Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

FIRST CHAPTER: AAMAL OF DAYS AND NIGHTS

AAMAL BETWEEN DAWN & SUNRISE

The time between dawn and sunrise is one of the blessed hours. Many traditions that are reported from the Ahl al-Bayt (a.s.) have revealed the merits of this hour and encouraged on mentioning Almighty Allah, glorifying Him, and worshipping Him at this very time, which has been called by some narrations as the time of inadvertence.

In this respect, Imam al-Baqir (a.s.) is reported to have said, “Iblis (Satan), may Allah’s curses be poured on him, distributes his troops at sunset and sunrise. Therefore, mention Allah, the Almighty and Majestic, at these two times more than any other time. Seek Allah’s protection against the evils of Iblis and his troops, and seek Him to protect your children against Satan at these two times in particular, because these two times are times of inadvertence.”

It is worth mentioning that to sleep at this time is discommended. In this regard, Imam al-Baqir (a.s.) is also reported to have said, “Sleeping at the pre-sunrise hour is ill-omened; it dismisses sustenance and makes the face seem pale and lose its color. It is the sleep of all ill-omened ones. Verily, Allah the All-exalted distributes sustenance in the time between dawn and sunrise; therefore, beware of sleeping (at this time).”

Shaykh al-Tusi, in Misbah al-Mutahajjid, has mention the following supplicatory prayer to be said at the crack of dawn:

اَللّهُمَّ اَنْتَ صاحِبُنا فَصَلِّ عَلى مُحَمَّدٍ وَآلِهِ وَاَفْضِلْ عَلَيْنا اَللّهُمَّ بِنِعْمَتِكَ تَتِمُّ الصّالِحاتُ فَصَلِّ عَلى مُحَمَّدٍ وَآلِهِ وَاَتْمِمْها عَلَيْنا عآئِذا بِاللّٰهِ مِنَ النّارِ عآئِذا بِاللّٰهِ مِنَ النّارِ عآئِذا بِاللّٰهِ مِنَ النّارِ

The following supplicatory prayer may be said thereafter:

يا فالِقَهُ مِنْ حَيْثُ لا اَرى وَمُخْرِجَهُ مِنْ حَيْثُ اَرى صَلِّ عَلى مُحَمَّدٍ وَآلِهِ وَاجْعَلْ اَوَّلَ يَوْمِنا هذا صَلاحا وَاَوْسَطَهُ فَلاحا وَآخِرَهُ نَجاحا

The following supplicatory prayer may be repeated ten times after that:

اَللّهُمَّ اِنّى اُشْهِدُكَ اَنَّهُ ما اَصْبَحَ بى مِنْ نِعْمَةٍ اَوْ عافِيَةٍ فى دينٍ اَوْ دُنْيا فَمِنْكَ وَحْدَكَ لا شَريكَ لَكَ لَكَ الْحَمْدُ وَلَكَ الشُّكْرُ بِها عَلَىَّ حَتّى تَرْضا وَبَعْدَ الرِّضا .

Except for these supplicatory prayers, numerous supplicatory prayers have been reported to be said at this hour. However, the most favorable of these are the following statements that have been expressed in a tradition as al-Baqiyat al-salihat (The ever-abiding, good deeds):

“سُبْحانَ اللّٰهِ وَالْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ وَلا اِلهَ اِلا اللّٰهُ وَاللّٰهُ اَكْبَرُ“

It is also recommended to say the following:

لا اِلهَ اِلا اللّٰهُ وَحْدَهُ لا شَريكَ لَهُ لَهُ الْمُلْكُ وَلَهُ الْحَمْدُ يُحْيى وَيُميتُ وَيُميتُ وَيُحيى وَهُوَ حَىُّ لا يَمُوتُ بِيَدِهِ الْخَيْرُ وَهُوَ عَلى كُلِّ شَىْءٍ قَديرٌ

Once you hear the call to the Dawn Prayer (i.e. adhan), you may say the following:

اَللّهُمَّ اِنّى اَسْئَلُكَ بِاِقْبالِ نَهارِكَ وَاِدْبارِ لَيْلِكَ وَحُضُورِ صَلَواتِكَ وَاَصْواتِ دُعآئِكَ وَتسْبيحِ مَلاَّئِكَتِكَ اَنْ تُصَلِّىَ عَلى مُحَمَّدٍ وَآلِ مُحَمَّدٍ وَاَنْ تَتُوبَ عَلَىَّ اِنَّكَ اَنْتَ التَّوّابُ الرَّحيمُ

ETIQUETTES OF GOING TO TOILET

If you wish to offer a prayer and need to go to toilet, you may begin with the latter. There are many reported etiquettes of going to toilet. However, I will hereinafter mention some of them briefly:

You may precede your left foot to the right when entering the water closet (or the place where you excrete) and say the following:

بِسْمِ اللّٰهِ وَبِاللّٰهِ اَعُوذُ بِاللّٰهِ مِنَ الرِّجْسِ النَّجِسِ الْخَبيثِ الْمُخْبِثِ الشَّيْطانِ الرَّجيمِ.

When you try to take off, you may utter the BISMILLAH

At such a situation, and all similar situations, you must try to cover your private parts, letting nobody see them. It is haram (i.e. religiously unlawful) to sit, for excretion, facing the kiblah direction or giving it one’s back.

While excreting, it is recommended to say the following:

اَللّهُمَّ اَطْعِمْنى طَيِّبا فى عافِيَةٍ وَاَخْرِجْهُ مِنّى خَبيثا فى عافِيَةٍ

If your sight falls on the excrement, you may say the following:

اَللّهُمَّ ارْزُقْنِى الْحَلالَ وَجَنِّبْنِى الْحَرامَ

When you finish and want to clean yourself, you may first of all try to make sure that you have discharged the entire waste. Then, you may say the supplicatory prayer that is said when one’s eye falls on water:

اَلْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ الَّذى جَعَلَ الْمآءَ طَهُورا وَلَمْ يَجْعَلْهُ نَجِسا

While cleaning yourself from the waste, you may say the following:

اَللّهُمَّ حَصِّنْ فَرْجى وَاَعِفَّهُ وَاسْتُرْ عَوْرَتى وَحَرِّمْنى عَلَى النّارِ

When you finish and stand up, you may rub your abdomen with your right hand and say the following:

اَلْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ الَّذى اَماطَ عَنِّى الاَذى وَهَنَّاَنى طَعامى وَشَرابى وَعافانى مِنَ الْبَلْوى

You may then leave the water closet (or the place where you have excreted), preceding your right foot to the left and saying the following:

اَلْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ الَّذى عَرَّفَنى لَذَّتَهُ وَاَبْقى فى جَسَدى قُوَّتَهُ وَاَخْرَجَ عَنّى اَذاهُ يا لَها نِعْمَةً يا لَها نِعْمَةً يا لَها نِعْمَةً لا يَقْدِرُ الْقادِرُونَ قَدْرَها.

CLEANSING THE TEETH

If you then intend to perform the ritual ablution (wudu’), you may before that begin with brushing the teeth with the miswak (a stick used for cleansing the teeth), because it cleanse the mouth, removes phlegm, strengthens the memory, increases the good deeds, and pleases the Exalted Lord. A two-unit prayer that is preceded by cleansing the teeth is more favorable than seventy-unit prayer without it. If a miswak is not available, it is acceptably sufficient to use one’s finger (for cleansing the teeth).

RITUAL ABLUTION (WUZU)

At performing the ritual ablution, it is necessary to sit down, face the kiblah direction, and put the bowl (containing the water of ablution) to the right side. Upon looking at the water, it is recommended to say the following:

اَلْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ الَّذى جَعَلَ الْمآءَ طَهُورا وَلَمْ يَجْعَلْهُ نَجِسا

Before putting the hand in the bowl, it is recommended to wash it. At putting it there, it is recommended to say the following:

بِسْمِ اللّٰهِ وَبِاللّٰهِ اَللّهُمَّ اجْعَلْنى مِنَ التَّوّابينَ وَاجْعَلْنى مِنَ الْمُتَطَهِّرينَ .

You may then rinse out your mouth with three handfuls of water three times and say the following:

اَللّهُمَّ لَقِّنى حُجَّتى يَوْمَ اَلْقاكَ وَاَطْلِقْ لِسانى بِذِكْراكَ

You may then inhale water (from the nose) three times and say the following:

اَللّهُمَّ لا تُحَرِّمْ عَلَىَّ ريحَ الْجَنَّةِ وَاجْعَلْنى مِمَّنْ يَشَمُّ ريحَها وَرَوْحَها وَطيبَها

You may then begin with washing the face, saying the following:

اَللّهُمَّ بَيِّضْ وَجْهى يَوْمَ تَسْوَدُّ فيهِ الْوُجُوهُ وَلا تُسَوِّدْ وَجْهى يَوْمَ تَبْيَضُّ فيهِ الْوُجُوهُ

You may then take a handful of water to wash your right hand, saying the following:

اَللّهُمَّ اَعْطِنى كِتابى بِيَمينى وَالْخُلْدَ فِى الْجِنانِ بِيَسارى وَحاسِبْنى حِسابا يَسيرا

You may then wash your left hand and say the following:

اَللّهُمَّ لا تُعْطِنى كِتابى بِشِمالى وَلا مِنْ وَرآءِ ظَهْرى وَلا تَجْعَلْها مَغْلُولَةً اِلى عُنُقى وَاَعُوذُ بِكَ مِنْ مُقَطَّعاتِ النّيرانِ

You may then rub the forepart of your head with your wetted forefingers of your right hand and say the following:

اَللّهُمَّ غَشِّنى رَحْمَتَكَ وَبَرَكاتِكَ .

You may then rub your feet, saying the following:

اَللّهُمَّ ثَبِّتْنى عَلَى الصِّراطِ يَوْمَ تَزِلُّ فيهِ الاَقْدامُ وَاجْعَلْ سَعْيى فيما يُرْضيكَ عنّى يا ذَاالْجَلالِ وَالاِكْرامِ

Upon accomplishment of the ritual ablution, you may say the following:

اَللّهُمَّ اِنّى اَسْئَلُكَ تَمامَ الْوُضُوءِ وَتَمامَ الصَّلوةِ وَتَمامَ رِضْوانِكَ وَالْجَنَّةَ .

You may also say the following:

اَلْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ رَبِّ الْعالَمينَ

Upon accomplishment too, you may recite Surah al-Qadr (No. 97) three times and impart a sweet smell to yourself.

ETIQUETTES OF ATTENDING MOSQUES

You may then walk to the mosque with tranquility and solemnity. While leaving your house towards the mosque, you may say the following:

بِسْمِ اللّٰهِ الَّذى خَلَقَنى فَهُوَ يَهْدينِ وَالَّذى هُوَ يُطْعِمُنى وَيَسْقينِ وَاِذا مَرِضْتُ فَهُوَ يَشْفينِ وَالَّذى يُميتُنى ثُمَّ يُحْيينِ وَالَّذى اَطْمَعُ اَنْ يَغْفِرَ لى خَطيَّئَتى يَوْمَ الدّينِ رَبِّ هَبْ لى حُكْما وَاَلْحِقْنى بِالصّالِحينَ وَاجْعَلْ لى لِسانَ صِدْقٍ فِى الاْخِرينَ وَاجْعَلْنى مِنْ وَرَثَةِ جَنَّةِ النَّعيمِ وَاغْفِرْ لاَِبى

Before you enter the mosque, you may check the bottom of your shoes, lest there may be an impure thing sticking to them.

You may then enter, by preceding your right foot to the left, and say the following:

بِسْمِ اللّٰهِ وَبِاللّٰهِ وَمِنَ اللّٰهِ وَاِلَى اللّٰهِ وَخَيْرُ الاَسْمآءِ كُلِّها لِلَّهِ تَوَكَّلْتُ عَلَى اللّٰهِ وَلا حَوْلَ وَلا قُوَّةَ اِلاّ بِاللّٰهِ اَللّهُمَّ صَلِّ عَلى مُحَمَّدٍ وَآلِ مُحَمَّدٍ وَافْتَحْ لى اَبْوابَ رَحْمَتِكَ وَتَوْبَتِكَ وَاَغْلِقْ عَنّى اَبْوابَ مَعْصِيَتِكَ وَاجْعَلْنى مِنْ زُوّارِكَ وَعُمّارِ مَساجِدِكَ وَمِمَّنْ يُناجيكَ فى اللَّيْلِ وَالنَّهارِ وَمِنَ الَّذينَ هُمْ فى صَلوتِهِمْ خاشِعُونَ وَادْحَرْ عَنِّى الشَّيْطانَ الرَّجيمَ وَجُنُودَ اِبْليسَ اَجْمَعينَ .

ETIQUETTES OF PRAYERS

When you intend to perform the prayer, you may say the following:

اَللّهُمَّ اِنّى اُقَدِّمُ اِلَيْكَ مُحَمَّدا صَلَّى اللّٰهُ عَلَيْهِ وَآلِهِ بَيْنَ يَدَىْ حاجَتى وَاَتَوَجَّهُ بِهِ اِلَيْكَ فَاجْعَلْنى بِهِ وَجيها عِنْدَكَ فِى الدُّنْيا وَالاْخِرَةِ وَمِنَ الْمُقَرَّبينَ وَاجْعَلْ صَلواتى بِهِ مَقْبُولَةً وَذَنْبى بِهِ مَغْفورا وَدُعآئى بِهِ مُسْتَجابا اِنَّكَ اَنْتَ الْغَفُورُ الرَّحيمُ .

You may then utter the call to prayer (i.e. adhan) and say the prefatory part of prayer (i.e. iqamah). You may separate the two with a prostration or a sitting position, saying the following:

اَللّهُمَّ اجْعَل قَلْبى باَّرّا وَعَيْشى قآرّا وَرِزْقى دآرّا وَاجْعَلْ لى عِنْدَ قَبْرِ رَسُولِكَ صَلَّى اللّٰهُ عَلَيْهِ وَآلِهِ مُسْتَقَرّا وَقَرارا

You may now pray Almighty Allah for any thing you wish and beseech Him to grant you whatever you need, because any supplication that is said between the adhan and Iqamah will not be rejected.

After uttering the Iqamah, you may say the following:

اَللّهُمَّ اِلَيْكَ تَوَجَّهْتُ وَمَرَضاتَكَ طَلَبْتُ وَثَوابَكَ ابْتَغَيْتُ وَبِكَ آمَنْتُ وَعَلَيْكَ تَوَكَّلْتُ اَللّهُمَّ صَلِّ عَلى مُحَمَّدٍ وَآلِ مُحَمَّدٍ وَافْتَحْ مَسامِعَ قَلْبى لِذِكْرِكَ وَثَبِّتْنى عَلى دينِكَ وَلا تُزِغْ قَلْبى بَعْدَ اِذْ هَدَيْتَنى وَهَبْ لى مِنْ لَدُنْكَ رَحْمَةً اِنَّكَ اَنْتَ الْوَهّابُ

DUA OF TAKBIR

You may now prepare yourself for performing the prayer. You must have heart presence and pay attention to your prayer, by considering the humiliation of your situation and the all-greatness and majesty of your Lord to whom you are talking in your prayer. Behave as is you can see Him in front of you and be ashamed of talking to Him with your tongue while your heart is preoccupied by another thing. You may then stand up with respect and reverence, putting your two hands on your thighs opposite to your knees. Separate between your two feet in an amount of three fingers up to one span. Cast your sight on the place of your prostration. You may then intend to perform this Dawn Prayer for seeking nearness to Allah the Exalted. Then, say the Takbirat al-Ihram statement (saying: Allahu-akbar ‘Allah is the Greatest’; the introductory statement to prayer). It is recommended to add statements of Takbir (i.e. professing Almighty Allah being the Greatest) to it, at each one of which, you may raise your hands to reach the level of the lower part of your ear, turning the palms of your hand towards the kiblah direction. Try to make all your fingers, except the thumb, stick to one another, but not open. You may now say the supplications of the Takbir statements, which are as follows:

After the third Takbir statement, you may say the following:

اَللّهُمَّ اَنْتَ الْمَلِكُ الْحَقُّ الْمُبينُ لا اِلهَ اِلاّ اَنْتَ سُبْحانَكَ اِنّى ظَلَمْتُ نَفْسى فَاغْفِرْ لى ذَنْبى اِنَّهُ لا يَغْفِرُ الذُّنُوبَ اِلاّ اَنْتَ

After the fifth Takbir statement, you may say the following:

لَبَّيْكَ وَسَعْدَيْكَ وَالْخَيْرُ فى يَدَيْكَ وَالشَّرُّ لَيْسَ اِلَيْكَ وَالْمَهْدِىُّ مَنْ هَدَيْتَ عَبْدُكَ وَابْنُ عَبْدَيْكَ ذَليلٌ بَيْنَ يَدَيْكَ مِنْكَ وَبِكَ وَلَكَ وَاِلَيْكَ لا مَلْجَاءَ وَلا مَنْجا وَلا مَفَرَّ مِنْكَ اِلاّ اِلَيْكَ سُبْحانَكَ وَحَنانَيْكَ تَبارَكْتَ وَتَعالَيْتَ سُبْحانَكَ رَبَّ الْبَيْتِ الْحَرامِ .

After the seventh Takbir statement, you may say the following:

وَجَّهْتُ وَجْهِىَ لِلَّذى فَطَرَ السَّمواتِ وَالاَرْضَ عالِمِ الْغَيْبِ وَالشَّهادَةِ حَنيفا مُسْلِما وَما اَنَا مِنَ الْمُشْرِكينَ اِنَّ صَلوتى وَنُسُكى وَمَحْياىَ وَمَماتى لِلَّهِ رَبِّ الْعالَمينَ لا شَريكَ لَهُ وَبِذلِكَ اُمِرْتُ وَاَ نَا مِنَ الْمُسْلِمينَ

OTHER ETIQUETTES OF NAMAZ

Before you begin with the recitation (qira’ah: reciting certain Quranic chapters in the prayers), you may say the statement of seeking protection (isti’adhah) in a low tone:

اعوذ باللّه من الشّيطان الرّجيم

You may then recite Surah al-Faatehah (No. 1) observing all etiquettes, having your heart present, and pondering over the meanings of the Surah. When you finish, you may pause for a while that is as much as one breath. Then, you may recite any Surah of the Holy Qur’an, although it is advisable to recite such Surahs as Surah al-Naba’ (No. 78), Surah al-Insan (or al-Dahr, No. 76), or Surah al-Qiyamah (No. 75). Upon finishing reciting the second Surah, you may also pause for a while that is as much as one breath. You may then raise your hands up to the lower part of your ears while uttering the Takbir statement. You may then genuflect, putting your right hand on your right knee and then your left hand on your left knee, opening up your fingers as if you are holding fast to your knees. You may also bow your back and stretch your neck at the level of your back, casting your sight on the space between your two feet and saying the following:

سُبْحانَ رَبِّى الْعَظيمِ وَبِحَمْدِهِ

It is highly advisable to repeat this statement seven, five, or three times. Before that, you may have said the following:

اَللّهُمَّ لَكَ رَكَعْتُ وَلَكَ اَسْلَمْتُ وَبِكَ آمَنْتُ وَعَلَيْكَ تَوَكَّلْتُ وَاَنْتَ رَبّى خَشَعَ لَكَ سَمْعى وَبَصَرى وَشَعْرى وَبَشَرى وَلَحْمى وَدَمى وَمُخّى وَعَصَبى وَعِظامى وَما اَقَلَّتْهُ قَدَماىَ غَيْرَ مُسْتَنْكِفٍ وَلا مُسْتَكْبِرٍ وَلا مُسْتَحْسِرٍ

You may now raise your head from genuflection, stand erect, and say the following:

سمع اللّه لمن حمده

You may then utter a Takbir statement and fall down for prostration with full submission and reverence. You may stretch your palms and put them on the ground before you put your knees on the ground. You may prostrate on a prostration-clay made of the soil taken from Imam al-Husayn’s tomb. While prostrating yourself, you should utter the statement of prostration once although it is favorable to repeat it seven, five, or three times. Before that, you may have said the following:

اَللّهُمَّ لَكَ سَجَدْتُ وَبِكَ آمَنْتُ وَلَكَ اَسْلَمْتُ وَعَلَيْكَ تَوَكَّلْتُ وَاَنْتَ رَبّى سَجَدَ وَجْهى لِلَّذى خَلَقَهُ وَشَقَّ سَمْعَهُ وَبَصَرَهُ اَلْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ رَبِّ الْعالَمينَ تَبارَكَ اللّٰهُ اَحْسَنُ الْخالِقينَ

You may now say the prostration statement. Then, you may raise your head from the position of prostration and sit down. While doing this, it is recommended to utter the Takbir statement and to sit on your hip, saying the following:

اَسْتَغْفِرُ اللّٰهَ رَبّى وَاَتُوبُ اِلَيْهِ

You may also say the following:

اَللّهُمَّ اغْفِرْ لى وَارْحَمْنى وَاجْبُرْنى وَادْفَعْ عَنّى وَعافِنى اِنّى لِما اَنْزَلْتَ اِلَىَّ مِنْ خَيْرٍ فَقيرٌ تَبارَكَ اللّٰهُ رَبُّ الْعالَمينَ

You may then utter the Takbir statement and prostrate yourself again, doing the same as what you have done in the first prostration. You may then raise your head and sit for rest. You may then stand up saying,

بحول اللّه و قوّته اقوم و اقعد

When you stand erect, you should recite Surah al-Faatehah and another Surah, preferably Surah al-Tawheed, after which you may say the following three times:

كذلك اللّه ربى

You may then say the Takbir statement and raise your hands to the level of your face turning the inner surface (i.e. palm) of your hands towards the sky and combining all your fingers, except the thumb, together and say any of the Qunut supplications, preferably choosing words of praying for relief. After that, you may say the following:

اَللّهُمَّ اغْفِرْ لَنا وَارْحَمْنا وَعافِنا وَاعْفُ عَنّا فِى الدُّنْيا وَالاْخِرَةِ اِنَّكَ عَلى كُلِّ شَىْءٍ قَديرٌ

You may say the following thereafter:

اَللّهُمَّ مَنْ كانَ اَصْبَحَ وَلَهُ ثِقَةٌ اَوْ رَجآءٌ غَيْرُكَ فَاَنْتَ ثِقَتى وَرَجآئى يا اَجْوَدَ مَنْ سُئِلَ وَيا اَرْحَمَ مَنِ اسْتُرْحِمَ صَلِّ عَلى مُحَمَّدٍ وَآلِ مُحَمَّدٍ وَارْحَمْ ضَعْفى وَمَسْكَنَتى وَقِلَّةَ حيلَتى وَامْنُنْ عَلَىَّ بِالْجَنَّةِ طَوْلا مِنْكَ وَفُكَّ رَقَبَتى مِنَ النّارِ وَعافِنى فى نَفْسى وَفى جَميعِ اُمُورى بِرَحْمَتِكَ يا اَرْحَمَ الرّاحِمينَ.

It is advisable to spend much time in Qunut, since the supplications to be said in Qunut are too many.

You may then say the Takbir statement, bow down, and prostrate yourself as has been previously recommended.

Upon accomplishment of the two prostrations (of the second unit of prayer), you may sit down to utter the statements of tashahhud and Taslim. It is recommended to sit on your hips and to say the following before uttering the tashahhud statement:

بِسْمِ اللّٰهِ وَبِاللّٰهِ وَالاَسْمآءُ الْحُسْنى كُلُّها لِلَّهِ وَالْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ وَخَيْرُ الاَسْمآءِ لِلَّهِ اَشْهَدُ اَنْ لا اِلْهَ اِلا اللّٰهُ

MERITS OF TAKIBAAT

When you accomplish the prayer, you may begin with saying the post-prayer supplications, litanies, and doxologies (ta’qib), because traditions have laid much stress on these.

In this respect, Almighty Allah has said (in the Holy Qur’an):

فَاِذا فَرَغْتَ فَانْصَبْ وَاِلى رَبِّكَ فَارْغَبْ

About the exegesis of these two holy verses, it is reported that when you accomplish your prayer, you should labor hard by engaging yourself with supplications and you should desire for your Lord by praying Him for granting you your requests and you should thus put your hope in none save Him.

Imam AliAmeer al-Momineen(a.s.) is reported to have said, “When you accomplish your prayers, you may raise your hands towards the sky and tire out yourself by praying Almighty Allah.”

As is inferred from traditions, post-prayer utterances increase sustenance. A believer is recorded as performer of prayers and is awarded the rewards of performing prayers as much as he engages himself with mentioning Almighty Allah after the prayer. A supplication that is said after obligatory prayers is preferred to supplications that are said after supererogatory prayers (Nafilah).

ETIQUETTES OF TAKIBAAT

‘Allamah al-Majlisi, may Allah have mercy upon him, says:

“As is inferred from the expression itself, ta’qib (post-prayer utterance) includes recitation of the Holy Qur’an, supplicating Almighty Allah, and reference to Him with statements of glorifying and praising Him that are conventionally connected (in time) to the obligatory prayer.

It is favorable that a post-prayer utterance be under the state of ritual ablution and while directing the face towards the kiblah direction. It is also better to sit in the position of uttering the tashahhud statement and not to speak while saying these post-prayer utterances, especially after the Isha’ (evening) Prayer.

Although some scholars have decided that all conditions of obligatory prayers must be met while saying the post-prayer utterances, it seems that the reward of doing the post-prayer (recommended) rites is given no matter what position the supplicant may take as long as he is engaged in reciting parts of the Holy Qur’an and saying supplications, even walking.”

The Infallible Imams (a.s.) are reported to have mentioned many supplications for the good of one’s worldly life and the Hereafter to be said after obligatory prayers. Actually, the obligatory prayers are the most honorable physical acts of worship; therefore, the utterances that follow them play a vital role in the perfection and completion of these prayers. They also raise the ranks, erase the punishments for evildoings, and contribute to winning one’s grants and needs. In view of all that, I am encouraged to mention some of these post-prayer utterances in this book, as quoted, mostly, from the two books of Bihar al-Anwar and al-Miqbas by ‘Allamah al-Majlisi, may Allah odorize his holy tomb.

Post-prayer utterances are of two categories; general and specific.

TASBIH AZ ZAHRA

The traditions, reported from the Holy Imams (a.s.) about the merit of Tasbih al-Zahra’, are too many to be counted. Imam al-Sadiq(a.s.) is reported to have said, “We order our boys to do Tasbih al-Zahra’ in the same effect that we order them to perform the obligatory prayers. Hence, you should abide by it, because misery will never find a way to a servant who constantly say it.”

According to validly reported traditions, the “frequent remembrance” that is mentioned and ordered in the Holy Qur’an indicates Tasbih al-Zahra’; therefore, whoever abides by it will have remembered Almighty Allah frequently and carried out the order decreed in this holy verse:

فاذكروا للّه ذكرا كثيرا

Through a valid chain of authority (i.e. sanad), Imam al-Baqir (a.s.) is reported to have said, “Whoever glorifies Almighty Allah with the doxology (Tasbih) of Fatimah (a.s.) and then ends it with imploring Almighty Allah’s forgiveness, Almighty Allah will forgive him. This doxology is one hundred (words) with tongues, but one thousand (rewards) in the Scale. It also dismisses Satan and pleases the Lord.”

Through an authentic (i.e. sahih) chain of authority, Imam al-Sadiq(a.s.) is reported to have said, “Whoever glorifies Almighty Allah with the doxology (Tasbih) of Fatimah (a.s.) before he extends his legs after an obligatory prayer, Almighty Allah will forgive him and Paradise will be absolutely decided for him.”

Through another valid (i.e. mu’tabar) chain of authority, Imam al-Sadiq(a.s.) is reported to have said, “The doxology of Fatimah al-Zahra’(a.s.) subsequent to every obligatory prayer is dearer to me than offering one thousand units of prayer every day.”

According to another validly reported tradition, Imam al-Baqir (a.s.) is reported to have said, “No statements of glorification and adoration through which Almighty Allah is worshipped can be better than the doxology of Fatimah (a.s.). If there had been any thing better than this, the Holy Prophet (s.a.w.a.) would certainly have given to Fatimah (a.s.).”

In conclusion, the traditions about the merits of Tasbih al-Zahra’are too numerable to be all mentioned in this book.

METHOD OF TASBIH AL-ZAHRA’

Although traditions have not mentioned a unanimous method of Tasbih al-Zahra’, the most famous and apparent method is as follows:

Repeat the following phrase thirty-four times:

الله اكبر

Repeat the following phrase thirty-three times:

الحمد لله

Repeat the following phrase thirty-three times:

سبحان الله

However, some traditions have mentioned that the last statement (i.e. subhana allahi) is preceded to the second (i.e. alhamdu lillahi). Some scholars have therefore tried to bring all the traditions to agreement, by saying that the earlier method may be said after the obligatory prayers while the latter may be said before sleep. However, the earlier method, which is the most famous, may be apparently applied before sleep and after obligatory prayers. It is a tradition (i.e. confirmedly recommended) to say the following statement after accomplishing Tasbih al-Zahra’:

لا اله الا الله

Imam al-Sadiq(a.s.) is reported to have said, “Whoever glorifies (Almighty Allah) with Tasbih al-Zahra’ after every obligatory prayer and follows it with la ilaha illaAllahu, Almighty Allah will forgive him.”

ROSARY MADE OF THE TURBAT OF IMAM AL HUSAYN (A)

It is most favorable to count the number of the statements of Tasbih al-Zahra’ with a rosary (subhah: a string of 100 beads) made of the soil of Imam al-Husayn’s tomb, which is a tradition in all religious rites. It is also recommended to carry at all times such a rosary, which protects from misfortunes and brings about endless rewards.

It is reported that the rosary of Lady Fatimah (a.s.) was made of woolen knotted string. She used to turn it with her hand while uttering statements of glorifying and professing Almighty Allah’s all-greatness. When Hamzah ibn ‘Abd al-Muttalib, may Allah be pleased with him, was martyred, she made a rosary from the soil of his tomb, and people followed her in that. When Imam al-Husayn the master of martyrs (a.s.) was martyred, people used rosaries made of the soil of his tomb. In this respect, the Awaited Imam (a.s.) is reported to have said, “Whoever forgets to mention Almighty Allah while having a rosary made of the soil of Imam al-Husayn’s tomb in the hand, the reward of remembrance will be recorded for him.”

Imam al-Sadiq(a.s.) is reported to have said, “A rosary that is made of the soil of Imam al-Husayn’s tomb glorifies Almighty Allah in the hand of its bearer although the bearer does not say anything.”

Imam al-Sadiq(a.s.) is also reported as saying, “Whoever turns a bead of a rosary made of the soil of Imam al-Husayn’s tomb and implores Almighty Allah’s forgiveness one time, Almighty Allah will record for him the reward of imploring His forgiveness seventy times. If one holds that rosary in the hand without saying anything, seven rewards for each bead will be recorded for him.”

According to another form of this tradition, “If one turns the bead uttering a statement of mentioning Almighty Allah, forty rewards for each bead will be recorded for him.”

It is also reported that the Paradisiacal Women (i.e. al-Hur al-’In), whenever they see an angel descending to the earth for any mission, ask him to bring them rosaries and prostration-clays made of the soil of Imam al-Husayn’s tomb.

In an authentic tradition, Imam Musa al-Kazim (a.s.) is reported to have said, “A true believer must not be lacking five things: a teeth-brushing stick (i.e. siwak), a comb, a prostration rug, a thirty-four bead rosary, and a ring whose stone is made of agate.”

Apparently, a pottery rosary is merited, too, although it is preferable that this rosary is made of fireless pottery.

Imam al-Sadiq(a.s.) is reported to have said, “Whoever glorifies Almighty Allah with a rosary of the clay of Imam al-Husayn’s tomb, Almighty Allah will record for him four hundred rewards, erase four hundred sins he has committed, grant him four hundred requests, and raise him four hundred ranks.”

It is also reported that the string of such rosaries may advisably be blue. Some narrations have suggested that it is better for women to use their fingertips in counting, but the narrations that have reported the recommendation of using rosaries made of clay are bigger in number and more authentic.

Second: It is recommended to utter the Takbir statement three times immediately after accomplishing any obligatory prayer, raising the hands to the level of the face at uttering each statement and then putting them down to the knees or a close place.

Ali ibn Tawus and Ibn Baabwayh (i.e. Shaykh al-Saduq) have reported through valid chains of authority that al-Mufaddal ibn ‘Umar asked Imam al-Sadiq(a.s.) to tell him why a performer of prayer, immediately upon the accomplishment of prayers, raises his hand three times while uttering the Takbir statement. The Imam (a.s.) said:

This is because when the Holy Prophet (s.a.w.a.) conquered Makkah, he led his companions in the Zohr (midday) prayer of that day near the Black Stone. When he accomplished the prayer, he raised his hands and uttered the Takbir statement three times. He then said:

لا اِلهَ اِلا اللّٰهُ وَحْدَهُ وَحْدَهُ وَحْدَهُ اَنْجَزَ وَعْدَهُ وَنَصَرَ عَبْدَهُ وَاَعَزَّ جُنْدَهُ وَغَلَبَ الاَحْزابَ وَحْدَهُ فَلَهُ الْمُلْكُ وَلَهُ الْحَمْدُ يُحْيى وَيُميتُ وَهُوَ عَلى كُلِّ شَىْءٍ قَديرٌ

The Holy Prophet (s.a.w.a.) then faced his companions and said, “Do not miss uttering this Takbir statement after every obligatory prayer, for whoever does so after the accomplishment of the prayer and says these words, will have thanked Almighty Allah as exactly as required for He has strengthened Islam and its troops.”

According to an authentic tradition, when Imam al-Sadiq(a.s.) accomplished the prayer, he would raise the hands above the level of the head and supplicate Almighty Allah.

Imam Muhammad al-Baqir (a.s.) is reported to have said, “Whenever a servant (of God) raises the hands towards Almighty Allah, the Almighty would be too shy to make that hand return empty. Hence, whenever you supplicate Him, do not return your hands to their natural position before you pass them over your faces.”

Third: Through a valid chain of authority, Shaykh al-Kulayni reports Imam Muhammad al-Baqir (a.s.) as saying, “Whoever repeats this imploration of forgiveness three times after the obligatory prayer before he changes the position of his feet, Almighty Allah will forgive his sins even if they were as massive as foams of oceans:

اَسْتَغْفِرُ اللّٰهَ الَّذى لا اِلهَ اِلاّ هُوَ الْحَىُّ الْقَيُّومُ ذُوالْجَلالِ وَالاِكْرامِ وَاَتُوبُ اِلَيْهِ

According to another report, whoever says this imploration of forgiveness every day, Almighty Allah will forgive forty of his grand sins.

Fourth: Shaykh al-Kulayni reports Imam al-Sadiq(a.s.) as saying, “Do not miss saying the following guard-seeking supplication after each prayer:

اُعيذُ نَفْسى وَما رَزَقَنى رَبّى بِاللّٰهِ الْواحِدِ الصَّمَدِ الَّذى لَمْ يَلِدْ وَلَمْ يُولَدْ وَلَمْ يَكُنْ لَهُ كُفُوا اَحَدٌ وَاُعيذُ نَفْسى وَما رَزَقَنى رَبّى بِرَبِّ الْفَلَقِ مِنْ شَرِّ ما خَلَقَ وَمِنْ شِرِّ غاسِقٍ اِذا وَقَبَ وَمِنْ شَرِّ النَّفّاثاتِ فِى الْعُقَدِ وَمِنْ شَرِّ حاسِدٍ اِذا حَسَدَ وَاُعيذُ نَفْسى وَما رَزَقَنى رَبّى بِرَبِّ النّاسِ مَلِكِ النّاسِ اِلهِ النّاسِ مِنْ شَرِّ الْوَسْواسِ الْخَنّاسِ الَّذى يُوَسْوِسُ فى صُدُورِ النّاسِ مِنَ الْجِنَّةِ وَالنّاسِ

Fifth: In a valid tradition, al-Kulayni has reported on the authority of Ali ibn Mahziyar that Muhammad ibn Ibrahim wrote the following letter to (Imam) Abu’l-Hasan al-Naqi(a.s.): “If you do not mind, sir; teach me a supplicatory prayer that I may say after my prayers and due to which Almighty Allah may give me together the wealth of this worldly life and the goodness of the Hereafter.” Replying him, the Imam (a.s.) wrote back, “You may say (the following):

اَعُوذُ بِوَجْهِكَ الْكَريمِ وَعِزَّتِكَ الَّتى لا تُرامُ وَقُدْرَتِكَ الَّتى لا يَمْتَنِعُ مِنْها شَىْءٌ مِنْ شَرِّ الدُّنْيا وَالاْخِرَةِ وَمِنْ شَرِّ الاَوْجاعِ كُلِّها.

According to other forms of the tradition, the following has been added to the supplicatory prayer:

وَلا حَوْلَ وَلا قُوَّةَ اِلاّ بِاللّٰهِ الْعَلِىِّ الْعَظيمِ

Sixth: Al-Kulayni and Ibn Baabwayh have both reported through authentic and inauthentic chains of authority that Imam al-Baqir and Imam al-Sadiq(a.s.) said, “The least acceptable supplicatory prayer to be said after obligatory prayers is the following:

اَللّهُمَّ اِنّى اَسْئَلُكَ مِنْ كُلِّ خَيْرٍ اَحاطَ بِهِ عِلْمُكَ وَاَعُوذُ بِكَ مِنْ كُلِّ شَرِّ اَحاطَ بِهِ عِلْمُكَ اَللّهُمَّ اِنّى اَسْئَلُكَ عافِيَتَكَ فى اُمُورى كُلِّها وَاَعُوذُ بِكَ مِنْ خِزْىِ الدُّنْيا وَعَذابِ الاْخِرَةِ.

According to Ibn Baabwayh’s report of the same tradition, you may begin the aforesaid supplicatory prayer with the following statement:

اَللّهُمَّ صَلِّ عَلى مُحَمَّدٍ وَآلِ مُحَمَّدٍ

Seventh: It is a strongly confirmed tradition to say the following supplicatory prayer upon the accomplishment of prayers:

اَللّهُمَّ صَلِّ عَلى مُحَمَّدٍ وَآلِ مُحَمَّدٍ وَاَجِرْنى مِنَ النّارِ وَاَدْخِلْنِى الْجَنَّةَ وَزَوِّجْنىِ الْحُورَ الْعينَ

According to a valid tradition, Imam AliAmeer al-Momineen(a.s.) is reported to have said, “A servant (of Allah) must not finish his prayer before beseeching Allah to grant him Paradise, save him from Hellfire, and give him in marriage the Paradisiacal women.”

MERITS OF RECITING AYAH KURSI (2: 255), AYAH AL SHAHADAH, AYAH AL MULK AFTER EVERY NAMAZ

Eighth: Through an authenticated (i.e. muwaththaq) chain of authority, Imam al-Sadiq(a.s.) is reported to have said:

When the following verses (of the Holy Qur’an) were ordered by Allah, the Almighty and Majestic, to descend to the earth, they held fast to the Divine Throne and said, “O Lord! Where are ordering us to descend? Is it to the people of evildoings and sins?” Therefore, Allah, the Almighty and Majestic, revealed to them, saying, “Descend! By My Almightiness and Majesty I take this oath; no one of Muhammad’s family and their adherents (Shi’ah) reads you but that I shall most certainly look at him with my Hidden Eye seventy times every day. In each look, I settle seventy of his needs and accept him despite of his acts of disobedience (to Me).”

According to another form of the same tradition, Almighty Allah has said, “Whoever recites these verses immediately after each prayer, I will allow him to dwell under the shed of My Sacredness despite of his acts of disobedience to Me. If I do not do that, I will settle seventy of his needs every day, the least of which is that I forgive his sins. If I do not do that either, I will protect him from Satan and from every enemy of his, I will grant him victory against these enemies, and nothing will prevent him from entering Paradise except death.”

These verses are the following:

(1) Surah al-Faatehah.

(2) Ayah al-Kursi along with the two verses (2:255-257)

(3) Verses of Bearing Witness (Ayah al-Shahadah; 3:18-19):

شَهِدَ اللّٰهُ اَنَّهُ لا اِلهَ اِلاّ هُوَ وَالْمَلاَّئِكَةُ وَاُولُوا الْعِلْمِ ق آئِما بِالْقِسْطِ لا اِل هَ اِلاّ هُوَ الْعَزيزُ الْحَكيمُ اِنَّ الدّينَ عِنْدَ اللّٰهِ الاِسْلامُ وَمَا اخْتَلَفَ الَّذينَ اُوتُوا الْكِتابَ اِلاّ مِنْ بَعْدِ مآ جآئَهُمُ الْعِلْمُ بَغْيا بَيْنَهُمْ وَمَنْ يَكْفُرْ بِاياتِ اللّٰهِ فَاِنَّ اللّٰهَ سَريعُ الْحِسابِ

(4) Verses of Kingdom (Ayah al-Mulk; 3:26-27):

قُلِ اللّهُمَّ مالِكَ الْمُلْكِ تُؤْتِى الْمُلْكَ مَنْ تَشآءُ وَ تَنْزِعُ الْمُلْكَ مِمَّنْ تَشآءُ وَتُعِزُّ مَنْ تَشآءُ وَتُذِلُّ مَنْ تَشآءُ بِيَدِكَ الْخَيْرُ اِنَّكَ عَلى كُلِّ شَىْءٍ قَديرٌ تُولِجُ اللَّيْلَ فِى النَّهارِ وَتُولِجُ النَّهارَ فِى اللَّيْلِ وَتُخْرِجُ الْحَىَّ مِنَ الْمَيِّتِ وَتُخْرِجُ الْمَيِّتَ مِنَ الْحَىِّ وَتَرْزُقُ مَنْ تَشآءُ بِغَيْرِ حِسابٍ

MERITS OF RECITING AYAH KURSI AFTER EVERY NAMAZ

Through a valid chain of authority, Imam Musa ibn Ja’far (a.s.) is reported to have said, “Whoever recites Ayah al-Kursi after every prayer will not be afflicted by stings of stingers.”

According to another validly reported tradition, Imam al-Kazim (a.s.) is reported to have quoted the Holy Prophet (s.a.w.a.) as saying to Imam Ali(a.s.), “O Ali! Keep on reciting Ayah al-Kursi after every obligatory prayer, because not everyone keeps on reciting it save a prophet, a veracious person, or a martyr.”

The Holy Prophet (s.a.w.a.) is reported to have said, “Whoever recites Ayah al-Kursi after every prayer, nothing will prevent him from entering Paradise except death.”

According to another tradition, “Whoever recites Ayah al-Kursi after obligatory prayers will have his prayers accepted, will be in the security of Allah, and will be saved by Almighty Allah from misfortunes and sinning.”

DUA SHAYBAH AL HUDHALI

Ninth: Al-Kulayni, Ibn Baabwayh, and others have reported through valid chains of authority that Imam Muhammad al-Baqir (a.s.) related the following:

One day, a man called Shaybah al-Hudhali came to the Holy Prophet (s.a.w.a.)and asked, “O Allah’s Messenger, I am an old man; I am too old and too weak to do acts of worship that I used to do, such as prayers, fasting, going on Hajj, and jihad. So, please teach me some words by which Almighty Allah will benefit me and make them as easy as possible for me.”

The Holy Prophet (s.a.w.a.) asked the man to repeat his request three times. Then the Holy Prophet (s.a.w.a.) answered, “All trees and rocks around you have wept for you out of mercy. When you accomplish the Dawn Prayer, you may repeat the following doxology ten times:

سُبْحانَ اللّٰهِ الْعَظيمِ وَبِحَمْدِهِ وَلا حَوْلَ وَلا قُوَّةَ اِلاّ بِاللّٰهِ الْعَلِىِّ الْعَظيمِ

If you say so, Allah, the Almighty and Majestic, will save you from blindness, lunacy, leprosy, poverty, and senility.”

The man said, “This was for worldly affairs; what do you have for me for the Hereafter?”

The Holy Prophet (s.a.w.a.) said, “You may say the following supplicatory prayer after accomplishing every prayer:

اَللّهُمَّ اهْدِنى مِنْ عِنْدِكَ وَاَفِضْ عَلَىَّ مِنْ فَضْلِكَ وَانْشُرْ عَلَىَّ مِنْ رَحْمَتِكَ وَاَنْزِلْ عَلَىَّ مِنْ بَرَكاتِكَ

If this man comes on the Resurrection Day abiding by these supplicatory prayers without neglecting them deliberately, all the eight gates of Paradise will be opened before him so that he can enter from any gate he wishes.”

However, according to another tradition that is reported through valid chains of authority, a different supplicatory prayer has been mentioned.

TRADITIONAL, MODERNIST, AND “FUNDAMENTALIST” INTERPRETATIONS OF ISLAM TODAY

All that has been said thus far provides the necessary context and framework for understanding the recent developments in the Islamic world. Until the impact of European colonialism on the heart of the Islamic world, there were those who fought against Western rule in the extremities of the “Abode of Islam,” but there were no Muslim modernists or fundamentalists. Muslims were all traditional and fitted into the complex pattern of the spectrum of Islam outlined above. But with the advent of European domination of the heartland of Islam, represented by the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798, the period of diverse reactions and interpretations leading to the contemporary period began.

The European encroachment upon the Islamic world had actually begun over two and a half centuries earlier with the Portuguese and later Dutch and British domination of the Indian Ocean, which had been a major economic lifeline for Islamic civilization. There had also been European invasions of North Africa, the decisive defeat of the Ottoman navy in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, which cut the Ottomans off from the western Mediterranean, and the defeat of the Ottomans in their siege of Vienna in 1683, which marked the beginning of the waning of their power. But none of these events, nor the Dutch colonization of the East Indies, nor British penetration into India, moved the minds and souls of Muslims as did the conquest of Egypt. That event awakened Muslims to a challenge without precedence in their history.

The Quran states, “If God aideth you, no one shall overcome you” (3:159). In the eyes of Muslims, twelve centuries of Islamic history had demonstrated the legitimacy of their claim and the truth of their call. God had been “on their side” and aided them over all those centuries, notwithstanding the defeat of Muslims in Spain and the destruction of the Tartar kingdom by the Russians, because these were at the margins of the world of Islam and lack of internal unity was considered as the reason for these defeats.

Otherwise, wherever Islam had gone, it had become victorious; even the powerful Mongols had soon embraced Islam. But these Europeans, whom Muslims had neglected for so long and considered their cultural inferiors, were now dominating the Islamic world and there was no possibility of their accepting Islam as the Turks or Mongols had. They claimed themselves to be superior and were so proud of their own culture that they showed no interest in anything else. This situation created a crisis of cosmic proportions with eschatological overtones.

Several attitudes could have been taken in face of this crisis, and in fact every one of them was adopted by one group or another. One view held that Muslims had become weak because they had strayed from the original message of the faith and had become corrupted by luxury and deviations.

This was the position of the so-called puritanical reformists, of whom the most famous, the eighteenthcentury Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab from Najd, lived in fact before the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt at the end of the

eighteenth century, but whose message sought to respond to causes for Muslim weakness. Although his message remained mostly in Arabia, this type of puritanical reformism, which was usually against Sufism, Shi‘ism, Islamic philosophy and theology, and the refinement of classical Islamic cities as demonstrated in the arts, became known as the Salafiyyah, that is, those who follow the early predecessors, or salaf, disregarding the thirteen or fourteen centuries of development of the Islamic tradition from its Quranic and Prophetic roots.

A second possibility was to turn to eschatologicalhadiths concerning the end of the world, when, it was said, oppression would reign everywhere and Muslims would become weakened and dominated by others. As a result of this focus, a wave of Mahdiism swept across some areas of the Islamic world in the early nineteenth century, ranging from the Brelvi movement in the northwestern province of present-day Pakistan; to the movements of Ghulam Ah.mad and the Bab already mentioned; to uprisings by major figures in West Africa, of whom the most significant, although his career began somewhat earlier, was ‘Uthman Dan Fadio, the founder of the Sokoto Caliphate, whose influence spread even to the Caribbean; to the Mahdiist movement of the Sudan, which inflicted the only defeat on the British army in the nineteenth century. As with every millennialist movement, this Mahdiist wave gradually died down, in this case by the second half of the nineteenth century.

The third possibility was to say, in the manner of European modernists, that the regulations of Islam were for the seventh century and times had changed; therefore religion had to be reformed and modernized. The modernists began in Egypt, the most famous of whom were Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who was of Persian origin, and Muh.ammad ‘Abduh. They also appeared in Ottoman Turkey, especially within the Young Turk movement; in India, with such figures as Sir Sayyid Ah.mad Khan; and in Persia, which produced several other figures besides al-Afghani, whose effect was, however, more local. These modernists varied in their degree of modernism and approach, but in general they were great admirers of the West and of rationalism, nationalism, and modern science. The most philosophical of all of them was Muh.ammad Iqbal, who belongs to the end of this first period of response to the West, which lasted until World War II. When Western scholars speak of Islamic reformers, they have mostly such figures in mind, along with the so-called puritanical reformers. From the ranks of the modernists rose nationalists and liberal thinkers, men who sought to modernize Islamic society, on the one hand, and fight against the West in the name of national independence, on the other. The colonial wars fought against Western powers for national independence by such figures as Ataturk, Sukarno, Bourgiba, and others were carried out in the name of nationalism, not Islam.

Consequently, when Western powers left their colonies, at least outwardly, in many areas they left behind them ruling groups who were Muslim in name, but whose thinking was more like that of the colonizers they had replaced.

There were, of course, also groups of fighters for independence who were not modernists at all, but traditional Muslims, often associated with various Sufi orders. They usually carried out military resistance to preserve their homelands with a degree of nobility and magnanimity that deeply impressed their European enemies. One can cite as a supreme example of this type Amir ‘Abd al-Qadir, the great Algerian freedom fighter and Sufi sage; his opponent, a French general, wrote back to Paris saying that fighting against the Amir was like confronting one of the prophets of the Old Testament. Another notable example is Imam Shamil, who fought for years in Caucasia against Russian encroachment. The example of the saintly nature of these men and the manner in which they treated their enemies as well as noncombatants, no matter what the other side was doing, is of the utmost importance for Muslims as well as Westerners to remember in the present-day situation.

Most of the Islamic world in the period between, let us say, 1800 and World War II did not react in any of the three manners described above. They were the traditional Muslims for whom the life of theShari‘ah as well as the Tariqah continued in its time-honored manner. There were, of course, continuous renewals from within that must not, however, be confused with reform in its modern sense. Many great scholars of Law continued to appear and Sufism was rejuvenated in several areas, especially in the Maghrib and West and East Africa, as we see in the rise of the Tijaniyyah and Sanusiyyah orders as well as the appearance of such great masters as Shaykh al-Darqawi, Shaykh Ahmad al-‘Alawi, and Shaykh Salamah al-Rad.i, all of whom revived the Shadhiliyyah Order. Nevertheless, the modus vivendi of traditional Muslims was not reaction, but continuation of the traditional Islamic modes of life and thought.

After World War II most Islamic countries had become politically free, except for Algeria, which gained its independence in 1962 after a war that cost a million lives, and Muslim areas within the Communist world. The general population of Muslims had expected that with political independence would come cultural, social, and economic independence as well. When the reverse occurred, that is, when with the advent of political independence Westernized classes began ruling over a deeply pious public, as can be seen in countries as different as Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Pakistan, major reactions set in that can be seen throughout the Islamic world to this day.

The old modernist and liberal schools of thought became discredited, as did the modernists as a political class, which had failed to solve any of the major problems that society faced in addition to suffering humiliating defeats, especially in the several Arab-Israeli wars. Nevertheless, modernism continued, often with a new Marxist component, and remained powerful because it controlled and still controls the state apparatus in most Muslim lands. But its intellectual and social power began to wane and weaken nearly everywhere except in Turkey, where Ataturk’s secularism remains strong, held in place by the force of the army. Iran was the first country in which a political revolution removed the modernist government in favor of an Islamic one. A process of internal Islamization also took

place, gradually and without revolutionary upheaval, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Malaysia, the Sudan, Jordan, Egypt, and some other countries, and that process continues.

As for what is called “fundamentalism,” the earlier form of it as found in Saudi Arabia became transformed in many ways. By the 1960s there was a general malaise in the Islamic world caused by the simple emulation of a West, which, according to its leading thinkers, did not know where it was going itself. Many people, even among the modernized classes, turned back to Islam to find solutions to the existential problems posed by life itself and more particularly the actual situation of Muslims. The desire of the vast majority of people was to be left alone to solve the problems of the Islamic world, to preserve the religion of Islam, including the revival of theShari‘ah , and to rebuild Islamic civilization, but the dominant civilization of the West hardly allowed such a thing to take place. Many organizations were nevertheless established to pursue these ends by peaceful means, chief among them the Ikhwan al-Muslimin, or Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in the 1920s by H. asan al-Banna’, and the Jama‘at-i islami, founded by Mawlana Mawdudi in 1941, both of which remain powerful to this day.

In the past few decades this desire to preserve religion, re-Islamicize Islamic society, and reconstruct Islamic civilization has drawn a vast spectrum of people into its fold, all of whom are now branded indiscriminately in the West as “fundamentalist.” The majority of such people, however, pursue nonviolent means to achieve their goals, as do most Christian, Jewish, or Hindu “fundamentalists.” But there are also those who take recourse to violent action, nearly always when they are trying to defend their homeland, as in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, Kosovo, or the southern Philippines, or sometimes in exasperation to defend their faith and traditional cultural values, as one sees in occasional violent eruptions in Indonesia, Pakistan, and elsewhere.

But to act Islamically is to act in defense. Those who inflict harm upon the innocent, no matter how just their cause might be, are going against the clear teachings of the Quran and theShari‘ah concerning peace and war (to which we turn later in Chapter 6). In any case, the unfortunate use of the term “fundamentalism,” drawn originally from American Protestantism, for Islam cannot now be avoided, but it is of the utmost importance to realize that it embraces very different phenomena and must not be confused with the demonizing usage of the term in the Western media.

Disappointment among Muslims with the lack of true freedom after the attainment of political freedom after World War II also led to a new wave of Mahdiism, as seen in the coming of Ayatollah Khomeini to power in Iran at the time of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 (which was a major event in modern history and which definitely possessed eschatological overtones), the taking over of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1980, and the appearance of Mahdi-like figures in Nigeria during the last two decades.

There is no doubt that there is again a presence of Mahdiism in the air throughout the Islamic world, as there are millennialist expectations among both Jews and Christians today.

As for traditional Islam, in contrast to the first phase of the encounter with the West, from the 1960s onward it began to manifest itself in the public intellectual arena and to challenge both the modernists and the so-called fundamentalists.

Scholars deeply rooted in the Islamic tradition but also well acquainted with the West began to defend the integral Islamic tradition, the Tariqah as well as theShari‘ah , the intellectual disciplines as well as the traditional arts. At the same time they began in-depth criticism not of Christianity or Judaism, but of secularist modernism, which was first incubated and grew in the West, but later spread to other continents. Such scholars base themselves on the universality of revelation stated in the Quran and seek to reject the substitution of the “kingdom of man” for the “Kingdom of God” as posited by modern secularism. Their criticisms of the modern world have drawn much from Western critics of modernism, rationalism, and scientism, including not only such traditionalists as René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, Titus Burckhardt, and Martin Lings, but also such well-known European and American critics of the modernist project, including modern science and technology, as Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, and Theodore Roszak. The traditional Islamic response began with those trained in Western-style educational organizations, but during the past two decades has come to also include figures from among the class of religious scholars, or ‘ulama’, and traditional Sufis. These scholars and leaders seek to preserve the rhythm of traditional Islamic life as well as its intellectual and spiritual traditions and find natural allies in Judaism and Christianity in confronting the challenges of modern secularism as well as globalization.

The great majority of Muslims today still belong to the traditionalist category and must be distinguished from both secularist modernizers and “fundamentalists,” as the latter term is now used in the Western media. In fact, it would be the greatest error to fail to distinguish the traditionalists from the “fundamentalists” and to include anyone who wishes to preserve the traditional Islamic way of life and thought in the “fundamentalist” category. It would be as if in contemporary Catholicism one were to call Padre Pio and Mother Teresa “fundamentalists” because they insisted on preserving traditional Catholic teachings. It is essential to realize that the notion of extremism implies a center, or median, of the spectrum; phenomena are judged “extreme” according to their distance, on either side, from this designated center. Unfortunately in the Western media today, that center is usually defined as the modernizing elements in Islamic society, and it is forgotten that modernism is itself one of the most fanatical, dogmatic, and extremist ideologies that history has ever seen. It seeks to destroy every other point of view and is completely intolerant toward any Weltanschauung that opposes it, whether it is that of the Native Americans, whose whole world was forcibly crushed by it, or Hinduism, Buddhism, or Islam, or for that matter traditional Christianity or Judaism. Orthodox Jews have as much difficulty resisting the constant assault of modern secularism upon their worldview and religious practices as do Hindus or Muslims. If one is going to speak of “fundamentalism” in religions, then one must include “secularist fundamentalism,” which is no less virulently proselytizing and aggressive

toward anything standing in its way than the most fanatical form of religious “fundamentalism.”

In the case of Islam, there are today certainly religious extremists of different kinds, but they do not define the mainstream, or center, of Islam. That center belongs to traditional Islam. And that center is the one against which one should view fanatical religious extremism, on the one side, and the rabid secularist modernism found in most Islamic countries, but especially in such places as Turkey, Tunisia, and Algeria, on the other. Traditional Islam is not opposed to what the West wishes to do within its own borders, but to the corrosive influences emanating from modern and postmodern Western culture, now associated so much with what is called globalization, that threaten Islamic values, just as they threaten Christian and Jewish values in the West itself. But the philosophy of defense of traditional Islam has always been to keep within the boundaries of Islamic teachings.

Its method of combat has been and remains primarily intellectual and spiritual, and when it has been forced to take recourse to physical action in the form of defense of its home and shelter, its models have been the Amir ‘Abd al-Qadirs and Imam Shamils, not the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution or homegrown models of Che Guevara.

To understand events in the Islamic world today, even the most outrageous and evil actions carried out in the name of Islam, it is necessary to have a context within which to place these actions, in the same way that Westerners are able to place Jonestown, Waco, bombs by the Irish Republican Army, Serbian ethnic cleansing, or the killings carried out by Baruch Goldstein or Rabbi Kahane’s group in context and not to identify them simply with Christianity or Judaism as such. This context can only be provided by looking at the vast spectrum of Islam outlined above. Yes, there are those in the Islamic world today who have taken recourse to military action and violence using modern technology with the supposed aim of ameliorating real or imaginary wrongs and injustices. Considering the history of the recent past, it is hardly surprising that such extremist illicit and morally reprehensible actions by a few using the name of Islam should take place, especially when injustices and suppressions within Islamic societies are added to external ones. Nor does asking why despicable actions take place in the name of Islam by the few and coming to understand the background of these actions in any way condone or excuse them.

The vast majority of Muslims still breathe in a universe in which the Name of God is associated above all with Compassion and Mercy, and they turn to Him in patience even in the midst of the worst tribulations. If it seems that more violence is associated with Islam than with other religions today, it is not due to the fact that there has been no violence elsewhere-think of the Korean and Vietnam wars, the atrocities committed by the Serbs, and the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi. The reason is that Islam is still very strong in Islamic society. Because Islam so pervades the lives of Muslims, all actions, including violent ones, are carried out in the name of Islam, especially since other ideologies such as nationalism and socialism have become so bankrupt.

Yet this identification is itself paradoxical because traditional Islam is as much on the side of peace and accord as are traditional Judaism and Christianity. Despite such phenomena, however, if one looks at the extensive panorama of the Islamic spectrum summarized below, it becomes evident that for the vast majority of Muslims, the traditional norms based on peace and openness to others, norms that have governed their lives over the centuries and are opposed to both secularist modernism and “fundamentalism,” are of central concern. And after the dust settles in this tumultuous period of both Islamic and global history, it will be the voice of traditional Islam that will have the final say in the Islamic world.

CHAPTER THREE: DIVINE AND HUMAN LAWS

And now We have set thee (O Muhammad) on a clear road (Shar‘) of Our Commandment; so follow it, and follow not the whim of those who know not.

Quran 45:18

It is the Law of God which has taken course aforetime. Thou wilt not find any change in the Law of God.

Quran 48:23

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LAW IN ISLAM

One of the most difficult aspects of Islam to understand for modern Westerners is the “philosophy of law,” which provides the conceptual foundation for theShari‘ah (literally, “road” or “path”), or Divine Law, in Islam. Since Christ did not promulgate a law like those of the prophets of the Old Testament and the Prophet of Islam, but rather came to break the letter of the law in the name of the Spirit, religious law in the West developed in a very different manner than it did in Islam. Even during the Middle Ages, when Western society was thoroughly Christian, everyday laws were drawn from Roman sources or common law. These sources were clearly distinguished from Divine Law, which in the Christian context involved spiritual principles and not ordinary laws dealing with society in general. Moreover, Christian theologians developed an elaborate doctrine of natural law, which does not have an exact counterpart in Islam, although there are striking developments worthy of comparison in this domain within the two traditions.

Originally, natural law meant a system of rights or justice common to all human beings and derived from nature. St. Thomas Aquinas provided the greatest elaboration of this concept, stating that eternal law exists in God’s mind and is known to us only in part through revelation and in part through reason. For St. Thomas, the law of nature is the “participation of the eternal law in the rational creature.”

Human law, based on precepts that human beings can derive by their own reason, must be a particular application of that law. Now, although Muslim theologians also debated among themselves whether our God-given reason can know the good without revelation, they did not develop a theory of natural law such as one finds in Thomism. Their view was closer to that of John Duns Scotus and Francisco Suarez, who believed that the Divine Will, rather than reason, was the source of law. In any case, even in the Middle Ages there were differences between the Islamic and certain of the predominantly Catholic schools of theology concerning the philosophy of law.

From the Renaissance onward laws became more and more secularized in the West, and they came to be seen as ever-changing regulations devised and defined by society to be made and discarded as circumstances dictate. And with the rise of parliamentary democracy, these laws came to be made and abrogated by the representatives of the people.

Within the context of such a background, it is easy to see why the understanding of the Islamic, and more generally the Semitic, concept of law, which is associated with the Will of God and is meant to determine society rather than be determined by it, poses such a problem for modern Westerners.

Yet such a view should not be so difficult to understand in the West if one only turns to Jewish Law and the Old Testament, which is of course also a part of Christian sacred scripture. In the Old Testament is stated a clear theology that determines the meaning of law for human society.

According to it, God is the Transcendent Reality Who is all powerful and sovereign over human beings. He is the only ultimate sanction of law, and

the laws of human society are the embodiments of His Will. In the Bible, law is designated as God’s commandments (mitsvah; as in Deut.11:13), teaching or instruction (torah; Gen. 26:5), utterance (davar; Deut. 4:13), and norm (mishpot; Exod. 21:1), along with other expressions. Violation of law is seen not only as an offense against society, but also as a moral sin and a violation of God’s order to humanity, for which human beings are accountable to God (Gen. 20:6; Lev. 19-

20, 22). The Bible makes no distinction between religious and secular offense against the law, and the law is seen as a norm by which not only men and women, but all beings must abide (Gen. 2:11-17; 9:1-7). For the rabbis, there was no distinction between fas, God-given laws, and lex, human laws, as claimed by the Romans; all laws were seen as expressions of God’s Will.

Now, this whole understanding of the meaning of law in the Bible corresponds very much to that of the Quran. If modern Westerners were only to grasp what the Old Testament says about law or how contemporary traditional Jews comprehend and practice Talmudic Law, it would be much easier to understand the “philosophy of law” in Islam. For Muslims also, God as the supreme and transcendent Sovereign has revealed His Laws through His prophets. TheShari‘ah is the concrete embodiment of the Divine Will, and in its most universal sense it embraces the whole of creation; what we call laws of nature are “theShari‘ah ” of various orders of corporeal reality. There is no distinction between the religious and secular realms, although the existence of non-Shari‘ite laws are recognized in practice, as we shall see later.

In the Islamic perspective, Divine Law is to be implemented to regulate society and the actions of its members rather than society dictating what laws should be. The injunctions of Divine Law are permanent, but the principles can also be applied to new circumstances as they arise.

But the basic thesis is one of trying to make the human order conform to the Divine norm, not vice-versa. To speak of theShari‘ah as being simply the laws of the seventh century fixed in time and not relevant today would be like telling Christians that the injunctions of Christ to love one’s neighbor and not commit adultery were simply laws of the Palestine of two thousand years ago and not relevant today, or telling Jews not to keep Sabbath because this is simply an outmoded practice of three thousand years ago.

Modern secularists might advance these arguments, but it is difficult to understand how Jews or Christians who still follow their religious tradition could do so. As far as Christianity is concerned, how Christians hold the spiritual teachings of Christ to be immutable can be a key for the understanding of how Muslims regard theShari‘ah . As for Jews, such an understanding should be even easier, because the Islamic understanding of Divine Law is so similar to that found in Judaism, and theShari‘ah and Halakhah hold very similar positions in the two religions, respectively.

As in Judaism, for Islam Divine Law is more central than theological thought to the religious life. One can be a very serious Muslim without interest in kalam, or Islamic theology, but one cannot be a serious Christian

without interest in Christian theology unless one is a mystic or pietist. One could, in fact, say that what theology is to Christianity, theShari‘ah , or Divine Law, is to Islam. To be a Muslim is to accept the validity of theShari‘ah , even if one is too weak to practice all of its injunctions, and to understand theShari‘ah is to gain knowledge of the formal religious structure of Islam. Even those who have sought to go beyond the formal level, through the Tariqah to the absolute Truth, which transcends all forms, have never ceased to revere theShari‘ah and to practice it. The greatest philosophers of Islam from Avicenna to Averroës practiced theShari‘ah ; so did the greatest saints and mystics, such as Ibn ‘Arabi, who wrote that his heart was the temple for idols and house for the Torah, the Gospels, and the Quran, but who never broke the Divine Law or stopped saying his daily prayers, promulgated by theShari‘ah , until his death.

The transcending of the Law in Islam in the direction of the Spirit has never been through the flouting of the Law, through breaking or denying its formal structure, but by transcending it from within. If there have been exceptions for those crazed by the love of God and in a paranormal state of consciousness, they have been there as exceptions to prove the rule. To speak of Islam on the level of individual practice and social norms is to speak of theShari‘ah , which has provided over the centuries guidelines for those who have wanted or wish today to live according to God’s Will in its Islamic form. When we hear in the Lord’s Prayer uttered by Christ “Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven,” for the Muslim His Will is expressed in theShari‘ah , and to live according to this Will on earth is, first of all, to practice the injunctions of the Divine Law. It is on the basis of this practice, meant for all Muslims, that the saintly can then surrender their whole will to the Will of God.

God, then, is the supreme Legislator (al-Shari‘ ).

Through His Laws, before which according to Islam all men and women are equal, human life is sanctified. The Divine Law embraces every aspect of life and removes the distinction between sacred and profane or religious and secular. Since God is the creator of all things, there is no legitimate domain of life to which His Will or His Laws do not apply. Even the most ordinary acts of life carried out according to theShari‘ah are sanctified, and persons of faith who live a life according to the Divine Law live a life immersed in grace, or what in Arabic is called barakah.

Their life gains meaning, and they move through the journey of life certain that they are following a road (shar‘) designated by God, a road that leads to salvation and felicity in the ultimate encounter with Him. To live according to theShari‘ah in both form and inner meaning is to live an ethical life in the fullest sense.

THE SOURCES OF THE SHARI‘AH AND THE METHODOLOGY OF ISLAMIC JURISPRUDENCE

The most important source of theShari‘ah is the Quran, which some scholars claim to be the only basic source; all other sources serve only to elucidate and elaborate the roots and principles contained in the Sacred Text. There are some 350 legal verses, or what Western law calls juris corpus, in the Quran. Some of them deal with specific legal issues and penalties for illicit and illegal acts. A large number deal with the principles of the acts of worship and in some cases the details of such actions. Another group of verses deals with commercial and economic issues. In addition, many verses deal with the questions of justice, equality, evidence in law, legal rights, and so forth. Together these verses constitute only a small part of the Quran, but they are essential as the roots of Islamic Law.

The injunctions of the Quran would not, however, be fully understood without theSunnah and Hadith of the Prophet, which constitute its first commentary. The Quran orders Muslims to pray, but how to pray was learned from the model established by the Prophet. After the Quran, therefore, theSunnah and Hadith are the second most important source of theShari‘ah . All schools of Law, Sunni and Shi‘ite alike, accept these two as the absolutely necessary sources for Islamic Law. It is important to note that it was only after the canonical collections of Hadith were assembled in the ninth century that the definitive work on the methodology of jurisprudence was produced by Imam al-Shafi‘i.

OtherShari‘ah sources are accepted by some schools and not by others. They include qiyas, or analogy, in its juridical sense, which technically means the extension of a Shari‘ite ruling or value from a known and accepted case (asl ) to a new case with the same effective cause, legally speaking. These sources also include ijma‘, or consensus, which is usually considered to be the consensus on a legal matter of the legal scholars who are specialists in theShari‘ah , but which in Islamic history has also been the consensus of the whole community over a long period, as in the case of the banning of slavery and the acceptance of tobacco as being halal, that is, legally acceptable rather than forbidden. There is, in fact, a hadith of the Prophet that asserts: “My community shall never agree on error.”

Then there is istihsan, or equity, which differs from equity in Western law in that in the latter equity relies on the concept of natural law, whereas istihsan relies on theShari‘ah ; otherwise, they are similar in that both are concerned with the idea of fairness and conscience in law. Finally, in this brief account one must mention mas.lah. ah mursalah, or considerations of public interest that are harmonious with theShari‘ah and the objectives of the Lawgiver.

An important point here is the position within theShari‘ah of human custom and law as distinct from the Divine Law. What in classical texts is called ‘urf or ‘adah, meaning human custom or habit, is considered valid in theShari‘ah itself if such a custom or habit does not contradict or contravene theShari‘ah . Therefore, human laws not derived from the Divine Law can become integrated into the Islamic legal system as long as they do not oppose the edicts of theShari‘ah . This occurred often

throughout Islamic history. Divine Law is referred to asShar‘ , and human law is referred to asqanun (from the Greek word kanon, which is also the source for the word “canonical” in Western law). Paradoxically, nonreligious law in Islam uses the same term as religious or ecclesiastical law in Christianity.

From the point of view of theShari‘ah , to follow theqanun of any country in which one finds oneself is itself commended as long as thatqanun or law does not contradict the injunctions of theShari‘ah .

Historically and in contrast to the modern period, there was much harmony betweenShar‘ andqanun in the Islamic world, and traditional Muslims did not feel any appreciable tension between Divine Law and human law.

This tension is a modern phenomenon that began in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the abrogation of theShari‘ah in certain Muslim countries and the forced implementation of various European legal codes, for example, in Persia, Egypt, Turkey, and North Africa. In these and similar countries, needless to say, the substitution of European laws for theShari‘ah created a tension between private religious life and the public domain and drew the majority of the population further away from their governments, which they began to view as anti-Islamic or at best indifferent to Islam.

In the hierarchy of the sources mentioned above, the Quran stands at the highest level, followed by theSunnah andHadith . An elaborate methodology was developed to deduce rulings from these sources and create the body of Islamic laws. This science of deriving juridical decisions from sources is called the “principles of jurisprudence” (us.ul al-fiqh ) and is central to Islamic Law. Althoughfiqh itself originally meant “understanding” or “knowledge” in general, gradually it came to be associated with the “science of the law,” or jurisprudence, corresponding to what the Romans called iurisprudentia. It deals with the body of the law and ways of concluding legal views from the principles and sources of the law.Fiqh has, therefore, a more technical legal meaning than theShari‘ah , which includes moral laws and the general framework for the religious life of Islam.

Fiqh, according to traditional authorities, is knowledge of the practical regulations and rules of theShari‘ah acquired by reference to and detailed study of the sources.

Although the fifth and sixth Shi‘ite Imams, Muh.ammad al-Baqir and Ja‘far al-Sadiq, said much aboutfiqh and its principles, it was Imam al-Shafi‘i who, in his Risalah (“Treatise”), established the systematic methodology for deriving laws from the sources. To exercise such an intellectual undertaking is called ijtihad, and the person who can give fresh views on matters of law by going back to the sources is called a mujtahid. In the Sunni world the “gate of ijtihad” closed after the tenth and eleventh centuries, when the major schools were established, whereas in the Shi‘ite world it has remained open to this day and in each generation the mujtahids have derived the laws from the established principles and sources, which for

Shi‘ites are the Quran, theHadith of the Prophet, and the teachings of the Imams.

Through the meticulous following of the methodologies elaborated inus.ul al-fiqh , the major schools of Sunni Law already mentioned, that is, the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi‘i, and Hanbali, came into being, as did the Twelve-Imam Ja‘fari School and the Zaydi, Isma‘ili, and ‘Ibadi schools. Since the last century, a great debate has taken place in the Sunni world about opening the “gate of ijtihad” again, and in both the Sunni and the Shi‘ite worlds, fundamental discussions are taking place today about the future development and application of theShari‘ah to Islamic society facing major new challenges, including those issuing from biotechnology and all the problems that it poses for ethics.

In this domain the recent responses of Jewish and Christian thinkers are close to Muslim ones, and the followers of the three monotheistic faiths can certainly collaborate together on many issues in the fields of bioethics and environmental ethics.

TheShari‘ah can best be understood through the use of the symbol of the tree, mentioned in the Quran: “Seest thou not how God coineth a similitude: A good saying, as a goodly tree, its roots set firm, its branches reaching into heaven” (14:24). This symbol has many levels of meaning, one of which concerns theShari‘ah . Divine Law is like a tree whose roots are sunk firmly in the ground of revelation, but whose branches extend in different directions and have grown in various ways. The firmness of the roots does not mean that the tree is not living. On the contrary, it is the very firmness and immutability of the roots that guarantee the flowing of the sap into the branches and the continuous life of the tree. TheShari‘ah has developed in many different cultural and political climates over the centuries.

It has harbored many differences of interpretation, and yet it has remained theShari‘ah . Today it is faced with unprecedented challenges both from within the borders of the “Abode of Islam” and from outside, but it remains a living body of law that Muslims consider the concrete embodiment of God’s Will for them to follow on the basis of their faith and free will.

TO WHOM DOES THE SHARI‘AH APPLY?

According to all schools of Islamic Law, the injunctions of theShari‘ah of Islam apply to all Muslims, male and female, who have reached the legal age and only to them. All Muslims are in principle equal before the law, whether they are kings or beggars, women or men, black or white, rich or poor. The Quran especially emphasizes that its injunctions concern both men and women in several verses where both sexes are addressed clearly and in a distinct manner, as when it says:

Verily, men who surrender unto God, and women who surrender, and men who believe and women who believe, and men who obey and women who obey, and men who speak the truth and women who speak the truth . and men who give alms and women who give alms, and men who fast and women who fast, and men who guard their modesty and women who guard (their modesty), and men who remember God much and women who

remember-God hath prepared for them forgiveness and a vast reward. (33:35)

In a society ruled by theShari‘ah and in which Muslims are the majority, accepted religious minorities are absolved from following the IslamicShari‘ah except in that which concerns public order. According to the IslamicShari‘ah itself, Jews, Christians, and other “People of the Book,” which in India included Hindus and in Persia the Zoroastrians, have their ownShari‘ah , and therefore their personal and communal affairs should be left to them. This is how the “community system,” or millat system, of the Ottoman world functioned for many centuries. In the millat system the central government, although Islamic, recognized fully the social, economic, and especially religious rights of established minorities, so that there was no danger of the majority destroying the presence or identity of minority groups. Under the Ottomans the rights of Jews and Christians were guaranteed by the state itself. Although there were occasionally social frictions, by and large there was certainly much greater tolerance between various groups than what we have observed in Yugoslavia since its breakup, with all those horrendous acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide that followed.

TRADITIONAL, MODERNIST, AND “FUNDAMENTALIST” INTERPRETATIONS OF ISLAM TODAY

All that has been said thus far provides the necessary context and framework for understanding the recent developments in the Islamic world. Until the impact of European colonialism on the heart of the Islamic world, there were those who fought against Western rule in the extremities of the “Abode of Islam,” but there were no Muslim modernists or fundamentalists. Muslims were all traditional and fitted into the complex pattern of the spectrum of Islam outlined above. But with the advent of European domination of the heartland of Islam, represented by the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798, the period of diverse reactions and interpretations leading to the contemporary period began.

The European encroachment upon the Islamic world had actually begun over two and a half centuries earlier with the Portuguese and later Dutch and British domination of the Indian Ocean, which had been a major economic lifeline for Islamic civilization. There had also been European invasions of North Africa, the decisive defeat of the Ottoman navy in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, which cut the Ottomans off from the western Mediterranean, and the defeat of the Ottomans in their siege of Vienna in 1683, which marked the beginning of the waning of their power. But none of these events, nor the Dutch colonization of the East Indies, nor British penetration into India, moved the minds and souls of Muslims as did the conquest of Egypt. That event awakened Muslims to a challenge without precedence in their history.

The Quran states, “If God aideth you, no one shall overcome you” (3:159). In the eyes of Muslims, twelve centuries of Islamic history had demonstrated the legitimacy of their claim and the truth of their call. God had been “on their side” and aided them over all those centuries, notwithstanding the defeat of Muslims in Spain and the destruction of the Tartar kingdom by the Russians, because these were at the margins of the world of Islam and lack of internal unity was considered as the reason for these defeats.

Otherwise, wherever Islam had gone, it had become victorious; even the powerful Mongols had soon embraced Islam. But these Europeans, whom Muslims had neglected for so long and considered their cultural inferiors, were now dominating the Islamic world and there was no possibility of their accepting Islam as the Turks or Mongols had. They claimed themselves to be superior and were so proud of their own culture that they showed no interest in anything else. This situation created a crisis of cosmic proportions with eschatological overtones.

Several attitudes could have been taken in face of this crisis, and in fact every one of them was adopted by one group or another. One view held that Muslims had become weak because they had strayed from the original message of the faith and had become corrupted by luxury and deviations.

This was the position of the so-called puritanical reformists, of whom the most famous, the eighteenthcentury Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab from Najd, lived in fact before the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt at the end of the

eighteenth century, but whose message sought to respond to causes for Muslim weakness. Although his message remained mostly in Arabia, this type of puritanical reformism, which was usually against Sufism, Shi‘ism, Islamic philosophy and theology, and the refinement of classical Islamic cities as demonstrated in the arts, became known as the Salafiyyah, that is, those who follow the early predecessors, or salaf, disregarding the thirteen or fourteen centuries of development of the Islamic tradition from its Quranic and Prophetic roots.

A second possibility was to turn to eschatologicalhadiths concerning the end of the world, when, it was said, oppression would reign everywhere and Muslims would become weakened and dominated by others. As a result of this focus, a wave of Mahdiism swept across some areas of the Islamic world in the early nineteenth century, ranging from the Brelvi movement in the northwestern province of present-day Pakistan; to the movements of Ghulam Ah.mad and the Bab already mentioned; to uprisings by major figures in West Africa, of whom the most significant, although his career began somewhat earlier, was ‘Uthman Dan Fadio, the founder of the Sokoto Caliphate, whose influence spread even to the Caribbean; to the Mahdiist movement of the Sudan, which inflicted the only defeat on the British army in the nineteenth century. As with every millennialist movement, this Mahdiist wave gradually died down, in this case by the second half of the nineteenth century.

The third possibility was to say, in the manner of European modernists, that the regulations of Islam were for the seventh century and times had changed; therefore religion had to be reformed and modernized. The modernists began in Egypt, the most famous of whom were Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who was of Persian origin, and Muh.ammad ‘Abduh. They also appeared in Ottoman Turkey, especially within the Young Turk movement; in India, with such figures as Sir Sayyid Ah.mad Khan; and in Persia, which produced several other figures besides al-Afghani, whose effect was, however, more local. These modernists varied in their degree of modernism and approach, but in general they were great admirers of the West and of rationalism, nationalism, and modern science. The most philosophical of all of them was Muh.ammad Iqbal, who belongs to the end of this first period of response to the West, which lasted until World War II. When Western scholars speak of Islamic reformers, they have mostly such figures in mind, along with the so-called puritanical reformers. From the ranks of the modernists rose nationalists and liberal thinkers, men who sought to modernize Islamic society, on the one hand, and fight against the West in the name of national independence, on the other. The colonial wars fought against Western powers for national independence by such figures as Ataturk, Sukarno, Bourgiba, and others were carried out in the name of nationalism, not Islam.

Consequently, when Western powers left their colonies, at least outwardly, in many areas they left behind them ruling groups who were Muslim in name, but whose thinking was more like that of the colonizers they had replaced.

There were, of course, also groups of fighters for independence who were not modernists at all, but traditional Muslims, often associated with various Sufi orders. They usually carried out military resistance to preserve their homelands with a degree of nobility and magnanimity that deeply impressed their European enemies. One can cite as a supreme example of this type Amir ‘Abd al-Qadir, the great Algerian freedom fighter and Sufi sage; his opponent, a French general, wrote back to Paris saying that fighting against the Amir was like confronting one of the prophets of the Old Testament. Another notable example is Imam Shamil, who fought for years in Caucasia against Russian encroachment. The example of the saintly nature of these men and the manner in which they treated their enemies as well as noncombatants, no matter what the other side was doing, is of the utmost importance for Muslims as well as Westerners to remember in the present-day situation.

Most of the Islamic world in the period between, let us say, 1800 and World War II did not react in any of the three manners described above. They were the traditional Muslims for whom the life of theShari‘ah as well as the Tariqah continued in its time-honored manner. There were, of course, continuous renewals from within that must not, however, be confused with reform in its modern sense. Many great scholars of Law continued to appear and Sufism was rejuvenated in several areas, especially in the Maghrib and West and East Africa, as we see in the rise of the Tijaniyyah and Sanusiyyah orders as well as the appearance of such great masters as Shaykh al-Darqawi, Shaykh Ahmad al-‘Alawi, and Shaykh Salamah al-Rad.i, all of whom revived the Shadhiliyyah Order. Nevertheless, the modus vivendi of traditional Muslims was not reaction, but continuation of the traditional Islamic modes of life and thought.

After World War II most Islamic countries had become politically free, except for Algeria, which gained its independence in 1962 after a war that cost a million lives, and Muslim areas within the Communist world. The general population of Muslims had expected that with political independence would come cultural, social, and economic independence as well. When the reverse occurred, that is, when with the advent of political independence Westernized classes began ruling over a deeply pious public, as can be seen in countries as different as Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Pakistan, major reactions set in that can be seen throughout the Islamic world to this day.

The old modernist and liberal schools of thought became discredited, as did the modernists as a political class, which had failed to solve any of the major problems that society faced in addition to suffering humiliating defeats, especially in the several Arab-Israeli wars. Nevertheless, modernism continued, often with a new Marxist component, and remained powerful because it controlled and still controls the state apparatus in most Muslim lands. But its intellectual and social power began to wane and weaken nearly everywhere except in Turkey, where Ataturk’s secularism remains strong, held in place by the force of the army. Iran was the first country in which a political revolution removed the modernist government in favor of an Islamic one. A process of internal Islamization also took

place, gradually and without revolutionary upheaval, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Malaysia, the Sudan, Jordan, Egypt, and some other countries, and that process continues.

As for what is called “fundamentalism,” the earlier form of it as found in Saudi Arabia became transformed in many ways. By the 1960s there was a general malaise in the Islamic world caused by the simple emulation of a West, which, according to its leading thinkers, did not know where it was going itself. Many people, even among the modernized classes, turned back to Islam to find solutions to the existential problems posed by life itself and more particularly the actual situation of Muslims. The desire of the vast majority of people was to be left alone to solve the problems of the Islamic world, to preserve the religion of Islam, including the revival of theShari‘ah , and to rebuild Islamic civilization, but the dominant civilization of the West hardly allowed such a thing to take place. Many organizations were nevertheless established to pursue these ends by peaceful means, chief among them the Ikhwan al-Muslimin, or Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in the 1920s by H. asan al-Banna’, and the Jama‘at-i islami, founded by Mawlana Mawdudi in 1941, both of which remain powerful to this day.

In the past few decades this desire to preserve religion, re-Islamicize Islamic society, and reconstruct Islamic civilization has drawn a vast spectrum of people into its fold, all of whom are now branded indiscriminately in the West as “fundamentalist.” The majority of such people, however, pursue nonviolent means to achieve their goals, as do most Christian, Jewish, or Hindu “fundamentalists.” But there are also those who take recourse to violent action, nearly always when they are trying to defend their homeland, as in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, Kosovo, or the southern Philippines, or sometimes in exasperation to defend their faith and traditional cultural values, as one sees in occasional violent eruptions in Indonesia, Pakistan, and elsewhere.

But to act Islamically is to act in defense. Those who inflict harm upon the innocent, no matter how just their cause might be, are going against the clear teachings of the Quran and theShari‘ah concerning peace and war (to which we turn later in Chapter 6). In any case, the unfortunate use of the term “fundamentalism,” drawn originally from American Protestantism, for Islam cannot now be avoided, but it is of the utmost importance to realize that it embraces very different phenomena and must not be confused with the demonizing usage of the term in the Western media.

Disappointment among Muslims with the lack of true freedom after the attainment of political freedom after World War II also led to a new wave of Mahdiism, as seen in the coming of Ayatollah Khomeini to power in Iran at the time of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 (which was a major event in modern history and which definitely possessed eschatological overtones), the taking over of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1980, and the appearance of Mahdi-like figures in Nigeria during the last two decades.

There is no doubt that there is again a presence of Mahdiism in the air throughout the Islamic world, as there are millennialist expectations among both Jews and Christians today.

As for traditional Islam, in contrast to the first phase of the encounter with the West, from the 1960s onward it began to manifest itself in the public intellectual arena and to challenge both the modernists and the so-called fundamentalists.

Scholars deeply rooted in the Islamic tradition but also well acquainted with the West began to defend the integral Islamic tradition, the Tariqah as well as theShari‘ah , the intellectual disciplines as well as the traditional arts. At the same time they began in-depth criticism not of Christianity or Judaism, but of secularist modernism, which was first incubated and grew in the West, but later spread to other continents. Such scholars base themselves on the universality of revelation stated in the Quran and seek to reject the substitution of the “kingdom of man” for the “Kingdom of God” as posited by modern secularism. Their criticisms of the modern world have drawn much from Western critics of modernism, rationalism, and scientism, including not only such traditionalists as René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, Titus Burckhardt, and Martin Lings, but also such well-known European and American critics of the modernist project, including modern science and technology, as Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, and Theodore Roszak. The traditional Islamic response began with those trained in Western-style educational organizations, but during the past two decades has come to also include figures from among the class of religious scholars, or ‘ulama’, and traditional Sufis. These scholars and leaders seek to preserve the rhythm of traditional Islamic life as well as its intellectual and spiritual traditions and find natural allies in Judaism and Christianity in confronting the challenges of modern secularism as well as globalization.

The great majority of Muslims today still belong to the traditionalist category and must be distinguished from both secularist modernizers and “fundamentalists,” as the latter term is now used in the Western media. In fact, it would be the greatest error to fail to distinguish the traditionalists from the “fundamentalists” and to include anyone who wishes to preserve the traditional Islamic way of life and thought in the “fundamentalist” category. It would be as if in contemporary Catholicism one were to call Padre Pio and Mother Teresa “fundamentalists” because they insisted on preserving traditional Catholic teachings. It is essential to realize that the notion of extremism implies a center, or median, of the spectrum; phenomena are judged “extreme” according to their distance, on either side, from this designated center. Unfortunately in the Western media today, that center is usually defined as the modernizing elements in Islamic society, and it is forgotten that modernism is itself one of the most fanatical, dogmatic, and extremist ideologies that history has ever seen. It seeks to destroy every other point of view and is completely intolerant toward any Weltanschauung that opposes it, whether it is that of the Native Americans, whose whole world was forcibly crushed by it, or Hinduism, Buddhism, or Islam, or for that matter traditional Christianity or Judaism. Orthodox Jews have as much difficulty resisting the constant assault of modern secularism upon their worldview and religious practices as do Hindus or Muslims. If one is going to speak of “fundamentalism” in religions, then one must include “secularist fundamentalism,” which is no less virulently proselytizing and aggressive

toward anything standing in its way than the most fanatical form of religious “fundamentalism.”

In the case of Islam, there are today certainly religious extremists of different kinds, but they do not define the mainstream, or center, of Islam. That center belongs to traditional Islam. And that center is the one against which one should view fanatical religious extremism, on the one side, and the rabid secularist modernism found in most Islamic countries, but especially in such places as Turkey, Tunisia, and Algeria, on the other. Traditional Islam is not opposed to what the West wishes to do within its own borders, but to the corrosive influences emanating from modern and postmodern Western culture, now associated so much with what is called globalization, that threaten Islamic values, just as they threaten Christian and Jewish values in the West itself. But the philosophy of defense of traditional Islam has always been to keep within the boundaries of Islamic teachings.

Its method of combat has been and remains primarily intellectual and spiritual, and when it has been forced to take recourse to physical action in the form of defense of its home and shelter, its models have been the Amir ‘Abd al-Qadirs and Imam Shamils, not the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution or homegrown models of Che Guevara.

To understand events in the Islamic world today, even the most outrageous and evil actions carried out in the name of Islam, it is necessary to have a context within which to place these actions, in the same way that Westerners are able to place Jonestown, Waco, bombs by the Irish Republican Army, Serbian ethnic cleansing, or the killings carried out by Baruch Goldstein or Rabbi Kahane’s group in context and not to identify them simply with Christianity or Judaism as such. This context can only be provided by looking at the vast spectrum of Islam outlined above. Yes, there are those in the Islamic world today who have taken recourse to military action and violence using modern technology with the supposed aim of ameliorating real or imaginary wrongs and injustices. Considering the history of the recent past, it is hardly surprising that such extremist illicit and morally reprehensible actions by a few using the name of Islam should take place, especially when injustices and suppressions within Islamic societies are added to external ones. Nor does asking why despicable actions take place in the name of Islam by the few and coming to understand the background of these actions in any way condone or excuse them.

The vast majority of Muslims still breathe in a universe in which the Name of God is associated above all with Compassion and Mercy, and they turn to Him in patience even in the midst of the worst tribulations. If it seems that more violence is associated with Islam than with other religions today, it is not due to the fact that there has been no violence elsewhere-think of the Korean and Vietnam wars, the atrocities committed by the Serbs, and the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi. The reason is that Islam is still very strong in Islamic society. Because Islam so pervades the lives of Muslims, all actions, including violent ones, are carried out in the name of Islam, especially since other ideologies such as nationalism and socialism have become so bankrupt.

Yet this identification is itself paradoxical because traditional Islam is as much on the side of peace and accord as are traditional Judaism and Christianity. Despite such phenomena, however, if one looks at the extensive panorama of the Islamic spectrum summarized below, it becomes evident that for the vast majority of Muslims, the traditional norms based on peace and openness to others, norms that have governed their lives over the centuries and are opposed to both secularist modernism and “fundamentalism,” are of central concern. And after the dust settles in this tumultuous period of both Islamic and global history, it will be the voice of traditional Islam that will have the final say in the Islamic world.

CHAPTER THREE: DIVINE AND HUMAN LAWS

And now We have set thee (O Muhammad) on a clear road (Shar‘) of Our Commandment; so follow it, and follow not the whim of those who know not.

Quran 45:18

It is the Law of God which has taken course aforetime. Thou wilt not find any change in the Law of God.

Quran 48:23

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LAW IN ISLAM

One of the most difficult aspects of Islam to understand for modern Westerners is the “philosophy of law,” which provides the conceptual foundation for theShari‘ah (literally, “road” or “path”), or Divine Law, in Islam. Since Christ did not promulgate a law like those of the prophets of the Old Testament and the Prophet of Islam, but rather came to break the letter of the law in the name of the Spirit, religious law in the West developed in a very different manner than it did in Islam. Even during the Middle Ages, when Western society was thoroughly Christian, everyday laws were drawn from Roman sources or common law. These sources were clearly distinguished from Divine Law, which in the Christian context involved spiritual principles and not ordinary laws dealing with society in general. Moreover, Christian theologians developed an elaborate doctrine of natural law, which does not have an exact counterpart in Islam, although there are striking developments worthy of comparison in this domain within the two traditions.

Originally, natural law meant a system of rights or justice common to all human beings and derived from nature. St. Thomas Aquinas provided the greatest elaboration of this concept, stating that eternal law exists in God’s mind and is known to us only in part through revelation and in part through reason. For St. Thomas, the law of nature is the “participation of the eternal law in the rational creature.”

Human law, based on precepts that human beings can derive by their own reason, must be a particular application of that law. Now, although Muslim theologians also debated among themselves whether our God-given reason can know the good without revelation, they did not develop a theory of natural law such as one finds in Thomism. Their view was closer to that of John Duns Scotus and Francisco Suarez, who believed that the Divine Will, rather than reason, was the source of law. In any case, even in the Middle Ages there were differences between the Islamic and certain of the predominantly Catholic schools of theology concerning the philosophy of law.

From the Renaissance onward laws became more and more secularized in the West, and they came to be seen as ever-changing regulations devised and defined by society to be made and discarded as circumstances dictate. And with the rise of parliamentary democracy, these laws came to be made and abrogated by the representatives of the people.

Within the context of such a background, it is easy to see why the understanding of the Islamic, and more generally the Semitic, concept of law, which is associated with the Will of God and is meant to determine society rather than be determined by it, poses such a problem for modern Westerners.

Yet such a view should not be so difficult to understand in the West if one only turns to Jewish Law and the Old Testament, which is of course also a part of Christian sacred scripture. In the Old Testament is stated a clear theology that determines the meaning of law for human society.

According to it, God is the Transcendent Reality Who is all powerful and sovereign over human beings. He is the only ultimate sanction of law, and

the laws of human society are the embodiments of His Will. In the Bible, law is designated as God’s commandments (mitsvah; as in Deut.11:13), teaching or instruction (torah; Gen. 26:5), utterance (davar; Deut. 4:13), and norm (mishpot; Exod. 21:1), along with other expressions. Violation of law is seen not only as an offense against society, but also as a moral sin and a violation of God’s order to humanity, for which human beings are accountable to God (Gen. 20:6; Lev. 19-

20, 22). The Bible makes no distinction between religious and secular offense against the law, and the law is seen as a norm by which not only men and women, but all beings must abide (Gen. 2:11-17; 9:1-7). For the rabbis, there was no distinction between fas, God-given laws, and lex, human laws, as claimed by the Romans; all laws were seen as expressions of God’s Will.

Now, this whole understanding of the meaning of law in the Bible corresponds very much to that of the Quran. If modern Westerners were only to grasp what the Old Testament says about law or how contemporary traditional Jews comprehend and practice Talmudic Law, it would be much easier to understand the “philosophy of law” in Islam. For Muslims also, God as the supreme and transcendent Sovereign has revealed His Laws through His prophets. TheShari‘ah is the concrete embodiment of the Divine Will, and in its most universal sense it embraces the whole of creation; what we call laws of nature are “theShari‘ah ” of various orders of corporeal reality. There is no distinction between the religious and secular realms, although the existence of non-Shari‘ite laws are recognized in practice, as we shall see later.

In the Islamic perspective, Divine Law is to be implemented to regulate society and the actions of its members rather than society dictating what laws should be. The injunctions of Divine Law are permanent, but the principles can also be applied to new circumstances as they arise.

But the basic thesis is one of trying to make the human order conform to the Divine norm, not vice-versa. To speak of theShari‘ah as being simply the laws of the seventh century fixed in time and not relevant today would be like telling Christians that the injunctions of Christ to love one’s neighbor and not commit adultery were simply laws of the Palestine of two thousand years ago and not relevant today, or telling Jews not to keep Sabbath because this is simply an outmoded practice of three thousand years ago.

Modern secularists might advance these arguments, but it is difficult to understand how Jews or Christians who still follow their religious tradition could do so. As far as Christianity is concerned, how Christians hold the spiritual teachings of Christ to be immutable can be a key for the understanding of how Muslims regard theShari‘ah . As for Jews, such an understanding should be even easier, because the Islamic understanding of Divine Law is so similar to that found in Judaism, and theShari‘ah and Halakhah hold very similar positions in the two religions, respectively.

As in Judaism, for Islam Divine Law is more central than theological thought to the religious life. One can be a very serious Muslim without interest in kalam, or Islamic theology, but one cannot be a serious Christian

without interest in Christian theology unless one is a mystic or pietist. One could, in fact, say that what theology is to Christianity, theShari‘ah , or Divine Law, is to Islam. To be a Muslim is to accept the validity of theShari‘ah , even if one is too weak to practice all of its injunctions, and to understand theShari‘ah is to gain knowledge of the formal religious structure of Islam. Even those who have sought to go beyond the formal level, through the Tariqah to the absolute Truth, which transcends all forms, have never ceased to revere theShari‘ah and to practice it. The greatest philosophers of Islam from Avicenna to Averroës practiced theShari‘ah ; so did the greatest saints and mystics, such as Ibn ‘Arabi, who wrote that his heart was the temple for idols and house for the Torah, the Gospels, and the Quran, but who never broke the Divine Law or stopped saying his daily prayers, promulgated by theShari‘ah , until his death.

The transcending of the Law in Islam in the direction of the Spirit has never been through the flouting of the Law, through breaking or denying its formal structure, but by transcending it from within. If there have been exceptions for those crazed by the love of God and in a paranormal state of consciousness, they have been there as exceptions to prove the rule. To speak of Islam on the level of individual practice and social norms is to speak of theShari‘ah , which has provided over the centuries guidelines for those who have wanted or wish today to live according to God’s Will in its Islamic form. When we hear in the Lord’s Prayer uttered by Christ “Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven,” for the Muslim His Will is expressed in theShari‘ah , and to live according to this Will on earth is, first of all, to practice the injunctions of the Divine Law. It is on the basis of this practice, meant for all Muslims, that the saintly can then surrender their whole will to the Will of God.

God, then, is the supreme Legislator (al-Shari‘ ).

Through His Laws, before which according to Islam all men and women are equal, human life is sanctified. The Divine Law embraces every aspect of life and removes the distinction between sacred and profane or religious and secular. Since God is the creator of all things, there is no legitimate domain of life to which His Will or His Laws do not apply. Even the most ordinary acts of life carried out according to theShari‘ah are sanctified, and persons of faith who live a life according to the Divine Law live a life immersed in grace, or what in Arabic is called barakah.

Their life gains meaning, and they move through the journey of life certain that they are following a road (shar‘) designated by God, a road that leads to salvation and felicity in the ultimate encounter with Him. To live according to theShari‘ah in both form and inner meaning is to live an ethical life in the fullest sense.

THE SOURCES OF THE SHARI‘AH AND THE METHODOLOGY OF ISLAMIC JURISPRUDENCE

The most important source of theShari‘ah is the Quran, which some scholars claim to be the only basic source; all other sources serve only to elucidate and elaborate the roots and principles contained in the Sacred Text. There are some 350 legal verses, or what Western law calls juris corpus, in the Quran. Some of them deal with specific legal issues and penalties for illicit and illegal acts. A large number deal with the principles of the acts of worship and in some cases the details of such actions. Another group of verses deals with commercial and economic issues. In addition, many verses deal with the questions of justice, equality, evidence in law, legal rights, and so forth. Together these verses constitute only a small part of the Quran, but they are essential as the roots of Islamic Law.

The injunctions of the Quran would not, however, be fully understood without theSunnah and Hadith of the Prophet, which constitute its first commentary. The Quran orders Muslims to pray, but how to pray was learned from the model established by the Prophet. After the Quran, therefore, theSunnah and Hadith are the second most important source of theShari‘ah . All schools of Law, Sunni and Shi‘ite alike, accept these two as the absolutely necessary sources for Islamic Law. It is important to note that it was only after the canonical collections of Hadith were assembled in the ninth century that the definitive work on the methodology of jurisprudence was produced by Imam al-Shafi‘i.

OtherShari‘ah sources are accepted by some schools and not by others. They include qiyas, or analogy, in its juridical sense, which technically means the extension of a Shari‘ite ruling or value from a known and accepted case (asl ) to a new case with the same effective cause, legally speaking. These sources also include ijma‘, or consensus, which is usually considered to be the consensus on a legal matter of the legal scholars who are specialists in theShari‘ah , but which in Islamic history has also been the consensus of the whole community over a long period, as in the case of the banning of slavery and the acceptance of tobacco as being halal, that is, legally acceptable rather than forbidden. There is, in fact, a hadith of the Prophet that asserts: “My community shall never agree on error.”

Then there is istihsan, or equity, which differs from equity in Western law in that in the latter equity relies on the concept of natural law, whereas istihsan relies on theShari‘ah ; otherwise, they are similar in that both are concerned with the idea of fairness and conscience in law. Finally, in this brief account one must mention mas.lah. ah mursalah, or considerations of public interest that are harmonious with theShari‘ah and the objectives of the Lawgiver.

An important point here is the position within theShari‘ah of human custom and law as distinct from the Divine Law. What in classical texts is called ‘urf or ‘adah, meaning human custom or habit, is considered valid in theShari‘ah itself if such a custom or habit does not contradict or contravene theShari‘ah . Therefore, human laws not derived from the Divine Law can become integrated into the Islamic legal system as long as they do not oppose the edicts of theShari‘ah . This occurred often

throughout Islamic history. Divine Law is referred to asShar‘ , and human law is referred to asqanun (from the Greek word kanon, which is also the source for the word “canonical” in Western law). Paradoxically, nonreligious law in Islam uses the same term as religious or ecclesiastical law in Christianity.

From the point of view of theShari‘ah , to follow theqanun of any country in which one finds oneself is itself commended as long as thatqanun or law does not contradict the injunctions of theShari‘ah .

Historically and in contrast to the modern period, there was much harmony betweenShar‘ andqanun in the Islamic world, and traditional Muslims did not feel any appreciable tension between Divine Law and human law.

This tension is a modern phenomenon that began in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the abrogation of theShari‘ah in certain Muslim countries and the forced implementation of various European legal codes, for example, in Persia, Egypt, Turkey, and North Africa. In these and similar countries, needless to say, the substitution of European laws for theShari‘ah created a tension between private religious life and the public domain and drew the majority of the population further away from their governments, which they began to view as anti-Islamic or at best indifferent to Islam.

In the hierarchy of the sources mentioned above, the Quran stands at the highest level, followed by theSunnah andHadith . An elaborate methodology was developed to deduce rulings from these sources and create the body of Islamic laws. This science of deriving juridical decisions from sources is called the “principles of jurisprudence” (us.ul al-fiqh ) and is central to Islamic Law. Althoughfiqh itself originally meant “understanding” or “knowledge” in general, gradually it came to be associated with the “science of the law,” or jurisprudence, corresponding to what the Romans called iurisprudentia. It deals with the body of the law and ways of concluding legal views from the principles and sources of the law.Fiqh has, therefore, a more technical legal meaning than theShari‘ah , which includes moral laws and the general framework for the religious life of Islam.

Fiqh, according to traditional authorities, is knowledge of the practical regulations and rules of theShari‘ah acquired by reference to and detailed study of the sources.

Although the fifth and sixth Shi‘ite Imams, Muh.ammad al-Baqir and Ja‘far al-Sadiq, said much aboutfiqh and its principles, it was Imam al-Shafi‘i who, in his Risalah (“Treatise”), established the systematic methodology for deriving laws from the sources. To exercise such an intellectual undertaking is called ijtihad, and the person who can give fresh views on matters of law by going back to the sources is called a mujtahid. In the Sunni world the “gate of ijtihad” closed after the tenth and eleventh centuries, when the major schools were established, whereas in the Shi‘ite world it has remained open to this day and in each generation the mujtahids have derived the laws from the established principles and sources, which for

Shi‘ites are the Quran, theHadith of the Prophet, and the teachings of the Imams.

Through the meticulous following of the methodologies elaborated inus.ul al-fiqh , the major schools of Sunni Law already mentioned, that is, the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi‘i, and Hanbali, came into being, as did the Twelve-Imam Ja‘fari School and the Zaydi, Isma‘ili, and ‘Ibadi schools. Since the last century, a great debate has taken place in the Sunni world about opening the “gate of ijtihad” again, and in both the Sunni and the Shi‘ite worlds, fundamental discussions are taking place today about the future development and application of theShari‘ah to Islamic society facing major new challenges, including those issuing from biotechnology and all the problems that it poses for ethics.

In this domain the recent responses of Jewish and Christian thinkers are close to Muslim ones, and the followers of the three monotheistic faiths can certainly collaborate together on many issues in the fields of bioethics and environmental ethics.

TheShari‘ah can best be understood through the use of the symbol of the tree, mentioned in the Quran: “Seest thou not how God coineth a similitude: A good saying, as a goodly tree, its roots set firm, its branches reaching into heaven” (14:24). This symbol has many levels of meaning, one of which concerns theShari‘ah . Divine Law is like a tree whose roots are sunk firmly in the ground of revelation, but whose branches extend in different directions and have grown in various ways. The firmness of the roots does not mean that the tree is not living. On the contrary, it is the very firmness and immutability of the roots that guarantee the flowing of the sap into the branches and the continuous life of the tree. TheShari‘ah has developed in many different cultural and political climates over the centuries.

It has harbored many differences of interpretation, and yet it has remained theShari‘ah . Today it is faced with unprecedented challenges both from within the borders of the “Abode of Islam” and from outside, but it remains a living body of law that Muslims consider the concrete embodiment of God’s Will for them to follow on the basis of their faith and free will.

TO WHOM DOES THE SHARI‘AH APPLY?

According to all schools of Islamic Law, the injunctions of theShari‘ah of Islam apply to all Muslims, male and female, who have reached the legal age and only to them. All Muslims are in principle equal before the law, whether they are kings or beggars, women or men, black or white, rich or poor. The Quran especially emphasizes that its injunctions concern both men and women in several verses where both sexes are addressed clearly and in a distinct manner, as when it says:

Verily, men who surrender unto God, and women who surrender, and men who believe and women who believe, and men who obey and women who obey, and men who speak the truth and women who speak the truth . and men who give alms and women who give alms, and men who fast and women who fast, and men who guard their modesty and women who guard (their modesty), and men who remember God much and women who

remember-God hath prepared for them forgiveness and a vast reward. (33:35)

In a society ruled by theShari‘ah and in which Muslims are the majority, accepted religious minorities are absolved from following the IslamicShari‘ah except in that which concerns public order. According to the IslamicShari‘ah itself, Jews, Christians, and other “People of the Book,” which in India included Hindus and in Persia the Zoroastrians, have their ownShari‘ah , and therefore their personal and communal affairs should be left to them. This is how the “community system,” or millat system, of the Ottoman world functioned for many centuries. In the millat system the central government, although Islamic, recognized fully the social, economic, and especially religious rights of established minorities, so that there was no danger of the majority destroying the presence or identity of minority groups. Under the Ottomans the rights of Jews and Christians were guaranteed by the state itself. Although there were occasionally social frictions, by and large there was certainly much greater tolerance between various groups than what we have observed in Yugoslavia since its breakup, with all those horrendous acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide that followed.

TRADITIONAL, MODERNIST, AND “FUNDAMENTALIST” INTERPRETATIONS OF ISLAM TODAY

All that has been said thus far provides the necessary context and framework for understanding the recent developments in the Islamic world. Until the impact of European colonialism on the heart of the Islamic world, there were those who fought against Western rule in the extremities of the “Abode of Islam,” but there were no Muslim modernists or fundamentalists. Muslims were all traditional and fitted into the complex pattern of the spectrum of Islam outlined above. But with the advent of European domination of the heartland of Islam, represented by the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798, the period of diverse reactions and interpretations leading to the contemporary period began.

The European encroachment upon the Islamic world had actually begun over two and a half centuries earlier with the Portuguese and later Dutch and British domination of the Indian Ocean, which had been a major economic lifeline for Islamic civilization. There had also been European invasions of North Africa, the decisive defeat of the Ottoman navy in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, which cut the Ottomans off from the western Mediterranean, and the defeat of the Ottomans in their siege of Vienna in 1683, which marked the beginning of the waning of their power. But none of these events, nor the Dutch colonization of the East Indies, nor British penetration into India, moved the minds and souls of Muslims as did the conquest of Egypt. That event awakened Muslims to a challenge without precedence in their history.

The Quran states, “If God aideth you, no one shall overcome you” (3:159). In the eyes of Muslims, twelve centuries of Islamic history had demonstrated the legitimacy of their claim and the truth of their call. God had been “on their side” and aided them over all those centuries, notwithstanding the defeat of Muslims in Spain and the destruction of the Tartar kingdom by the Russians, because these were at the margins of the world of Islam and lack of internal unity was considered as the reason for these defeats.

Otherwise, wherever Islam had gone, it had become victorious; even the powerful Mongols had soon embraced Islam. But these Europeans, whom Muslims had neglected for so long and considered their cultural inferiors, were now dominating the Islamic world and there was no possibility of their accepting Islam as the Turks or Mongols had. They claimed themselves to be superior and were so proud of their own culture that they showed no interest in anything else. This situation created a crisis of cosmic proportions with eschatological overtones.

Several attitudes could have been taken in face of this crisis, and in fact every one of them was adopted by one group or another. One view held that Muslims had become weak because they had strayed from the original message of the faith and had become corrupted by luxury and deviations.

This was the position of the so-called puritanical reformists, of whom the most famous, the eighteenthcentury Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab from Najd, lived in fact before the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt at the end of the

eighteenth century, but whose message sought to respond to causes for Muslim weakness. Although his message remained mostly in Arabia, this type of puritanical reformism, which was usually against Sufism, Shi‘ism, Islamic philosophy and theology, and the refinement of classical Islamic cities as demonstrated in the arts, became known as the Salafiyyah, that is, those who follow the early predecessors, or salaf, disregarding the thirteen or fourteen centuries of development of the Islamic tradition from its Quranic and Prophetic roots.

A second possibility was to turn to eschatologicalhadiths concerning the end of the world, when, it was said, oppression would reign everywhere and Muslims would become weakened and dominated by others. As a result of this focus, a wave of Mahdiism swept across some areas of the Islamic world in the early nineteenth century, ranging from the Brelvi movement in the northwestern province of present-day Pakistan; to the movements of Ghulam Ah.mad and the Bab already mentioned; to uprisings by major figures in West Africa, of whom the most significant, although his career began somewhat earlier, was ‘Uthman Dan Fadio, the founder of the Sokoto Caliphate, whose influence spread even to the Caribbean; to the Mahdiist movement of the Sudan, which inflicted the only defeat on the British army in the nineteenth century. As with every millennialist movement, this Mahdiist wave gradually died down, in this case by the second half of the nineteenth century.

The third possibility was to say, in the manner of European modernists, that the regulations of Islam were for the seventh century and times had changed; therefore religion had to be reformed and modernized. The modernists began in Egypt, the most famous of whom were Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who was of Persian origin, and Muh.ammad ‘Abduh. They also appeared in Ottoman Turkey, especially within the Young Turk movement; in India, with such figures as Sir Sayyid Ah.mad Khan; and in Persia, which produced several other figures besides al-Afghani, whose effect was, however, more local. These modernists varied in their degree of modernism and approach, but in general they were great admirers of the West and of rationalism, nationalism, and modern science. The most philosophical of all of them was Muh.ammad Iqbal, who belongs to the end of this first period of response to the West, which lasted until World War II. When Western scholars speak of Islamic reformers, they have mostly such figures in mind, along with the so-called puritanical reformers. From the ranks of the modernists rose nationalists and liberal thinkers, men who sought to modernize Islamic society, on the one hand, and fight against the West in the name of national independence, on the other. The colonial wars fought against Western powers for national independence by such figures as Ataturk, Sukarno, Bourgiba, and others were carried out in the name of nationalism, not Islam.

Consequently, when Western powers left their colonies, at least outwardly, in many areas they left behind them ruling groups who were Muslim in name, but whose thinking was more like that of the colonizers they had replaced.

There were, of course, also groups of fighters for independence who were not modernists at all, but traditional Muslims, often associated with various Sufi orders. They usually carried out military resistance to preserve their homelands with a degree of nobility and magnanimity that deeply impressed their European enemies. One can cite as a supreme example of this type Amir ‘Abd al-Qadir, the great Algerian freedom fighter and Sufi sage; his opponent, a French general, wrote back to Paris saying that fighting against the Amir was like confronting one of the prophets of the Old Testament. Another notable example is Imam Shamil, who fought for years in Caucasia against Russian encroachment. The example of the saintly nature of these men and the manner in which they treated their enemies as well as noncombatants, no matter what the other side was doing, is of the utmost importance for Muslims as well as Westerners to remember in the present-day situation.

Most of the Islamic world in the period between, let us say, 1800 and World War II did not react in any of the three manners described above. They were the traditional Muslims for whom the life of theShari‘ah as well as the Tariqah continued in its time-honored manner. There were, of course, continuous renewals from within that must not, however, be confused with reform in its modern sense. Many great scholars of Law continued to appear and Sufism was rejuvenated in several areas, especially in the Maghrib and West and East Africa, as we see in the rise of the Tijaniyyah and Sanusiyyah orders as well as the appearance of such great masters as Shaykh al-Darqawi, Shaykh Ahmad al-‘Alawi, and Shaykh Salamah al-Rad.i, all of whom revived the Shadhiliyyah Order. Nevertheless, the modus vivendi of traditional Muslims was not reaction, but continuation of the traditional Islamic modes of life and thought.

After World War II most Islamic countries had become politically free, except for Algeria, which gained its independence in 1962 after a war that cost a million lives, and Muslim areas within the Communist world. The general population of Muslims had expected that with political independence would come cultural, social, and economic independence as well. When the reverse occurred, that is, when with the advent of political independence Westernized classes began ruling over a deeply pious public, as can be seen in countries as different as Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Pakistan, major reactions set in that can be seen throughout the Islamic world to this day.

The old modernist and liberal schools of thought became discredited, as did the modernists as a political class, which had failed to solve any of the major problems that society faced in addition to suffering humiliating defeats, especially in the several Arab-Israeli wars. Nevertheless, modernism continued, often with a new Marxist component, and remained powerful because it controlled and still controls the state apparatus in most Muslim lands. But its intellectual and social power began to wane and weaken nearly everywhere except in Turkey, where Ataturk’s secularism remains strong, held in place by the force of the army. Iran was the first country in which a political revolution removed the modernist government in favor of an Islamic one. A process of internal Islamization also took

place, gradually and without revolutionary upheaval, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Malaysia, the Sudan, Jordan, Egypt, and some other countries, and that process continues.

As for what is called “fundamentalism,” the earlier form of it as found in Saudi Arabia became transformed in many ways. By the 1960s there was a general malaise in the Islamic world caused by the simple emulation of a West, which, according to its leading thinkers, did not know where it was going itself. Many people, even among the modernized classes, turned back to Islam to find solutions to the existential problems posed by life itself and more particularly the actual situation of Muslims. The desire of the vast majority of people was to be left alone to solve the problems of the Islamic world, to preserve the religion of Islam, including the revival of theShari‘ah , and to rebuild Islamic civilization, but the dominant civilization of the West hardly allowed such a thing to take place. Many organizations were nevertheless established to pursue these ends by peaceful means, chief among them the Ikhwan al-Muslimin, or Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in the 1920s by H. asan al-Banna’, and the Jama‘at-i islami, founded by Mawlana Mawdudi in 1941, both of which remain powerful to this day.

In the past few decades this desire to preserve religion, re-Islamicize Islamic society, and reconstruct Islamic civilization has drawn a vast spectrum of people into its fold, all of whom are now branded indiscriminately in the West as “fundamentalist.” The majority of such people, however, pursue nonviolent means to achieve their goals, as do most Christian, Jewish, or Hindu “fundamentalists.” But there are also those who take recourse to violent action, nearly always when they are trying to defend their homeland, as in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, Kosovo, or the southern Philippines, or sometimes in exasperation to defend their faith and traditional cultural values, as one sees in occasional violent eruptions in Indonesia, Pakistan, and elsewhere.

But to act Islamically is to act in defense. Those who inflict harm upon the innocent, no matter how just their cause might be, are going against the clear teachings of the Quran and theShari‘ah concerning peace and war (to which we turn later in Chapter 6). In any case, the unfortunate use of the term “fundamentalism,” drawn originally from American Protestantism, for Islam cannot now be avoided, but it is of the utmost importance to realize that it embraces very different phenomena and must not be confused with the demonizing usage of the term in the Western media.

Disappointment among Muslims with the lack of true freedom after the attainment of political freedom after World War II also led to a new wave of Mahdiism, as seen in the coming of Ayatollah Khomeini to power in Iran at the time of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 (which was a major event in modern history and which definitely possessed eschatological overtones), the taking over of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1980, and the appearance of Mahdi-like figures in Nigeria during the last two decades.

There is no doubt that there is again a presence of Mahdiism in the air throughout the Islamic world, as there are millennialist expectations among both Jews and Christians today.

As for traditional Islam, in contrast to the first phase of the encounter with the West, from the 1960s onward it began to manifest itself in the public intellectual arena and to challenge both the modernists and the so-called fundamentalists.

Scholars deeply rooted in the Islamic tradition but also well acquainted with the West began to defend the integral Islamic tradition, the Tariqah as well as theShari‘ah , the intellectual disciplines as well as the traditional arts. At the same time they began in-depth criticism not of Christianity or Judaism, but of secularist modernism, which was first incubated and grew in the West, but later spread to other continents. Such scholars base themselves on the universality of revelation stated in the Quran and seek to reject the substitution of the “kingdom of man” for the “Kingdom of God” as posited by modern secularism. Their criticisms of the modern world have drawn much from Western critics of modernism, rationalism, and scientism, including not only such traditionalists as René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, Titus Burckhardt, and Martin Lings, but also such well-known European and American critics of the modernist project, including modern science and technology, as Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, and Theodore Roszak. The traditional Islamic response began with those trained in Western-style educational organizations, but during the past two decades has come to also include figures from among the class of religious scholars, or ‘ulama’, and traditional Sufis. These scholars and leaders seek to preserve the rhythm of traditional Islamic life as well as its intellectual and spiritual traditions and find natural allies in Judaism and Christianity in confronting the challenges of modern secularism as well as globalization.

The great majority of Muslims today still belong to the traditionalist category and must be distinguished from both secularist modernizers and “fundamentalists,” as the latter term is now used in the Western media. In fact, it would be the greatest error to fail to distinguish the traditionalists from the “fundamentalists” and to include anyone who wishes to preserve the traditional Islamic way of life and thought in the “fundamentalist” category. It would be as if in contemporary Catholicism one were to call Padre Pio and Mother Teresa “fundamentalists” because they insisted on preserving traditional Catholic teachings. It is essential to realize that the notion of extremism implies a center, or median, of the spectrum; phenomena are judged “extreme” according to their distance, on either side, from this designated center. Unfortunately in the Western media today, that center is usually defined as the modernizing elements in Islamic society, and it is forgotten that modernism is itself one of the most fanatical, dogmatic, and extremist ideologies that history has ever seen. It seeks to destroy every other point of view and is completely intolerant toward any Weltanschauung that opposes it, whether it is that of the Native Americans, whose whole world was forcibly crushed by it, or Hinduism, Buddhism, or Islam, or for that matter traditional Christianity or Judaism. Orthodox Jews have as much difficulty resisting the constant assault of modern secularism upon their worldview and religious practices as do Hindus or Muslims. If one is going to speak of “fundamentalism” in religions, then one must include “secularist fundamentalism,” which is no less virulently proselytizing and aggressive

toward anything standing in its way than the most fanatical form of religious “fundamentalism.”

In the case of Islam, there are today certainly religious extremists of different kinds, but they do not define the mainstream, or center, of Islam. That center belongs to traditional Islam. And that center is the one against which one should view fanatical religious extremism, on the one side, and the rabid secularist modernism found in most Islamic countries, but especially in such places as Turkey, Tunisia, and Algeria, on the other. Traditional Islam is not opposed to what the West wishes to do within its own borders, but to the corrosive influences emanating from modern and postmodern Western culture, now associated so much with what is called globalization, that threaten Islamic values, just as they threaten Christian and Jewish values in the West itself. But the philosophy of defense of traditional Islam has always been to keep within the boundaries of Islamic teachings.

Its method of combat has been and remains primarily intellectual and spiritual, and when it has been forced to take recourse to physical action in the form of defense of its home and shelter, its models have been the Amir ‘Abd al-Qadirs and Imam Shamils, not the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution or homegrown models of Che Guevara.

To understand events in the Islamic world today, even the most outrageous and evil actions carried out in the name of Islam, it is necessary to have a context within which to place these actions, in the same way that Westerners are able to place Jonestown, Waco, bombs by the Irish Republican Army, Serbian ethnic cleansing, or the killings carried out by Baruch Goldstein or Rabbi Kahane’s group in context and not to identify them simply with Christianity or Judaism as such. This context can only be provided by looking at the vast spectrum of Islam outlined above. Yes, there are those in the Islamic world today who have taken recourse to military action and violence using modern technology with the supposed aim of ameliorating real or imaginary wrongs and injustices. Considering the history of the recent past, it is hardly surprising that such extremist illicit and morally reprehensible actions by a few using the name of Islam should take place, especially when injustices and suppressions within Islamic societies are added to external ones. Nor does asking why despicable actions take place in the name of Islam by the few and coming to understand the background of these actions in any way condone or excuse them.

The vast majority of Muslims still breathe in a universe in which the Name of God is associated above all with Compassion and Mercy, and they turn to Him in patience even in the midst of the worst tribulations. If it seems that more violence is associated with Islam than with other religions today, it is not due to the fact that there has been no violence elsewhere-think of the Korean and Vietnam wars, the atrocities committed by the Serbs, and the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi. The reason is that Islam is still very strong in Islamic society. Because Islam so pervades the lives of Muslims, all actions, including violent ones, are carried out in the name of Islam, especially since other ideologies such as nationalism and socialism have become so bankrupt.

Yet this identification is itself paradoxical because traditional Islam is as much on the side of peace and accord as are traditional Judaism and Christianity. Despite such phenomena, however, if one looks at the extensive panorama of the Islamic spectrum summarized below, it becomes evident that for the vast majority of Muslims, the traditional norms based on peace and openness to others, norms that have governed their lives over the centuries and are opposed to both secularist modernism and “fundamentalism,” are of central concern. And after the dust settles in this tumultuous period of both Islamic and global history, it will be the voice of traditional Islam that will have the final say in the Islamic world.

CHAPTER THREE: DIVINE AND HUMAN LAWS

And now We have set thee (O Muhammad) on a clear road (Shar‘) of Our Commandment; so follow it, and follow not the whim of those who know not.

Quran 45:18

It is the Law of God which has taken course aforetime. Thou wilt not find any change in the Law of God.

Quran 48:23

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LAW IN ISLAM

One of the most difficult aspects of Islam to understand for modern Westerners is the “philosophy of law,” which provides the conceptual foundation for theShari‘ah (literally, “road” or “path”), or Divine Law, in Islam. Since Christ did not promulgate a law like those of the prophets of the Old Testament and the Prophet of Islam, but rather came to break the letter of the law in the name of the Spirit, religious law in the West developed in a very different manner than it did in Islam. Even during the Middle Ages, when Western society was thoroughly Christian, everyday laws were drawn from Roman sources or common law. These sources were clearly distinguished from Divine Law, which in the Christian context involved spiritual principles and not ordinary laws dealing with society in general. Moreover, Christian theologians developed an elaborate doctrine of natural law, which does not have an exact counterpart in Islam, although there are striking developments worthy of comparison in this domain within the two traditions.

Originally, natural law meant a system of rights or justice common to all human beings and derived from nature. St. Thomas Aquinas provided the greatest elaboration of this concept, stating that eternal law exists in God’s mind and is known to us only in part through revelation and in part through reason. For St. Thomas, the law of nature is the “participation of the eternal law in the rational creature.”

Human law, based on precepts that human beings can derive by their own reason, must be a particular application of that law. Now, although Muslim theologians also debated among themselves whether our God-given reason can know the good without revelation, they did not develop a theory of natural law such as one finds in Thomism. Their view was closer to that of John Duns Scotus and Francisco Suarez, who believed that the Divine Will, rather than reason, was the source of law. In any case, even in the Middle Ages there were differences between the Islamic and certain of the predominantly Catholic schools of theology concerning the philosophy of law.

From the Renaissance onward laws became more and more secularized in the West, and they came to be seen as ever-changing regulations devised and defined by society to be made and discarded as circumstances dictate. And with the rise of parliamentary democracy, these laws came to be made and abrogated by the representatives of the people.

Within the context of such a background, it is easy to see why the understanding of the Islamic, and more generally the Semitic, concept of law, which is associated with the Will of God and is meant to determine society rather than be determined by it, poses such a problem for modern Westerners.

Yet such a view should not be so difficult to understand in the West if one only turns to Jewish Law and the Old Testament, which is of course also a part of Christian sacred scripture. In the Old Testament is stated a clear theology that determines the meaning of law for human society.

According to it, God is the Transcendent Reality Who is all powerful and sovereign over human beings. He is the only ultimate sanction of law, and

the laws of human society are the embodiments of His Will. In the Bible, law is designated as God’s commandments (mitsvah; as in Deut.11:13), teaching or instruction (torah; Gen. 26:5), utterance (davar; Deut. 4:13), and norm (mishpot; Exod. 21:1), along with other expressions. Violation of law is seen not only as an offense against society, but also as a moral sin and a violation of God’s order to humanity, for which human beings are accountable to God (Gen. 20:6; Lev. 19-

20, 22). The Bible makes no distinction between religious and secular offense against the law, and the law is seen as a norm by which not only men and women, but all beings must abide (Gen. 2:11-17; 9:1-7). For the rabbis, there was no distinction between fas, God-given laws, and lex, human laws, as claimed by the Romans; all laws were seen as expressions of God’s Will.

Now, this whole understanding of the meaning of law in the Bible corresponds very much to that of the Quran. If modern Westerners were only to grasp what the Old Testament says about law or how contemporary traditional Jews comprehend and practice Talmudic Law, it would be much easier to understand the “philosophy of law” in Islam. For Muslims also, God as the supreme and transcendent Sovereign has revealed His Laws through His prophets. TheShari‘ah is the concrete embodiment of the Divine Will, and in its most universal sense it embraces the whole of creation; what we call laws of nature are “theShari‘ah ” of various orders of corporeal reality. There is no distinction between the religious and secular realms, although the existence of non-Shari‘ite laws are recognized in practice, as we shall see later.

In the Islamic perspective, Divine Law is to be implemented to regulate society and the actions of its members rather than society dictating what laws should be. The injunctions of Divine Law are permanent, but the principles can also be applied to new circumstances as they arise.

But the basic thesis is one of trying to make the human order conform to the Divine norm, not vice-versa. To speak of theShari‘ah as being simply the laws of the seventh century fixed in time and not relevant today would be like telling Christians that the injunctions of Christ to love one’s neighbor and not commit adultery were simply laws of the Palestine of two thousand years ago and not relevant today, or telling Jews not to keep Sabbath because this is simply an outmoded practice of three thousand years ago.

Modern secularists might advance these arguments, but it is difficult to understand how Jews or Christians who still follow their religious tradition could do so. As far as Christianity is concerned, how Christians hold the spiritual teachings of Christ to be immutable can be a key for the understanding of how Muslims regard theShari‘ah . As for Jews, such an understanding should be even easier, because the Islamic understanding of Divine Law is so similar to that found in Judaism, and theShari‘ah and Halakhah hold very similar positions in the two religions, respectively.

As in Judaism, for Islam Divine Law is more central than theological thought to the religious life. One can be a very serious Muslim without interest in kalam, or Islamic theology, but one cannot be a serious Christian

without interest in Christian theology unless one is a mystic or pietist. One could, in fact, say that what theology is to Christianity, theShari‘ah , or Divine Law, is to Islam. To be a Muslim is to accept the validity of theShari‘ah , even if one is too weak to practice all of its injunctions, and to understand theShari‘ah is to gain knowledge of the formal religious structure of Islam. Even those who have sought to go beyond the formal level, through the Tariqah to the absolute Truth, which transcends all forms, have never ceased to revere theShari‘ah and to practice it. The greatest philosophers of Islam from Avicenna to Averroës practiced theShari‘ah ; so did the greatest saints and mystics, such as Ibn ‘Arabi, who wrote that his heart was the temple for idols and house for the Torah, the Gospels, and the Quran, but who never broke the Divine Law or stopped saying his daily prayers, promulgated by theShari‘ah , until his death.

The transcending of the Law in Islam in the direction of the Spirit has never been through the flouting of the Law, through breaking or denying its formal structure, but by transcending it from within. If there have been exceptions for those crazed by the love of God and in a paranormal state of consciousness, they have been there as exceptions to prove the rule. To speak of Islam on the level of individual practice and social norms is to speak of theShari‘ah , which has provided over the centuries guidelines for those who have wanted or wish today to live according to God’s Will in its Islamic form. When we hear in the Lord’s Prayer uttered by Christ “Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven,” for the Muslim His Will is expressed in theShari‘ah , and to live according to this Will on earth is, first of all, to practice the injunctions of the Divine Law. It is on the basis of this practice, meant for all Muslims, that the saintly can then surrender their whole will to the Will of God.

God, then, is the supreme Legislator (al-Shari‘ ).

Through His Laws, before which according to Islam all men and women are equal, human life is sanctified. The Divine Law embraces every aspect of life and removes the distinction between sacred and profane or religious and secular. Since God is the creator of all things, there is no legitimate domain of life to which His Will or His Laws do not apply. Even the most ordinary acts of life carried out according to theShari‘ah are sanctified, and persons of faith who live a life according to the Divine Law live a life immersed in grace, or what in Arabic is called barakah.

Their life gains meaning, and they move through the journey of life certain that they are following a road (shar‘) designated by God, a road that leads to salvation and felicity in the ultimate encounter with Him. To live according to theShari‘ah in both form and inner meaning is to live an ethical life in the fullest sense.

THE SOURCES OF THE SHARI‘AH AND THE METHODOLOGY OF ISLAMIC JURISPRUDENCE

The most important source of theShari‘ah is the Quran, which some scholars claim to be the only basic source; all other sources serve only to elucidate and elaborate the roots and principles contained in the Sacred Text. There are some 350 legal verses, or what Western law calls juris corpus, in the Quran. Some of them deal with specific legal issues and penalties for illicit and illegal acts. A large number deal with the principles of the acts of worship and in some cases the details of such actions. Another group of verses deals with commercial and economic issues. In addition, many verses deal with the questions of justice, equality, evidence in law, legal rights, and so forth. Together these verses constitute only a small part of the Quran, but they are essential as the roots of Islamic Law.

The injunctions of the Quran would not, however, be fully understood without theSunnah and Hadith of the Prophet, which constitute its first commentary. The Quran orders Muslims to pray, but how to pray was learned from the model established by the Prophet. After the Quran, therefore, theSunnah and Hadith are the second most important source of theShari‘ah . All schools of Law, Sunni and Shi‘ite alike, accept these two as the absolutely necessary sources for Islamic Law. It is important to note that it was only after the canonical collections of Hadith were assembled in the ninth century that the definitive work on the methodology of jurisprudence was produced by Imam al-Shafi‘i.

OtherShari‘ah sources are accepted by some schools and not by others. They include qiyas, or analogy, in its juridical sense, which technically means the extension of a Shari‘ite ruling or value from a known and accepted case (asl ) to a new case with the same effective cause, legally speaking. These sources also include ijma‘, or consensus, which is usually considered to be the consensus on a legal matter of the legal scholars who are specialists in theShari‘ah , but which in Islamic history has also been the consensus of the whole community over a long period, as in the case of the banning of slavery and the acceptance of tobacco as being halal, that is, legally acceptable rather than forbidden. There is, in fact, a hadith of the Prophet that asserts: “My community shall never agree on error.”

Then there is istihsan, or equity, which differs from equity in Western law in that in the latter equity relies on the concept of natural law, whereas istihsan relies on theShari‘ah ; otherwise, they are similar in that both are concerned with the idea of fairness and conscience in law. Finally, in this brief account one must mention mas.lah. ah mursalah, or considerations of public interest that are harmonious with theShari‘ah and the objectives of the Lawgiver.

An important point here is the position within theShari‘ah of human custom and law as distinct from the Divine Law. What in classical texts is called ‘urf or ‘adah, meaning human custom or habit, is considered valid in theShari‘ah itself if such a custom or habit does not contradict or contravene theShari‘ah . Therefore, human laws not derived from the Divine Law can become integrated into the Islamic legal system as long as they do not oppose the edicts of theShari‘ah . This occurred often

throughout Islamic history. Divine Law is referred to asShar‘ , and human law is referred to asqanun (from the Greek word kanon, which is also the source for the word “canonical” in Western law). Paradoxically, nonreligious law in Islam uses the same term as religious or ecclesiastical law in Christianity.

From the point of view of theShari‘ah , to follow theqanun of any country in which one finds oneself is itself commended as long as thatqanun or law does not contradict the injunctions of theShari‘ah .

Historically and in contrast to the modern period, there was much harmony betweenShar‘ andqanun in the Islamic world, and traditional Muslims did not feel any appreciable tension between Divine Law and human law.

This tension is a modern phenomenon that began in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the abrogation of theShari‘ah in certain Muslim countries and the forced implementation of various European legal codes, for example, in Persia, Egypt, Turkey, and North Africa. In these and similar countries, needless to say, the substitution of European laws for theShari‘ah created a tension between private religious life and the public domain and drew the majority of the population further away from their governments, which they began to view as anti-Islamic or at best indifferent to Islam.

In the hierarchy of the sources mentioned above, the Quran stands at the highest level, followed by theSunnah andHadith . An elaborate methodology was developed to deduce rulings from these sources and create the body of Islamic laws. This science of deriving juridical decisions from sources is called the “principles of jurisprudence” (us.ul al-fiqh ) and is central to Islamic Law. Althoughfiqh itself originally meant “understanding” or “knowledge” in general, gradually it came to be associated with the “science of the law,” or jurisprudence, corresponding to what the Romans called iurisprudentia. It deals with the body of the law and ways of concluding legal views from the principles and sources of the law.Fiqh has, therefore, a more technical legal meaning than theShari‘ah , which includes moral laws and the general framework for the religious life of Islam.

Fiqh, according to traditional authorities, is knowledge of the practical regulations and rules of theShari‘ah acquired by reference to and detailed study of the sources.

Although the fifth and sixth Shi‘ite Imams, Muh.ammad al-Baqir and Ja‘far al-Sadiq, said much aboutfiqh and its principles, it was Imam al-Shafi‘i who, in his Risalah (“Treatise”), established the systematic methodology for deriving laws from the sources. To exercise such an intellectual undertaking is called ijtihad, and the person who can give fresh views on matters of law by going back to the sources is called a mujtahid. In the Sunni world the “gate of ijtihad” closed after the tenth and eleventh centuries, when the major schools were established, whereas in the Shi‘ite world it has remained open to this day and in each generation the mujtahids have derived the laws from the established principles and sources, which for

Shi‘ites are the Quran, theHadith of the Prophet, and the teachings of the Imams.

Through the meticulous following of the methodologies elaborated inus.ul al-fiqh , the major schools of Sunni Law already mentioned, that is, the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi‘i, and Hanbali, came into being, as did the Twelve-Imam Ja‘fari School and the Zaydi, Isma‘ili, and ‘Ibadi schools. Since the last century, a great debate has taken place in the Sunni world about opening the “gate of ijtihad” again, and in both the Sunni and the Shi‘ite worlds, fundamental discussions are taking place today about the future development and application of theShari‘ah to Islamic society facing major new challenges, including those issuing from biotechnology and all the problems that it poses for ethics.

In this domain the recent responses of Jewish and Christian thinkers are close to Muslim ones, and the followers of the three monotheistic faiths can certainly collaborate together on many issues in the fields of bioethics and environmental ethics.

TheShari‘ah can best be understood through the use of the symbol of the tree, mentioned in the Quran: “Seest thou not how God coineth a similitude: A good saying, as a goodly tree, its roots set firm, its branches reaching into heaven” (14:24). This symbol has many levels of meaning, one of which concerns theShari‘ah . Divine Law is like a tree whose roots are sunk firmly in the ground of revelation, but whose branches extend in different directions and have grown in various ways. The firmness of the roots does not mean that the tree is not living. On the contrary, it is the very firmness and immutability of the roots that guarantee the flowing of the sap into the branches and the continuous life of the tree. TheShari‘ah has developed in many different cultural and political climates over the centuries.

It has harbored many differences of interpretation, and yet it has remained theShari‘ah . Today it is faced with unprecedented challenges both from within the borders of the “Abode of Islam” and from outside, but it remains a living body of law that Muslims consider the concrete embodiment of God’s Will for them to follow on the basis of their faith and free will.

TO WHOM DOES THE SHARI‘AH APPLY?

According to all schools of Islamic Law, the injunctions of theShari‘ah of Islam apply to all Muslims, male and female, who have reached the legal age and only to them. All Muslims are in principle equal before the law, whether they are kings or beggars, women or men, black or white, rich or poor. The Quran especially emphasizes that its injunctions concern both men and women in several verses where both sexes are addressed clearly and in a distinct manner, as when it says:

Verily, men who surrender unto God, and women who surrender, and men who believe and women who believe, and men who obey and women who obey, and men who speak the truth and women who speak the truth . and men who give alms and women who give alms, and men who fast and women who fast, and men who guard their modesty and women who guard (their modesty), and men who remember God much and women who

remember-God hath prepared for them forgiveness and a vast reward. (33:35)

In a society ruled by theShari‘ah and in which Muslims are the majority, accepted religious minorities are absolved from following the IslamicShari‘ah except in that which concerns public order. According to the IslamicShari‘ah itself, Jews, Christians, and other “People of the Book,” which in India included Hindus and in Persia the Zoroastrians, have their ownShari‘ah , and therefore their personal and communal affairs should be left to them. This is how the “community system,” or millat system, of the Ottoman world functioned for many centuries. In the millat system the central government, although Islamic, recognized fully the social, economic, and especially religious rights of established minorities, so that there was no danger of the majority destroying the presence or identity of minority groups. Under the Ottomans the rights of Jews and Christians were guaranteed by the state itself. Although there were occasionally social frictions, by and large there was certainly much greater tolerance between various groups than what we have observed in Yugoslavia since its breakup, with all those horrendous acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide that followed.