General introduction: The law in the Islamic Renaissance and the role of Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr
Law as Lingua Franca
In recent years, a renewed interest in Islam as a worldwide active social phenomenon has appeared. This has resulted in a flurry of works of sundry types on the theme of resurgence, revivalism, re-emergence of political Islam, also dubbed revolutionary Islam, radical Islam, militant Islam, Islamic fundamentalism, or more simply Islamism.
The issue of Islam as a socially turbulent phenomenon was approached by countries and disciplines: history, sociology, anthropology, politics.
Questions were being posed in the worried and intrigued West, but they were also being asked in the East, where answers had an immediate political relevance.
Naturally, the concerns were different according to the groups’ varied interests. The common underlying concern, however, was for stability, or its converse, foiled or successful revolution. Depending on the position of a group in a particular state, fear, concern, or hope alternated.
This research tries to look into the thought of the resurgent I slams behind the first layer of enthusiasm or despair, to determine how the new vindicated outlook was shaped, and to examine whether there were any new ideas in the alternative system at all. In this longer perspective of the history of ideas, ideas could be’new’ only in comparison with earlier outlooks. A comparative, as well as a prospective work was therefore needed. This meant not only asking questions of a chronological type, whether current ideas were new compared to those reformists advocated fifty or a hundred years ago, but also whether the claim of a different strand of thought which was specifically Islamic could be defended before a more universal jury.
One striking feature of the Islamic renewal is the legal form emphasised in its own language. Whether voiced by laymen or religious scholars, the appeal to Islam has directly addressed Islamic law: the shari’a. The concern of the Islamist advocates has primarily taken a legalistic form. The’ulama’s (plural of’alim, or fuqaha, plural of faqih, jurists) emphasis on the law might not be surprising, since they would in effect be defending their speciality. This is particularly true when the body of the ulama’ as such is under attack by the rapid changes brought about by the twentieth century. But upholders of revolutionary Islam were not solely scholars of the law, and the reasons for the appeal to the shari’a by people who were not essentially trained in classical law are rooted in the special place of the shari’a in the tradition.
Certainly Islam has offered as a civilisation areas of extreme sophistication in all walks of life, including scientific and literary disciplines. Yet, strong as the scientific tradition may have been, it has objectively lagged behind the advances of the scientific disciplines in the West. This is not true of the literary disciplines, some of which prove essentially incompatible with a categorisation in terms of progress. Typical of the’humanities’ field is literature: the poetry of al-Mutanabbi, Abu Tammam, Hafiz, and Firdawsi remains unsurpassed. In these fields, there can be no’advance’.
Other disciplines partake of the two traditions. They are both comparatively static and prone to’ advances’ which render preceding research in their field, as in pure science, relatively obsolete. The pertinence of progress in their case is more uncertain. Such is the case of the’continent histoire’
in which Ibn Khaldun (d. 808/1406) appears as a scientific analyst of the rise and fall of nations. One is reluctant none the less to describe the Muqaddima as a’ scientific’ text. It belongs to a type of historiography which starts with Ibn Khaldun and flourishes in the nineteenth and twentieth-century histories with major works emphasising economic structures, modes of production and exchange, and long waves.
But the language of the Muqaddima offers a string of brilliant insights rather than the systematic model of interconnected concepts which distinguish scientific laws.
These remarks may be too general for a precise classification of major disciplines in the Islamic tradition, but they serve the limited purpose in this essay of’ discarding’ the work of historians like Tabari (d.923), Ibn al-Athir (d.1234), and Ibn Khaldun, in so far as they have resisted the impact of breaks (‘coupures’) and breakthroughs which characterise science.
More specifically in the study of the thought of revolutionary Islam, the relative
irrelevance of the historiographic tradition appears mostly in the general lack of reference to that tradition within Islamic movements.
To this caveat it must be added that the question which is important for the currents of Islamic resurgence is not of a diachronic nature. The validity of historical research and the criteria of its scientificity are secondary to the purely’synchronic’ dimension at stake. Synchrony here means the relationship to contemporaneity. In the case of Ibn Khaldun, the whole of the Muqaddima appears irrelevant because it fails to answer the basic need of a contemporary movement in search of Islamic legitimacy: how can the modern Islamic polity be shaped? The Muqaddima, Maqrizi’s (d.1442) or Tabari’s histories, or the great works of the geographers cannot give ready answers. Muslim historians and geographers can only be precursors. The material they offer is too raw. It needs to be fundamentally reworked to appear relevant for questions of the late twentieth century.
One field, in contrast, where the riches of the Muslim tradition appear inextinguishable, and, at the same time, of immediate relevance for the contemporary Islamic polity is the law.
Ibn Manzur (d. 711H/1311 AD), the most famous Arab lexicographer, mentions in his dictionary Lisan al-’Arab under the root’sh r " that’‘sharfa is the place from which one descends to water... and shari’a in the acception of Arabs is the law of water (shur’at al-ma’) which is the source for drinking which is regulated by people who drink, and allow others to drink, from’.
A later classical dictionary is even more specific:’ Ash-shari’a’, writes Zubaydi, is the descent (munhadar) of water for which has also been called what God has decreed (sharra’a: legislate, decree) for the people in terms of fasting, prayer, pilgrimage, marriage etc... Some say it has been called shari’a by comparison with the sharfa of water in that the one who legislates, in truth and in all probability, quenches [his thirst] and purifies himself, and I mean by quenching what some wise men have said: I used to drink and remained thirsty, but when I knew God I quenched my thirst without drinking.
The connection between shari’a as a generic term for Islamic law, and shari’a as the path as well as the law of water, is not a coincidence, and the centrality of water in Islam is obvious in the economic as well as ritualistic sense. What is more important however, is that the jurists -the exponents and expounders of the shari’a -did not fail to develop, in answer to this centrality, a highly sophisticated system of rules, covering the whole field of what the contemporary world perceives as’law’.
From a purely religious law, the shari’a therefore developed into the common law of the Muslim world, extending its realm to encompass what modern law would identify as statutes, customs, legal deeds, court decisions, arbitration awards, responsa literature known as fatzvas, etc. With the secular distinctions introduced by the European Enlightenment, the shari’a lost ground in the Middle East as a common law with no clearly identifiable separation between the religious and the non-religious, but a strict separation of the two realms remains to date impossible. Yet the religious persons at the centre of the Islamic renewal are more jurisconsults than theologians, a fact of importance for developments in the late twentieth-century Muslim world.
In the process of renewing the shari’a by the jurisconsults, developments were rife both in terms of form and substance. In substance, as in Salvador Dali’s advice to young painters eager to do something’new’, novelty was secured naturally. A twentieth-century author cannot fail to be’new’. In form, the tentacles of the modern state invested the area previously reserved for individual jurists. The process of codification, which started haltingly in the qanunnamehs of the early Ottoman empire, was established, and the debate over the place and role of the shari’a extended to all the artisans of legal literature in the contemporary period: legislators, judges and scholars. The sway of’classical’ Islamic law did however vary widely.
In some areas, the consistency and relevance of classical Islamic law are remarkable. Such is the case of the law of succession, where, but for minor modifications, the law applied at present has kept to the same blueprint elaborated by the early jurists of the first and second centuries.
Other areas of the law have been completely discarded. The most significant example attaches to the law of trade in relation to slaves. Jurists of the classical age have written long sections on the rights of slaves as opposed to the rights of free persons, and the special position of slaves in the law permeates several fields, including torts, crime, booty in international law, and property.
Less dramatic than slave law, but similar in many ways, has been the whole area relating to the Hbadat, the legal dispositions in the classical texts which regulate acts of worship. In a sense, these rules remain untouched by historical change, and the conduct of a Hbada like prayer cannot be affected fundamentally by the new age. Under what is now considered as law, these areas are irrelevant. The Hbadat have stopped being a legal precinct. Similarly, there is little or no debate as to the regulation of hajj (pilgrimage), and even though its importance remains great, as the polemic between Saudi Wahhabis and Iranian Shi’is in recent years indicates,
the problem is purely of a political nature. Classical law does not bear on the controversial areas of the hajj.
Other areas of the legal spectrum, still, appear of only marginal relevance. Such is the case, in the present world of nation-states, of the whole field of international law, where the dichotomy between dar al-harb (war territory) and dar al-islam (peace territory) at the heart of the classical theory has become completely marginal.
Similarly, classical criminal law appears, but for some exceptions, not to be followed in the majority of the world’s Muslim countries.
The Islamic Renaissance feeds on different legal fields. Although a clearcut distinction can hardly be made in a vast body of literature which claims to be universal, the importance of only a few legal areas has come to the fore in the years of the renewal. Other areas have been left out. Following the taxonomy just described, international law, criminal law, Hbadat, torts and civil law generally, have all remained outside the sphere of interest of the Islamic Renaissance. Similarly, currently relevant parts of the classical shari’a, such as the family and succession, have on the whole changed very little since the late 1950s, when important reforms took place in most Muslim countries.
Two general areas, in contrast, have been opened to careful scrutiny. They are the constitutional part of public law, and the large field opened up by modern economics: labour law, land law in its specific economic dimension, industrial production and relations, and banking.
The Islamic revival has taken place essentially in these domains. Of course, as in all systematic exercises, there have been many forays into other fields outside the law, including Islamic arts and sciences. In the strict legal domain, writings on civil law, on torts
and contracts,
were published, and criminal and international law were discussed. These areas did not constitute, however, the crux of the Islamic Renaissance, because the upheaval that the world has witnessed in the Middle Eastern intellectual scene has been much more connected with economic and constitutional issues than with more neutral areas of the civil, criminal, or international law disciplines. Recent turmoil has affected primarily constitutional and economic law, and this is where the intellectual legal production has been at its best and most creative. The Renaissance in Islamic law has been prompted in these two fields, as against other areas which have remained untouched by the revival efforts.
Although it is difficult to explain this selective phenomenon, an essential factor that comes to mind is related to the conditions of the revival. At the heart of it, and at the heart of the renewed interest in Islamic thought worldwide, is without doubt the success and durability of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Without Iran, Islam would have not come centre stage in the same way, and the vast literature accompanying it would not have come so forcefully into being. The Renaissance, with its emphasis on break and change, has come because of the emergence of a State, the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the received tradition had not developed sufficient conceptual tools.
The establishment of the Iranian State has been directly affected by those legal elements which are central to the concerns of the Iranian revolutionaries now in power. Their interest, because of the peculiar nature of the Revolution, bears precisely on the’Islamic’ formation of State agents, in other words on the Constitution. Because they claim their State to be special and exclusive, the first task confronting the Iranian revolutionaries was the peculiarity of the’Islamic’ State. The other fundamental task was the implementation of a discourse of change in the country’s economy. The language of the Iranian Revolution has been premised on an idea of justice which needed implementation, and the tool of the implementation was the law.
These are therefore two priorities of the Islamic Revolution: the’ Islamic’ way the institutions of the country are formed, and the’Islamic’ way the production and distribution of wealth is carried out.
From the outset of the new regime, an overwhelming interest lay in economics and constitutional law. But the field did not come about as a deus ex machina. The Iranian Revolution, like all the revolutions in the world in search of authenticity, had to look back to the tradition for precedents.
Good research on the intellectual roots of the Iranian Revolution has already been achieved, and has uncovered two main strands of revolutionary forerunners. These strands can be described under two headings: the sufi, and the faqih, traditions. On the one hand, the sufi tradition is apolitical and emphasises the philosophical-mystical dimensions of Islam. On the other hand, the faqih tradition is deeply concerned with the relationship between government and governed, and is rooted in the legal riches of Islamic culture.
The sufi tradition, which fed on such works as Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i (d. 1983) and Henry Corbin (d. 1978), appears best in the existentialism-influenced background of’Ali Shari’ati (d. 1977). The Shari’ati legacy is probably most alluring in terms of its humanistic appeal, and it has been the focus of much scholarship in the West in the first years after the revolution.
As its relevance to the new Iranian State proved increasingly minimal, and however important a rallying point it represented to the disgruntled opponents of the Shah before the revolution, the faqih tradition supplanted it. Law was a much better tool to understand the institutionalisation of the new system.
The faqih tradition at the root of the Islamic Renaissance is therefore more appealing from the point of view of the tangible reality of things. As a field where tradition is centuries old, legal scholarship offers an important domain of investigation for the contemporary world.
Yet all the branches of modern law were not equally developed. There is no better example of unequal development than the richness of the field of constitutional law and the virgin territory constituted by economic and financial law.
Theory of government in Islam has ranked high in the concerns of scholars and ‘ulama, and solid work has been produced in this area of modern Islamic thought.
Constitutional theory from an Islamic perspective is important for modern times, particularly in the case of Iran, where the turmoil between 1905 and 1911 was very much enmeshed with the fate of the mashruta. The mashruta, being the’Dean of Middle Eastern Constitutions’,
has been the subject of much scholarship.
The constitutional debate has not of course been limited to Iran, but the Iranian events enhanced the received version of government and resource management in a way which shifted the debate to the Shi’i world in an unprecedented manner.
Much work has been produced on government and economics from the legal point of view in Cairo, as well as in the Maghreb. However these works never became truly important, because they never had the chance of finding some practical application from inside the power of a state. It is only retrospectively that Khumaini’s wilayat al-faqih became significant.
Its relevance in effect, and the interest of scholarship in it, were actualised only when its author suddenly seized power. Until 1979, the Iranian leader’s reflections on Islamic government represented one pamphlet amongst many others.
But things are not so simple. The dialectic of a text and of an upheaval that claims it as intellectual foreboding and basis does not permit a single answer. The French rhyme of the 1789 Revolution about’stumbling because it was Voltaire and Rousseau’s fault’ expresses well the one side of this difficult dialectic.
The song claims it was because of the revolutionary thought of the philosophes that the revolution took place. But, on the other side of the dialectic, would the Social Contract be anything more than an Utopia without Robespierre’s actualisation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau ?
All other matters remaining equal, the Iranian Revolution offers a similar dialectic. Khumaini’s lectures would have passed relatively unnoticed, had Khumaini not come to power in Tehran. But neither would the revolution in Iran have taken the same constitutional form, without the blueprint of the Ayatollah’s lectures. It may even be suggested that the revolution in Iran would not have taken place without Khumaini’s lectures, the audience which paid attention to them, and the various circles which discussed and elaborated on his theory and tactics.
To carry the comparison with the philosophes further, it is suspected that a Rousseau never comes on his own. Who came with Khumaini? This is where the relevance of Shi’i thought as a whole becomes logically compelling. The action was not restricted to a single individual. Beyond the immediate persona of Khumaini, many protagonists prepared the intellectual terrain, and the case of Shari’ati comes naturally to mind as a prime example. But Shari’ati was no jurist, and the function of Shari’ati’s texts was mainly cultural.
Khumaini’s acolytes stemmed from a different background, which was legal both in its formation and its expression. Hence the relevance of Shi’ism. Khumaini is a Shi’i’a/zra, a mujtahid. It is in the legal circles in which he and his colleagues were educated that the investigation will yield up the clues to the Iranian constitutional and economic order.
In the Islamic Renaissance as a whole, it is important to bring some perspective to Khumaini by putting him in the wider perspective of the milieu of which he was part. This milieu is rooted in the law colleges of the Shi’i world, most prominent of which was Najaf in the South of Iraq. It is in Najaf that the Islamic legal renewal took place in the 1960s and 1970s. In Najaf, Khumaini himself was one scholar among many.
For a long time, and until he emerged in the light of the Paris exile in the fall of 1978, Khumaini had remained more or less at the periphery. Despite his access to the position of Ay at Allah (literally the sign of God, the highest position in the Shi’i legal hierarchy), he was not an innovative jurist by the standards of Shi’i scholarship. Khumaini has little or nothing to say about banking or economics and, even in constitutional law, his main contribution in the Najaf lectures of 1970 was too polemical to offer any significant watershed for the field. Khumaini must be understood as a part, albeit important, of a larger and deeper wave, which is in essence constituted by the’ Shi’i international’ formed by the teachers and graduates of the Iranian and Iraqi law colleges.
There was in the Shi’i world a man of much higher intellectual calibre than Khumaini, a man whom Khumaini acclaimed, upon his execution by the Iraqi Ba’th party in April 1980, as’the prize of Islamic universities’:
Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr.
Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr: a bio-bibliographical presentation
A decade ago, it would have probably still been necessary to defend the choice of a’alim who was completely unknown in the Western world, and who, for a few scholars in the Middle East, merely meant a book, Iqtisaduna (Our Economic System), and a tragic existence which ended in execution in obscure circumstances in Iraq.
The picture in the late 1980s has radically changed, as the reputation of Sadr, by now well established among his followers currently in exile (mostly in Iran), has crossed the Mediterranean towards Europe and the United States. In 1981, Hanna Batatu had already drawn attention in an article in The Middle East Journal in Washington to the importance of Sadr for the underground Shi’i movements in Iraq.
In 1984 Iqtisaduna was translated, in part, into German, with a long introduction on the Shi’i’alim by a young German orientalist.
It soon became impossible to ignore his importance in the revival of Islamic political movements, in Iraq, in the Shi’i world, and in the Muslim world at large. A comparative book on the Islamic movements put Sadr centre stage in relation to Iraq.
Then acknowledgment came in Israel,
and in France, where a well-informed new journal on the Middle Eastern scene consecrated a long dossier to Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr in 1987.
Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr was born, according to his Arab biographers,
in 25 Dhu al-Qi’da 1353/1 March 1935 in Kazimiyya, Iraq, to a family famous in the Shi’i world for its learning. His great-grandfather Sadr ad-Din al-’Amili (d. 1264/1847) was brought up in the Southern Lebanese village of Ma’raka, then emigrated to study in Isfahan and Najaf, where he was buried.
His grandfather Isma’il was born in Isfahan in 1258/1842, moved in 1280/1863 to Najaf then Samarra’, where he is said to have replaced al-Mujaddid ash-Shirazi in the local hauza (Circle of Shi’i scholars). He died in Kazimiyya 1338/1919. His son Haydar, the father of Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr, was born in Samarra’ in 1309/1891, and studied under his father and under Ayat Allah al-Ha’iri al-Yazdi in Karbala. He died in Kazimiyya in 1356/1937, leaving a wife, two sons and a daughter. Though a relatively well-known marja’, he seems to have died penniless.’The family, until more than a month after [his] death, were still unable to secure their daily bread, kanu ha’irin fi luqmat al-’aysh.’
The’international’ scholarly background, and the relative poverty into which Sadr was born, are the two important elements which determined the context of Sadr’s upbringing. The economic hardship that the family faced upon the early death of Haydar as-Sadr came to Muhammad Baqer when he was still an infant.
Other members of his family looked after his education, and he grew up under the supervision of his uncle on his mother’s side,
Murtada Al Yasin, and of his older brother, Isma’il (1340/1921-1388/1968).
In Kazimiyya, Muhammad Baqer went to a primary school called Muntada an-Nashr, where, according to reports of schoolmates, he established himself early on as a subject of interest and curiosity to his teachers,’ so much so that some students took to imitating him in his walk, speech and manner of sitting in class’.
Post mortem descriptions are often eulogistic, and must be taken with circumspection. Against the testimonies of these panegyrics, there is unfortunately no material for contrast, since the government in Iraq does not even acknowledge the existence of Sadr, let alone his intellectual or political achievements. One is therefore limited to the texts themselves, and to the hagiographies of students and followers close to the deceased’alim. However unlikely this may be, several reports mention, for example, that Sadr wrote a first treatise at age eleven.’Abd al-Ghani al-Ardabili, quoted in Ha’iri’s biography, refers to this book as a treatise on logic.
The earliest published work that can be traced dates however from 1955.
This study, an analysis on the episode of Fadak and its significance in Shi’i history, shows great maturity in the young scholar’s thoughts in terms of method and substance. The content however betrays a sectarian Shi’i tone which soon disappeared from Sadr’s language, until it came back to the fore at the time of the confrontation with the Ba’th in the late 1970s.
In 1365/1945, the family moved to Najaf, where Sadr would remain for the rest of his life. The importance of Najaf had already been established in the twenties as the city and its’ulama emerged as the central focus of resistance against the British invasion.
A lull followed after a relative defeat against the King in 1924, when major jurists took the route of exile, but most returned a few years later to resume their study and teaching away from political turmoil.
The picture changed radically in the 1950s, as the quietism of the mujtahids, instructed by their inability to stand up to the confrontation with Baghdad, received a serious challenge in the years leading to the 1958 Revolution from an unsuspected quarter, the Communists.
The Communist challenge to the’ulama received the attention of one of the most prominent leaders in Najaf, Muhammad Husayn Kashif al-Ghita’.
Kashif al-Ghita’ greeted in 1953 the American and British ambassadors in the city with complaints about the Western shortsighted attitude to the Middle East. Western policy, he explained to them, was responsible for the fertile ground left open to the development of Communism. This was due to Western support for the Zionist presence in Palestine, and to the government in Baghdad which allowed the perpetuation of the dire poverty of the people and’ulama.
Sadr found himself in the midst of a bitter intellectual confrontation between traditional Najaf and the Communists, and his world view was formed with this twofold intellectual background: a Socialist-Communist call prevailing in the whole of the Middle East, which permeated the concern in his writings with the’ social question’ ;
and the traditional education of the’ulama, including the relatively strict structure of their hierarchy.
More will be said below of the classical education in Najaf in the 1950s and 1960s, because of the importance of the colleges in the constitutional system of the Shi’i world, and the analysis of Iqtisaduna will show how Sadr tried to counter the communist appeal to redress the’social balance’. The constitutional section will also try to use significant aspects of Sadr’s early and late life as a contrasting example of the Shi’i mujtahids’ hierarchy. In the remainder of this section, the system offered by Sadr’s works will be introduced by a rapid overview of his prolific production, against the developments on the Iraqi scene as perceived from Najaf.
The strict, more traditional dimension of Sadr’s works appears in several publications which span his life. Most conspicuous are his books on the jurisprudential discipline of usul al-fiqh, of which two samples can be considered. One sample belongs to the early years of Najaf, where Sadr wrote an introduction to the history and main characteristics of the discipline, al-Ma’alim al-Jadida fil-Usul
This book, which became widely used for introductory teaching at Najaf, was published in 1385/1964. It remains one of the more interesting and accessible works in the field.
Sadr himself authored more complicated usul works. In 1397/1977, the first tome of a series of four volumes on Him (the science of) al-usul, which were destined to prepare the students for the higher degree of bahth al-kharej (graduate research), appeared in Beirut and Cairo.
Sadr suggests that he prepared these works to facilitate the task of students, who were otherwise subject to the’pressure in the language’
of the four basic works in use for over a half century in Najaf.
Al-Ma’alim al-Jadida and the Durus series represent the didactic side of Sadr’s interest in usul al-fiqh. They were intended for the apprentice’alim who would find the direct approach to the requirements necessary before bahth al-kharej too difficult, and to the lay person generally interested in the overview of the discipline. But Sadr also wrote more advanced works in usul, some of which were published posthumously. Most of these advanced works were in the form of notes taken by his students. This is the case of Kazim al-Husayni al-Ha’iri, who compiled a first volume of Mabaheth al-Usul in 1407/1987,
and of one of Sadr’s favourite disciples, Mahmud al-Hashimi, who assembled the section of Sadr’s lectures on Ta’arud al-Adilla ash-Shar’iyya in a book published in 1977.
The works on usul being traditionally student compilations of the lecturers’ notes, there is little doubt that many of Sadr’s classes must have been recorded, and there will probably appear more usul works by Sadr in the future. Biographical sources also mention a first volume in a series entitled Ghayat al-Fikr fi Ilm al-Usul (The highest thought in the science of usul),
and it is doubtful that the entire works of Sadr in this field, which he started teaching in Najaf on the higher kharej level in 1378/1958
will ever be completely recovered.
Akin to these difficult works are Sadr’s more general investigations in jurisprudence (fiqh), and in logic and philosophy.
The interest in these two areas stems from various concerns. The interest in logic was part of the exercise in usul, with a more universal dimension which was meant to offer a response to the same discipline in the West. The main work in this domain is Sadr’s al-Usus al-Mantiqiyya lil-Istiqra
Sadr tries to take on the field of logic on its own terms, and al-Usus al-Mantiqiyya is filled with references to Russell and to mathematical symbols and equations, leading up to the revelation of the’true objective’ of the work:’to prove... that the logical bases on which are built all the scientific conclusions derived from observation and experience are the very logical bases on which is built the conclusion on the evidence of a creator and organiser of this world... This conclusion, as any other scientific conclusion, is inductive in its nature.’
This work is actually part of the larger system which Sadr was trying to construct on the basis of Islam, and the dabbling in logic with al-Usus al-Mantiqiyya, as well as with other smaller contributions,
was perhaps the least successful achievement of the system, for Sadr was not well equipped to take on such arcane discipline. It must be noted none the less that the display of technical terms in Arabic is rather remarkable in a field where even terms-of-art are still in the making.
Sadr is better known for his work on philosophy, Falsafatuna, which has recently been translated into English.
How much the substance of Falsafatuna has enriched the philosophical debate in the Muslim world, and whether the work is up to par with the great philosophers in history, is doubtful. The book bears the imprint of the pressing conditions which produced it. Sadr is said to have completed the research and writing in less than a year.
In some passages where the authentic Islamic tradition in philosophy surfaces, however, the book reveals the diversity and originality of Sadr’s mind. An example drawn from a parallel adapted by Sadr from Mulla Sadra Shirazi (the famous Iranian philosopher, author of al-Asfar al-Arba’a, d. 1640) will give an idea of both the constraints of Sadr’s philosophical system and its relative originality.
It is now well established that Falsafatuna was written in 1959 in reaction to the growing Communist tide in Iraq, particularly among the more disenfranchised Shi’is.
Sadr’s first purpose was to stem the tide by offering a better understanding and a closer look at Marxism’s own system and terminology. Falsafatuna appears as a detailed critique, from an Islamic point of view, of the most sophisticated expression of materialist philosophy available then in the Arab world. An appendix to the first edition of the book reveals Sadr’s Marxist sources.
For a Shi’i mujtahid, the effort is remarkable, but the longer term prospects of a book based on a Stalinistcum-Politzerian dialectical materialism were doomed. Reading Falsafatuna now gives a distinct flavour of a de’passe language. What appears to be more interesting than the struggle over the Engels and Stalin philosophical classics of the 1950s (in their Arabic version) is the use in contrast, from time to time, of the philosophical categories of a thinker of Mulla Sadra’s stature.
The use of Mulla Sadra’s haraka jawhariyya is most patent in the chapter of Falsafatuna dealing with’the movement of development’.
This chapter typically opens with two quotes from Stalin and Engels on the superiority of Marxist philosophy (dialectical materialism) in its approach to nature as a developing process of contradictions. The quotation sets dialectical materialism in contrast to the idealist school of philosophy, which considers nature in its fixed, unevolving and unevolved form.
First, Sadr points out the fallacy, in the Marxist approach, of impoverishing the philosophical tradition:’ As if the poor metaphysicist had been shorn of all types of understanding... and came not to feel like anybody else... the ways of change and transformation in the world of nature’.
Greek history, says Sadr, has always been mindful of the concept of development in nature. It was never a question for the philosophical debate among the Greeks whether nature develops or not. The debate, with Zeno on the one hand, and the Aristotelian school on the other, was between the first school’s emphasis on stages of transformation which carry the object through several discrete phases, and Aristotle’s emphasis on movement as a gradualist realisation of the potentiality of the object. This Aristotelian emphasis on the development in nature by the realisation of potentialities was refined by Mulla Sadra’s concept of haraka jawhariyya.
For Sadr, the concept of motion in the universe received a deeper treatment by Mulla Sadra through an analysis of causality which rests on the concept of development. Mulla Sadra introduced’a general theory of movement and proved philosophically that movement... does not only affect the manifestations of nature and its surface epiphenomena’. It goes deeper to the evolution at the heart of nature and its essentialist motion (haraka jawhariyya). This is because the surface movement in its outward manifestations, in that its meaning is renewal and waste, must also have a direct cause which is itself a renewed and unfixed matter, since the causality of fixed matters is itself fixed, and the causality of the changing and renewed is changing and renewed. There can be no fixed direct cause to movement. Otherwise the elements of movement would never come to waste, but stay stagnant and motionless.
Sadr tries to show that the idea of contradiction in the dialectics of Communism is redundant:
Motion in its dialectical understanding rests on the basis of contradiction, and the opposition of contradictions. These conflicts and contradictions are the inner force which pushes movement and creates development. In contrast to this, our philosophical understanding rests on a notion of movement which is considered a course [of passing] from degree to a corresponding degree, without these corresponding degrees ever meeting in one specific stage of the course of the movement.
This example taken from Falsafatuna gives an idea of Sadr’s arguments and the marshalling of’Islamic philosophy’ in the work. Without assessing the validity of the proposed Islamic system, it is sufficient to say that its subject matter and first raison d’etre is negative, and this underlying concern weakens the work, although it proved no doubt very valuable to the opposition to Communist ideology in the Iraq of the early 1960s. Falsafatuna is so obsessed with Marxist categories that its Islamic language becomes affected by it. In hindsight, of course, criticism is easy: Stalin, Politzer and even Engels’ arguments have long become out of fashion in philosophical circles, and their decay has negatively affected Sadr’s philosophical treatise itself, which accorded them an importance they do not deserve.
Falsafatuna remains a good example of Sadr’s comprehensive efforts to build a full Islamic system of thought. As in the works of logic, the test of time has weakened the arguments, but both efforts remain a unique example of Sadr’s diversity of thought. Little in them results from the mujtahid tradition, and this is perhaps why they do not appear to be as original and authentic as the other treatises, in which the professionalism of Sadr could emerge more forcefully.
In fiqh works by contrast, Sadr was producing what he was expected to produce, namely works of a general legal nature which represent his position as a mujtahid. It might be surprising to some extent to find Sadr to be different from other established mujtahids in this respect, who, unlike him, have all tried to offer a comprehensive work offiqh embracing their vast legal knowledge of Shi’i law.
The absence of such a risala lamaliyya in his case is attributed to his young age. Sadr was not fifty when he was executed. But there are signs of a work of that nature in his commentary on Muhsin al-Hakim’s two volumes Minhaj as-Salihin in 1976 and I980,
which were probably completed in the early 1970s, as well as in his three volumes of comments on the nineteenth-century classic by Muhammad Kazem at-Tabataba’i (d. 1327/1919), al-’Urwa al-Wuthqa.
More importantly, Sadr did release the first volume of a comprehensive work of fiqh of his own, al-Fatawa al-Wadiha, which he meant as a risala’amaliya.
This book was the first in a series which was interrupted, and deals merely with the libadat section of fiqh.
The fiqh works can be said to depart little from the tradition, and one cannot see easily how much innovation could be developed in commentaries on works of such respected figures as Hakim and Tabataba’i. But the Fatawa Wadiha includes an interesting introductory chapter,
which reveals Sadr’s readiness to depart from the tradition, even in such established schemes as the century-old dichotomy between Hbadat and mu’amalat. This departure from the traditional classification is presented as follows:
The rules of the shari’a, despite their interconnection, can be divided into four categories :
(1)’Ibadat, i.e. purity, prayer, fasting, religious retreats (i’tikaf), hajj, lumra (hajj outside the holy month), and repentances (kaffarat).
(2) Property law (annual), which is two kinds:
(a) Public property, by which we mean any property dedicated to a public interest. It includes zakat and khums, which, despite the fact of their being acts of worship (‘ibadatayn), have a salient financial aspect. Public property also includes kharaj and anfal etc. The analysis in this part revolves around the types of public property and the rules related to each and to their expenditure.
(b) Private property, by which we mean the property of individuals. The analysis of its rules is twofold:
one: The legal causes for possession or acquisition of a private right whether the property is tangible, (‘ayni) i.e. outside (kharij) property, or an obligation (fidh-dhimma), which is property which involves the obligation of another person such as a guarantee or a fine, gharama. Into this domain enter the rules of revival (ihya’), possession, hunting, servitudes (taba’iyya), inheritance, guarantee, fines, including secured contracts, assignments (hawala), loans, insurance, and others.
two: The rules on the disposing of money, including sale, arbitration (sulk), companies, trust (zvaqf), and similar transactions.
(3) Private behaviour (suluk khass), by which we mean any personal (shakhsi) behaviour of an individual, a behaviour which is not directly related to property, and which does not form part of man’s worship of his Creator. The rules of private behaviour are twofold :
(a) Those related to the regulation of the relationship between man and woman. They include marriage, repudiation (talaq), khul’, mubara’a, zihar, ila’ [variations in the law of divorce], etc.
(b) Those related to the regulation of private behaviour in other spheres, including the rules concerning food, drink, clothing, accommodation, social behaviour (adab al-mu’ashara), the rules on nidhr (religious vow), yamin (oath), promise, hunting, animal slaughter, enjoining the good and forbidding the evil, and other similar rules, interdictions, and injunctions.
(4) Public (amm) behaviour, by which we mean the behaviour of the ruler iwali alamr) in the sphere of government, justice, war, and various international relations. Included are the rules of public governance ial-wilaya al-’amma), justice, testimonies, penal provisions (hudud), jihad (‘holy’ war), etc.
This text is remarkable for the comprehensive structuring of the legal system along lines which differ significantly from the traditional way. All the substantive rules are mentioned, but the libadat-muiamalat dichotomy gives way to a more sophisticated and more logical system, which excludes even traditional’ibadat rules, such as the’pillar’ of Islam, zakat, from their accepted ambit. By re-ordering traditional categories into a consistent taxonomy that excludes zakat and khums from the Hbadat category, and by devising a’ private’ sphere section to account for rules of marriage described only a year earlier within the mu’amalat genre,
the new scheme insulates’ibadat, and opens the way to re-ordering the century-old legal classification.
Sadr never completed al-Fatawa al-Wadiha, and Islamic law will probably remain bereft of an authority of his stature to affect and re-adapt the traditional scheme. But his legal expertise was not confined to re-ordering the usul and fiqh disciplines. Where he was most innovative appears in the two areas which form the bulk of the present book, the field of economics, including an important work on Islamic banking,
and the constitution.
Before turning to the details of his contributions in this field, the other works of Sadr’s encyclopaedic production will be mentioned.
Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr worked on Qur’anic exegesis and on history, and some of his publications in this field are remarkably rich. This is the case of the lectures given in 1979-80 on the’objective exegesis of the Qur’an’, where a combination of historical, political, and methodological remarks on the text and significance of the Qur’an are at work.
Similarly, the more historical analyses of Sadr -from Fadak fit-Tarikh to his lectures on the Twelve Imams, the 1977 pamphlets on Shi’ism, the various articles on Islamic education, on the Qur’an, and on the political tasks at various stages of the development of the opposition at Najaf-all offer rich insights into the general system on which Sadr was working from his earlier days and into the Iraqi world of hopes and constraints.
But Sadr, like Khumaini, was not on his own. There will appear in the course of this essay several other names from Najaf, of other scholars from the Shi’i world, and also of other (non-Shi’i) luminaries who are important to the Renaissance of Islamic law. Before turning to their contributions, the political context of Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr and his companions will show the extent of the stakes at play.
The political context
The present work is primarily an investigation into the components of the intellectual Renaissance of Najaf, with Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr as one of its most prominent thinkers. The other striking feature of the renewal was its political dimension, and the close interplay between what happened in the obscure alleys and dusty colleges of Najaf, and the Middle East world at large. When Sadr was executed, with his sister Bint al-Huda, probably on 8 April, 1980, the event was a culminating point for the Islamic challenge in Iraq. With Sadr’s death, Iraq lost its most important Islamic activist.
The Islamic movement based in Iraq can be followed through the three stages of its intellectual and political development. Back in the late 1950s, the religious circles of Najaf were essentially reactive. As previously mentioned, when Falsafatuna was published in 1959, it coincided with the anxious calls by the Najaf’ulama, including Muhsin al-Hakim and Sadr’s uncle Murtada Al Yasin, to reject the communist appeal.
The silence of the’ulama until that date was itself a legacy of twentieth-century Iraqi history. The last time the’ulama had exercised an active political opposition was in 1923-4, a few years after the great Iraqi revolt of 1920. Then the most famous leaders of Najaf and Karbala went into exile after their confrontation with King Faisal and the British representatives who ruled Iraq. Except for Shaikh Mahdi al-Khalisi, who died in Persian exile in 1925, most returned to Iraq a few years later, and paid with silence the price of their reinsertion. Political mutism remained for three decades, while Shi’i integration in the new Nation-State was proceeding slowly but surely. But in 1959, with the’ulama’s audience at an all-time low, the leaders of Najaf and Karbala faced the danger of complete marginalisation as they were threatened into oblivion by the inroads of communism into the fabric of their followers. At the same time, their general perception of’Abd al-Karim Qasem, who sometimes relied on the Communist wave to strengthen his own power, was inimical. For the’ulama, the combination of suspicion towards central rule and the spectre of communism turned direct involvement in politics into a condition for survival. In the reaction to communism and Qasem, Pandora’s box was opened.
That first reactive phase of the late 1950s was followed by a period of hesitation and consolidation. Through the following decade of turbulent coups and rapid changes of regimes, an active wing of the’ulama pursued its political course, both intellectually and organisationally. The competition between Najaf and Baghdad took many forms. Several documents and testimonies show the efforts in Najaf, Karbala, and Baghdad to heighten awareness of the’ulama’s assertive bid in the population at large.
In addition to their hostility to Qasem for being too soft on Communists, the attempt of central rule to diminish further the mujtahids’ sway on sensitive issues like matrimonial and family law by implementing an integrated Code of Personal Status was received in Najaf with dismay, even by the well-established and relatively apolitical ‘ulama. The role of the old Muhsin al-Hakim in the opposition to Qasem’s Code is paramount, and it took the form of a full-length critique of the 1959 Code by one of his close collaborators, who was himself the scion of an important family of scholars from Najaf.
In the case of Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr, the publication of Falsafatuna and Iqtisaduna propelled him as the foremost theoretician of the Islamic Renaissance. The philosophical and economic alternative system was to be completed by a social and institutional leg. In Falsafatuna and Iqtisaduna, a third important volume was promised, which was to be called, on the same pattern, Mujtama’una (Our [Islamic] Society).
The book was never published, and it is doubtful it was ever written. Instead, we have a number of articles by Sadr on societal themes, which were published in al-Adwa’ a journal published at Najaf, and collected after his death as Risalatuna (Our Message) .
The full series of the journal itself is not available, but Sadr’s editorials in Risalatuna do not betray great originality, and his later articles of the time of the Iranian revolution proved to be of much greater significance. But the mere existence of an openly political journal like al-Adwa’ in the hitherto sedate Najaf was significant. The reconstitution of the picture of collaborators to the journal is also enlightening for the network of leaders which was then being formed in Southern Iraq.
Two other authors in al-Adwa? were Bint al-Huda and Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah. On the collaboration of Bint al-Huda, we have the testimony of her Collected Works, also a posthumous publication, which reproduces some of the articles she originally published in i960 and in 1961.
’ It is with great pleasure’, she wrote,’ that I meet my female audience at the beginning of each month.’
Bint al-Huda was then in charge of the’feminist rubric’, in which she developed, along with her many novels, a vision of the Muslim woman in the ideal Islamic society. A book on Bint al-Huda published in 1985 gives more precise indications on the date of al-Adwa?. Here the first issue, which features Bint al-Huda’s contribution, is dated 9 June 1960.
Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, a prominent scholar and leader of the Shi’i community in Lebanon, is another fellow of the small Najaf circle, and he used to write’the second editorial’ of al-Adwa? every month.
Some of his contributions were also collected in books which were published much later.
Fadlallah recalls the enthusiasm of the Adwa? period, but also the pressure exercised by the Shi’i establishment which, in combination with the concern of the central government, forced the discontinuation of the journal.
Al-Adwa’ was discontinued towards 1963-4, but the testimony of a collection entitled Min Hadi an-Najaf (from the guidance of Najaf), which was published in the second half of the 1960s, shows how the network of militant’ulama proceeded on the margins of the Najaf establishment.
The books of the collection extant include discussions on themes like the political significance of pilgrimage, the misreadings of the Qur’an by the Orientalists, Islamic literature, the socio-political legacy of the Revolt of Imam Husayn, and the importance of fasting as a symbolic stance against injustice and wrong doing. These works were authored by scholars from Najaf who were destined to political prominence in the 1980s, such as Muhammad Mahdi Shamseddin (the head of the Lebanese Higher Shi’i Council), Mahmud al-Hashimi and Muhammad Baqer al-Hakim (the leaders of the Tehran-based Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq).
Yet the political involvement of the new generation of ‘ulama was constrained by the wariness of older and better established figures, who had much sympathy for the new enthusiasm, were grateful for its success in countering Communist influence, but were also aware of the dangers of unbridled militancy. Testimonies from militant circles shed light on the hesitations of the older’ulama (most prominent amongst whom was Ayat Allah Abul-Qasem al-Khu’i) who, as in Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah’s recollections, succeeded in the mid-1960s to put a curb on political activities. But as the central government was getting increasingly authoritarian and sectarian, the hesitation slowly gave way to the ascendancy of activism.
Then came the third phase, which started when the Ba’th arrived to power in the Summer of 1968. In the now open confrontation, which ended up in the death of Sadr and the destruction of all forms of worldly activity in Najaf, a series of strikes, demonstrations, arrests and repression increased the tension until break point. In the recollection of the protagonists, the first trigger came in the form of a confrontation between Najaf and Baghdad over the establishment of a University at Kufa. The project of the University had been part of the great expansion in Iraq of the educational system, and the active work towards the eradication of illiteracy and the development of higher education. The leaders of Najaf, who saw the establishment of a University in the neighbouring historic city of Kufa as a worthwhile opportunity, pressed the issue forward and were successful in raising the necessary funds for the university from wealthy Shi’i businessmen.
The Ba’th government saw otherwise. Administrative stalling on the Kufa project was accompanied by the increased curb on political activity throughout the country. In retrospect, it is clear that the central government of Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr and Saddam Hussein could not tolerate a project which rendered close control by the repressive apparatus difficult, but its rejection of the project could not be plainly directed against an educational endeavour. The way for a repressive government, for whom the peripheral threat clearly consisted in a Southern Shi’i and a Northern Kurdish one, was to attack the circles of Najaf on the charge of an’American-Zionist conspiracy’. Mahdi al-Hakim, the son of the Great Ayat Allah Muhsin, was the first target of the attack. With Muhammad Bahr al-’Ulum, another close collaborator of his father, a life of underground and exile was beginning. This took place in late 1968 and 1969.
Muhsin al-Hakim was understandably angry, and efforts to patch up the quarrel between him and the Ba’th proved useless. He was reportedly’on strike’ when the government chose to send to Lebanon in 1969 a lalim of the Kashif al-Ghita’ family as’Najaf representative’, to the great dismay of some Lebanese Shi’i circles.
The stage for the next two decades was set.
Governmental packing of Najaf was one way, which continued well into the Iran-Iraq war with the same’Ali Kashif al-Ghita’ presiding over numerous’Islamic popular meetings’ held in Baghdad. Dividing between South and North was another successful plank. There was great resentment in Najaf over the rapprochement between Saddam Hussein and the Kurdish leader Mulla Mustafa Barzani, which culminated in the March 1970 agreement:
Muhsin al-Hakim and other personalities had expressed dismay towards the heavy-handed treatment of the Kurds by the central government in the preceding years, and the 1970 Agreement was perceived as an ungrateful let down at a time when the Ba’th and the ulama’ were at daggers drawn. When in June 1970 crowds assembled in Najaf to mourn the death of Muhsin and to voice their disbelief in the accusation that Mahdi was an agent of the CIA,
Muhammad Bahr al-’Ulum and Mahdi al-Hakim were in exile and unable to return to Iraq for the mourning ceremonies.
From 1970 onwards troubles recurred yearly against the Iraqi government in Najaf. Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr was arrested several times, and subjected to interrogation and brutal treatment. In the last such instance, in June 1979, as he was preparing to go at the head of a delegation to greet Ay at Allah Khumaini in Tehran, he was detained and confined to house arrest. He remained under house arrest until his transfer to Baghdad on 5 April 1980. That date coincided with the second attack on high governmental officials in one week. On 1 April 1980, Tariq’Aziz, who was then a prominent Ba’thist (but not yet foreign minister), was the target of a grenade attack on the occasion of a speech at Mustansariyya University in Baghdad.’Aziz was wounded but survived. Students in the rally were not so lucky and, on the occasion of their mourning at the Baghdad Waziriyya University on 5 April, a grenade was again hurled into the crowd. This was for the government the signal for the final confrontation with what they considered the root of his problems. Najaf was invested in the evening, and Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr transferred to Baghdad. Najaf lore recalls that Sadr escaped abduction and imprisonment back in June thanks to Bint al-Huda’s rallying the mourners gathered at the sahn (‘Ali’s mosque in Najaf) with the cry’ your imam is being kidnapped’. This time, the government secured the silence of Sadr’s sister by taking her along to Baghdad, and by executing her with her brother. Muhammad Baqer’s body was reported to have been buried at dawn on 9 April in the presence of relatives from Najaf; thus the presumption of his death a day earlier. But many questions remain unanswered.
Thus ended the build-up of the confrontation inside Iraq between Najaf and Baghdad. The assassination was the focal point for a renewed struggle, which had now extended to the whole Middle Eastern stage. In Lebanon, Kuwait, Iran, Pakistan, India, the Sudan, there fell in the following decade several victims of the war between Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr’s friends and Saddam Hussein’s supporters.
At a more global level, the confrontation turned into Armageddon, as the Ba’th government first fuite en avant came in the Iran-Iraq war, which was started with the invasion of Iran five months later, on 22 September 1980.
Then came the invasion of Kuwait, and, in the wake of the Iraqi rout, the Iraqi intifada (revolt) of March 1991, where pictures of Sadr were paraded in the cities of the South during the brief period when they were freed from brutal rule.
Had history gone back full circle? Only time will tell. But the emergence of the Islamic movement in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon cannot be understood without the network which originated and developed in the city of Najaf. A glance at the most prominent figures of the movement in the late 1970s and in the 1980s will show that, without exception, they had studied, resided, or visited their colleagues in Najaf.
With such a complex web of personal and institutional relations as was woven in the Iraqi city, many developments in the Middle East since the access to power in Iran of the most famous Najaf resident, Ruhullah al-Khumaini, bore in a direct or indirect way the imprint of Najaf. The internal Iraqi, Lebanese, and Iranian developments, as well as the international developments which came in the wake of the establishment of the Islamic Republic, were influenced by the legacy of the network.
This, in a nutshell, is the political background of the Renaissance in Najaf. Since the episode of the University of Kufa, the scene of the confrontation has changed into unprecedented globalism. The universal character of the Islamic political challenge started in Najaf would however not have been, without the peculiar intellectual and cultural dimension which it carries. In the midst of dramatic events which were increasingly assuming a global reach, it is important to bear in mind that the Najaf Renaissance was an intellectual phenomenon, involving primarily jurists and legal production. This is the less known dimension of the turbulent Middle East, which is the subject of this book.
At the centre of the cultural renewal and the shaping of the system was’ the Shi’i International’, itself the product of the networks of Najaf. In Najaf, Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr, the prize of the Universities as Ruhullah Khumaini called him posthumously, emerges as the founder of a new constitutional and economic system.
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Author: CHIBLI MALLAT
