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XLbe Semitic Series 
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF 
 
 MUSLIM THEOLOGY, JURISPRUDENCE 
 AND CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY 
 
 By DUNCAN B. MACDONALD, M.A., B.D. 
 
SERIES OF HAND-BOOKS IN SEMITICS 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 JAMES ALEXANDER CRAIG 
 
 PROFESSOR OF SEMITIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURl'.S AND 
 HELLENISTIC CREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 
 
 Recent scientific rescarcli lias stimulated an increasing: in. 
 terest in Semitic studies among sciiolars, students, and tlie 
 serious reading public generally. It has provided us with a 
 picture of a liitlierto unknown civilization, and .1 history of 
 oneof the great branches of the human family. 
 
 The object of the present Series is to slate its results in 
 popularly scientific form. Each work is complete in itself, and 
 the Series, taken as a whole, neglects no phase of the general 
 subject. Each contributor is a specialist in the subject as- 
 signed him, and has been chosen from the body of eminent 
 Semitic scholars in Europe and in this country. 
 
 This Series will be composed of the following volumes : 
 
 I. Hebrews. History and Government. By Professor 
 
 J. F. McCurdy, University o( Toronto, Canada. 
 II. Hebrews. Ethics and Religion. By Professor Archi- 
 bald Duff, Airedale College, Bradford, England. 
 
 \,JSIoii) Ready. 
 
 III. Hebrews. The Social IJJe. By the Rev. Edwnrd 
 
 Day, Springfield, Mass. {Now Ready. 
 
 IV. Babylonians and Assyrians, with introductory chfip- 
 
 ter on the Sumerians. History to the Fall of Baby- 
 lon. By Dr. Hugo Winckler, University of Berlin. 
 
 [/« Press. 
 V. Babylonians AND Assyrians. Religion. By Professor 
 
 J. A. Craig, University of Michigan. 
 VI. Babylonians and Assyrians. Life and Customs. By 
 Professor A. H. Sayce, University of Oxford, England, 
 
 \,Novi Ready, 
 VII. Babylonians and Assyrians. Excavations and Ac- 
 count of Decipherment of Inscriptions. 
 VIII. Syria and Palestine. Early History. By Professor 
 Lewis Bayles Paton, Hartford Thcnlngical Seminary. 
 
 \_Novt) Ready. 
 IX. Development of Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence 
 and Constitutional Theory. By Professor D. B. 
 Macdonald, Hartford Theological Seminary. 
 
 \Now Ready. 
 The following volumes are to be included in the Series, 
 and others may be added : 
 
 X. Phcenicia. History and Government, including 
 
 Colonies, Trade, and Religion. 
 XI. Arabia, Discoveries in, and History and Religion 
 
 until Muhammad. 
 XII. Arabic Literature and Science since Muhammad. 
 XIII. The Influence of Semitic Art and Mythology on 
 Western Nations. 
 
XCbe Semitic Series 
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF 
 
 Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence 
 and Constitutional Theory 
 
 BY 
 
 DUNCAN B. MACDONALD, M.A, B.D. 
 
 SOMETIME SCHOLAR AND FELLOW OF THE UNIVERSITY OF 
 
 GLASGOW ; PROFESSOR OF SEMITIC LANGUAGES IN 
 
 HARTFORD THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 1903 
 
Copyright, 1903, by 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 Fublishedt March, 1903 
 
 mow DIRECTORY 
 
 PHINTINQ AND BOOKBmDINQ COMPAHY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
MEMORI^ 
 MATRIS SACRVM 
 
PREFACE 
 
 It is with verr great diffidence that I send ont this 
 book. Of the lack and need of some text-book of 
 the kind there can be little donbt. From the ed- 
 ucated man who wishes to read with intelligence his 
 " Arabian Xights " to the student of history or of 
 law or of theolc^y who wishes to know how it has 
 gone in such matters with the great Muslim world, 
 there is demand enough and to spare. Still graxer 
 is the difficulty for the growing body of young men 
 who are taking up the study of Arabic. In English 
 or German or French there is no book to which a 
 teacher may send :his pupils for brief guidance on 
 the development of these institutions ; on the devel- 
 opment of law there are only scattered and fragmen- 
 tary papers, and on the development of theolc^ 
 there is practically nothing. But of the difficulty of 
 supplying this need there can be even less doubt. 
 Gk)ldziher could do it fully and completely ; no other 
 Arabist alive could approach the task other than with 
 trepidation. The following pages therefore form a 
 kind of forlorn attempt, a rushing in on the part of 
 one who is sure he is not an angel and is in grave 
 doubt on the question of folly, but who also sees a 
 gap and no great alacrity on the part of his betters 
 toward filling it. One thing, however, I would pre- 
 
VIU PEEFAOB 
 
 mise with emphasis. All the results given here have 
 been reached or verified from the Arabic sources. 
 These sources are seldom stated either in the text or 
 in the bibliography, as the book is intended to be 
 useful to non-Arabists, but, throughout, they lie be- 
 hind it and are its basis. By this it is not meant 
 that the results of this book are claimed as original. 
 Every Arabist will recognize at once from whose 
 wells I have drawn and who have been my mas- 
 ters. Among these I would do homage in the first in- 
 stance to Goldziher ; what Arabist is not deep in his 
 debt ? With Goldziher's influence through books I 
 would join the kindred influence of the living voice 
 of my teacher Sachau. To him I render thanks and 
 reverence now for his kindly sympathy and guid- 
 ance. Others in whose debt I am are Noldeke, 
 Snouck Hurgronje, von Kremer, Lane — many more. 
 Those who are left of these will know their own in 
 my pages and will be merciful to my attempts to 
 tread in their steps and to develop their results. 
 What is my own, too, they will know ; into questions 
 of priority I have no desire to enter. Foot-notes 
 which might have given to each scholar his due have 
 been left unwritten. For the readers of this book 
 such references in so vast a subject would be use- 
 less. Such references, too, would have in the end to 
 be made to Arabic sources. 
 
 More direct help I have to acknowledge on several 
 sides. To the atmosphere and scholarly ideals of 
 Hartford Seminary I am indebted for the possibility 
 of writing such a book as this, so far from the ordi- 
 nary theological ruts. Among my colleagues Professor 
 
PBEFACE is 
 
 Gillett has especially aided me ■with criticism and 
 suggestions on the terminology of scholastic theol- 
 ogy. Dr. Talcott Williams, of Philadelphia, illnmined 
 for me the Idrisid movement in North Africa. One 
 complete sentence on p. 85 I have conveyed from a 
 kindly notice in The Nation of my inaugural lecture 
 on the development of Muslim Jurisprudence. Fi- 
 nally, and above all, I am indebted to my wife for 
 much patient labor in copying and for keen and lu- 
 minous criticism in planning and correcting. With 
 thanks to her this preface may fitly close. 
 
 Dtoican B. Macdonald. 
 
 Habtfokd, December, 1902. 
 
 %* As it has proved impracticable to gire In the body of the 
 book a full transliteration of names and technical terms, the 
 learner is referred for such exact forma to the chronological table 
 and the index. In these hamza and ayn, the long Towels and the 
 emphatic consonants are tmiformly represented, the last by italic. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 FASE 
 
 Introduction 3 
 
 PART I 
 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 OHAPTEB I 
 From Death of Muhammad to Rise of Abbasids 7 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 To Rise of Ayyubids .... .34 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 To Present Situation . .... 50 
 
 PAET II 
 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 To Close of Umattad Period . . . .65 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 To Present Situation ...... 91 
 
Xll CONTENTS 
 
 PAKT III 
 DEVELOPMENT OF THEOLOGY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 FAQE 
 
 To Close of Umattad Period . . . .119 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 To Fodndation of Fatimid Khamfate > . . 153 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 To Triumph of Ash'aritbs in East . . .186 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 Al-Ghazzali 215 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 To Ibn SAB'nf and End of Muwahhids . . . 243 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 To Present Situation 266 
 
 APPENDICES 
 I. Illustrative Documents in Translation . 291 
 
 II. Selected Bibliography 358 
 
 III. Chronological Table 368 
 
 INDEX 373 
 
ERRATA 
 
 Page 30, line 5, for al-Mukanna read al-Muqanna. 
 " 86, 1. 19, for first Khalifa read second Khalifa. 
 " 301, 1. 26, for tasalsal read tasalsul. 
 " 237, for Mansell read ilansel. 
 " 267, 1. 30, for Haqqari read Hakkari. 
 " 299, 1. 10, for Mushriqs read Musliriks. 
 " 300, 1. 4, for kalimatan ash-shahada read kalima- 
 
 ta-sh-shahada. 
 " 325, 1. 23, for ivihdaniya read luahdaniya. 
 " 339, 1. 11, for ihtiyaz read ihtiyaj. 
 
DEVELOPMENT OF 
 
 MUSLIM THEOLOGY, JURISPRUDENCE, 
 AND CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Is human progress viniry and complexiTT are the 
 
 two eorreliitives i"or:r.i'-g logetier :22e gre.^i: pi\rii:x. 
 Life is manifold, bn: i: is iilso one. So it is sel,i:iii 
 possible, aiii still more seldom aivisable, to drdde a 
 crnlization into departme:::ts ;iiia to a::e:^r.i to ti-aee 
 theii serar.i:e deTelopiue:Lts ; life nowhere can be 
 cm in two with a liatclieu And :iis is emphatioiJlT 
 tme of the civilization of Islam. Its intefle>cnial 
 uni^, for gc>od and for eril. is i:s ontstiuidin;: qoal- 
 itr. It iLiY have solTed the problem of faiili and 
 seienee. as some hcdd ; it mar have cms lied ail 
 thought which is not of faith, ;is many otlei-s hold. 
 However that may be, its life and thought are a 
 unity. 
 
 So, also, with its institutions. It might be possible 
 to tr.ioe the developments of the Ettropean states ont 
 of the dying Boman Eniviie. even to watch the rat- 
 limony of the Chntch grow and again vanish, and 
 yet taie bnt little if any aceonnt of the Cath.^lie 
 tlieology. It might be possible to deal adeonately 
 with the iTTO^^h of that system of tlieolo-gy and yet 
 never t-inch eitier the Soman or the cItlI la*^. evem 
 to leave :nt of our view the canon law itself In 
 Enrope the Stite may role tiie Church, or tLe Clinroh 
 may mle the Stite : or they may stanl iii!e by siie 
 in some—hat inbions amity, supposedly taking no 
 
 3 
 
4 INTItODUOTlON 
 
 account each of the other. But in Muslim countries, 
 Church and State are <mio indissoluljly, iuid until tlie 
 very essence of Islam passes away, that unity caunol 
 be rel.'ixud. The law of the land, too, is, in thocjiy, 
 the law of the Church. In the ();irli<ji- days at least, 
 canon and civil law were one. Thus wo can never 
 say in Islam, " he is a great lawyer ; he, a great 
 theologian ; Ik;, a great statesman." One man may 
 be all three, almost he must be all three, if he is to 
 be any one. The statesman may not j)iactice theol- 
 ogy or law, but his training, in great part, will be 
 that of a theologian and a legist. The theologian- 
 legist may not be a man of action, but ho will be a 
 court of ultimate appeal on the theory of the state. 
 He will pass upon treaties ; decide disputed succes- 
 sions; assign to each his due rank and title. He will 
 tell the Commander of the Faithful hirjiself what he 
 may do and what, by law, lies beyond his reach. 
 
 It was, then, under the pressure of necessity only 
 that the following sketch of the development of Mus- 
 lim thought was divided into three parts. By no 
 possible arrangement did it seem feasible to treat 
 the whole at once. Intolerable confusions and unin- 
 telligible complications would, to all appearance, be 
 the result. As the most concrete and simple side, 
 the development of the state is taken first. Second, 
 on account of the shortness of the course which it 
 ran, comes the development of the legal ideas and 
 schools. Third comes the long and thrice <:i mi pli- 
 cated thread of theological thought. It is for the 
 student to hold firmly in mind that this division is 
 purely mechanical and for convenience only ; that it 
 
I^^TRODtJCTION• 5 
 
 corresponds to little or nothing in tlie real nature of 
 the case. This will imdoubtecUy become clear to 
 him as he proceeds. He mil meet ■with the same 
 names in all three divisions ; he will meet with the 
 same technicalities and the same scholastic system. 
 A treatise on canon law is certainly different from 
 one on theology, but each touches the other at in- 
 numerable points ; their authors may easily be the 
 same ; each will be in great part unintelligible with- 
 out the other. He must then labor to merge these 
 three sections again into one another. His principal 
 helps in this, along with diligent parallel reading, 
 will be the chronological table and the index. In 
 the table he will watch the succession of men and 
 events grouped from all the three sections ; from the 
 index he wiU trace the activities of each man ia these 
 different spheres. The index, too, will give him the 
 technical terms and he will observe their recurrence 
 in historical, legal, and theological theory. Further, 
 it will serve him as a vocabulary when he comes to 
 read technical texts. 
 
 But, again, another warning is necessary. The 
 sketch given here is incomplete, not only in details 
 but in the ground that it covers. Important phases 
 of Muslim law, theology, and state theory are of neces- 
 sity passed over entirely. Thus Babism is not touched 
 at all and the Shi'ite theology and law hardly at all. 
 The Ibadite systems have the merest mention and 
 Turkish and Persian mysticism are equally neglect- 
 ed. For such weighty organizations the Darwish 
 Fraternities are most inadequately dealt with, and 
 Muslim missionary enterprise might well be treated 
 
6 IlSrTEODTJCTION 
 
 at length. Guidance on these and other points the 
 student will seek in the bibliography. It, too, makes 
 no pretence to completeness and consists of selected 
 titles only. But it will serve at least as an introduc- 
 tion and clew to an exceedingly wide field. And it 
 may be well to state here, in so many words, that 
 no work can be done in this field without a reading 
 knowledge of French and German, and no satis- 
 factory work without some knowledge of Arabic. 
 
 And, again, this sketch is incomplete because the 
 development of Islam is not yet over. If, as some 
 say, the faith of Muhammad is a cul-de-sac, it is cer- 
 tainly a very long one ; off it many courts and doors 
 open ; down it many peoples are still wandering. 
 It is a faith, too, which brings us into touching dis- 
 tance with the great controversies of our own day. 
 We see in it, as in a somewhat distorted mirror, the 
 history of our own past. But we do not yet see its 
 end, even as the end of Christianity is not yet in 
 sight. It is for the student, then, to remember that 
 Islam is a present reality and the Muslim faith a 
 living organism, a knowledge of whose laws may be 
 of life or death for us who are in another camp. For 
 there can be little doubt that the three antagonistic 
 and militant civilizations of the world are those of 
 Christendom, Islam, and China. When these are 
 unified, or come to a mutual understanding, then, and 
 only then, will the cause of civilization be secure. 
 To aid some little to the understanding of Islam 
 among us is the object of this book. 
 
PART I 
 ConjStitutional 2Debeio}wnent 
 
 OHAPTEE I 
 
 The death of Muhammad and the problem of the euccession ; the 
 parties ; families of Hashimids, Uraayyads and Abbaeids ; 
 election of Abu Bakr ; nomination of Umar ; his constitution ; 
 election of Uthman ; Umayyads in power ; murder of Uth- 
 man ; origin of Shi'ites ; election of Ali ; civil war ; Mu'a- 
 wiya first Umayyad ; origin of Kharijites ; their reTolts ; 
 Ibadites; development of Shi'ites; al-Husayn at Karbala; 
 different Shi'ite constitutional theories ; doctrine of the hidden 
 Imam ; revolts against Umayyads ; rise of Abbasids ; Umay- 
 yads of Cordova. 
 
 With the death of Muhammad at al-Madina in the 
 year 11 of the Hijra (a.d. 632), the community of 
 Islam stood face to face with three great questions. 
 Of the existence of one they were conscious, at least 
 in its immediate form ; the others lay still for their 
 consciousness in the future. The necessity was upon 
 them to choose a leader to take the place of the 
 Prophet of God, and thus to fix for all time what was 
 to be the nature of the Muslim state. Muhammad 
 had appointed no Joshua ; unlike Moses he had died 
 and given no guidance as to the man who should 
 take up and carry on his work. If we can imagine 
 the people of Israel left thus helpless on the other 
 
8 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 side of the Jordan witli the course of conquest that 
 they must pursue opening before them, we shall have 
 a tolerably exact idea of the situation in Islam when 
 Muhammad dropped the reins. Certainly, the peo- 
 ple of Islam had little conception of what was in- 
 volved in the great precedent that they were about to 
 establish, but, nevertheless, there lies here, in the 
 first elective council which they called, the beginning 
 of all the confusions, rivalries, and uncertainties that 
 were to limit and finally to destroy the succession of 
 the Commanders of the Faithful. 
 
 Muhammad had ruled as an absolute monarch — 
 a Prophet of God in his own right. He had no 
 son; though had he left such issue it is not prob- 
 able that it would have affected the direct result. 
 Of Moses's son we hear nothing till long after- 
 ward, and then under very suspicious circumstances. 
 The old free spirit of the Arabs was too strong, 
 .^ and as in the Ignorance {al-jahiliya), as they called 
 the pre-Muslim age, the tribes had chosen from 
 time to time their chiefs, so it was now fixed that 
 in Islam the leader was to be elected by the people. 
 But wherever there is an election, there there are 
 parties ; and this was no exception. Of such par- 
 ties we may reckon roughly four. There were the 
 Early Believers, who had suffered with Muhammad 
 at Mecca, accompanied him to al-Madina and had 
 fought at his side through all the Muslim campaigns. 
 These were called BluJiajirs, because they had made 
 with him the Hijra or migration to al-Madina. Then 
 there was the party of the citizens of al-Madina, who 
 had invited him to come to them and had promised 
 
EARLY PARTIES 9 
 
 him allegiance. These were called Ansar or Helpers. 
 Eventually we shall find these two factions gi'owing 
 together and forming the one party of the old orig- 
 inal believers and Companions of Muhammad {sahibs, 
 i.e., all those who came in contact with the Prophet 
 as believers and who died in Islam), but at the first 
 they stood apart and there was much jealousy be- 
 tween them. Then, in the third place, there was the 
 party of recent converts who had only embraced 
 Islam at the latest moment when Mecca was capt- 
 ured by Muhammad, and no other way of escape for 
 them was open. They were the aristocratic party of 
 Mecca and had fought the new faith to the last. 
 Thus they were but indifferent believers and were 
 regarded by the others with more than suspicion. 
 Their principal family was descended from a certain 
 Umayya, and was therefore called Umayyad. There 
 will be much about this family in the sequel. Then, 
 fourth, there was growing up a party that might be 
 best described as legitimists ; their theory was that 
 the leadership belonged to the leader, not because he 
 was elected to it by the Muslim community, but be- 
 cause it was his right. He was appointed to it by 
 God as completely as Muhammad had been. This 
 idea developed, it is true, somewhat later, but it de- 
 veloped very rapidly. The times were such as to 
 force it on. 
 
 These, then, were the parties of which account 
 must be taken, but before proceeding to individuals 
 in these parties, it will be well to fix some genea- 
 logical relationships, so as to be able to trace the 
 family and tribal jealousies and intrigues that were 
 
10 CONSTITUTIOlSrAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 SO soon to transfer themselves from the little circle of 
 Mecca and al-Madina and to fight themselves out on 
 the broad field of Muslim history. For, in truth, 
 in the development of no other state have little causes 
 produced such great efi'ects as here. For example, it 
 may be said, broadly and yet truly, that the seclu- 
 sion of Muslim women, with all its disastrous effects 
 at the present day for a population of two hundred 
 millions, runs back to the fact that A'isha, the four- 
 teen-year-old wife of Muhammad, once lost a neck- 
 lace under what the gossips of the time thought were 
 suspicious circumstances. As to the point now in 
 hand, it is quite certain that Muslim history for sev- 
 eral hundred years was conditioned and motived by 
 the quarrels of Meccan families. The accompanying 
 genealogy will give the necessary starting-point. 
 The mythical ancestor is Qurayshj hence " the Qur- 
 aysh," or "Quraysh" as a name for the tribe. With- 
 in the tribe, the two most important families are 
 those of Hashim and Umayya ; their rivalries for the 
 succession of the Prophet fill the first century and a 
 half of Muslim history, and the immediately pre- 
 Islamic history of Mecca is similarly filled with a 
 contest between them as to the guardianship of the 
 Ka'ba and the care of the pilgrims to that sanctuary. 
 Whether this earlier history is real, or a reflection 
 from the later Muslim times, we need not here con- 
 sider. The next important division is that between 
 the families of al- Abbas and Abu Talib, the uncles 
 of the Prophet. From the one were descended the 
 Abbasids, as whose heir-at-law the Sultan of the 
 Ottoman Empire now claims the Khalifate, and from 
 
GENEALOGICAL CHART 
 
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ABU BAKR ; IIMAR 13 
 
 the other the different conflicting lines of Shi'ites, 
 whose inti-icacies we shall soon have to face. 
 
 To return : in this first elective council the choice 
 fell upon Abu Bakr. He "was a man distinguished 
 by his piety and his affection for and close intimacy 
 with Muhammad. He was the father of Muhammad's 
 favorite wife, A'isha, and was some two years young- 
 er than his son-in-law. He was, also, one of the 
 earliest believei-s and it is evident that this, with his 
 advanced age, always respected in ,li-abia, went far 
 to secure his election. Yet his election did not pass 
 off without a struggle in which the elements that 
 later came to absohite schism and revolution :ue 
 plainly visible. The scene, as it can be put together 
 from Arabic historians, is curiously suggestive of the 
 methods of modern politics. As soon as it was as- 
 sm-ed that the Prophet, the hand which had held 
 together all those clashing interests, was really dead, 
 a convention was called of the leaders of the people. 
 There the strife ran so high between the Ansai-, the 
 Mnhajirs jxnd the Muslim aristocrats of the house of 
 Uma} ya, that they almost came to blows. Suddenly 
 in the tumult, Umar, a man of character and decision, 
 '■ rushed the convention " by solemnly giving to Abu 
 Bakr the hand-grasp of fealty. The accomplished 
 fact was recognized — as it has always been in Islam — 
 and on the next day the general mass of the people 
 swore allegiance to the fii'st Khalifa, literally Succes- 
 sor, of Muhammad. 
 
 On his death, in a.h. 13 (a.d. 634^ there followed 
 Umar-. His election passed off quietly. He had 
 been nominated by Abu Bakr and nothing remained 
 
14 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 but for the people to confirm that nomination. 
 There thus entered a second principle — or rather 
 precedent — beside that of simple election. A cer- 
 tain right was recognized in the Khalifa to nomi- 
 nate his successor, provided he chose one suitable 
 and eligible in other respects. Unlike Cromwell in 
 a similar case, Abu Bakr did not nominate one of 
 his own sons, but the man who had been his right 
 hand and who, he knew, could best build up the 
 state. His foresight was proved by the event, and 
 Umar proved the second founder of Islam by his 
 genius as a ruler and organizer and his self-devotion 
 as a man. Through his generals, Damascus and 
 Jerusalem were taken, Persia crushed in the great 
 battles of al-Qadisiya and Nahawand, and Egypt con- 
 quered. He was also the organizer of the Muslim 
 state, and it will be advisable to describe part of his 
 system, both for its own sake and in order to point 
 the contrast with that of his successors. He saw 
 clearly what were the conditions under which the 
 Muslims must work, and devised a plan, evidently 
 based on Persian methods of government, which, for 
 the time at least, was perfect in its way. 
 
 The elements in the problem were simple. There 
 was the flood of Arabs pouring out of Arabia and 
 bearing everything down in their course. These must 
 be retained as a conquering instrument if Islam were 
 to exist. Thus they must be prevented from settling 
 down on the rich lands they had seized, — from be- 
 coming agriculturists, merchants, and so on, and so 
 losing their identity among other peoples. The 
 whole Arab stock must be preserved as a warrior 
 
CONSTITUTION OF UMAK 15 
 
 caste to fight the battles of God. This was secured 
 by a regulation that no new lands should be held by 
 a Muslim. When a country was conquered, the land 
 was left to its previous possessors with the duty of 
 paying a high rent to the Muslim state and, besides, 
 of furnishing fodder and food, clothing and every- 
 thing necessary to the Muslim camp that guarded 
 them. These camps, or rather camp-cities, were scat- 
 tered over the conquered countries and were practi- 
 cally settlements of Muslims in partibus infidelium. 
 The duty of these Muslims was to be soldiers only. 
 They were fed and clothed by the state, and the 
 money paid into the public treasury, consisting of 
 plunder or rents of conquered lands {Miaraj), or the 
 head-tax on all non-Muslims (jizya), was regularly 
 divided among them and the other believers. If a 
 non-Muslim embraced Islam, then he no longer paid 
 the head-tax, but the land which he had previously 
 held was divided among his former co-religionists, 
 and they became responsible to the state. He, on 
 the other hand, received his share of the public mon- 
 eys as regularly distributed. Within Arabia itself, 
 no non-Muslim was permitted to live. It was pre- 
 served, if we may use the expression, as a breeding- 
 ground for defenders of the faith and as a sacred soil 
 not to be polluted by the foot of an unbeliever. It 
 will readily be seen what the results of such a system 
 must have been. The entire Muslim people was re- 
 tained as a gigantic fighting machine, and the con- 
 quered peoples were machines again to furnish it 
 with what was needed. The system was communistic, 
 but in favor of one special caste. The others — the 
 
16 ooNH'rrririroNAL dkvklopmbnt 
 
 (•,()7i(|uorG(l peoides- woro <;inHli<)(l to tlm ^i<nnii1 bo- 
 n(«i,l,li tLoir Imnldiis. Yot tlioy could not H(:ll llxiir 
 limd ami loave tljn country; tlioro wnH no orm to l>iiy 
 it. The MiiMliins would uot, and tlioir fcllow-co- 
 relii^ioiiisiH could not, for with it wont tlm liuid-tax. 
 Such was, in i(.i-i <ishcih;(5, the coiiHtitution of I'lriar, 
 forcvor fiuiiouH in MuHlirri tradition. It hI-<;o<1 for a 
 short finic, and conld not have stood for ii loti^^ fimo; 
 but the cM,iiH(i of its ovortJirow was ]K)lit,icid and not 
 social-economic. With the next Klialifa and the 
 chanf^oH wliich caino with him, it wciif, in gniat ]>iiri, 
 to the f^'round. The choice of Urriiu- to the Khalifate 
 hiul evidently been dictii.iod by a conKiihsintioii of his 
 position as one of the (!;i,rli(!Hi believers and as son in- 
 law of the Pro|iliei. The party of I'iiuly lielieverH had 
 thus succeeded twice in eleciinf^ iJieir candidate. But 
 with the death of Umar it] a.m. 2.'! (a.i». M'i) the 
 Meccan ariHlocrutic party of tlio family of I'rniiyya 
 that had so lotif^' Hf.rnf^glod af^ainst Muhanitnad and 
 had only acccjpted Islam when tli(;ir c;i,use was hope- 
 lessly lost, had at last a chance. Umar loft no direc- 
 tions as to his successor, lie sooms to have felt no 
 certainty as to the man best fitted to tid<e np the 
 bur<leri, and when his son sought to urge him to name 
 a Khalii'a, lie is re|)orted to have said, "Iff ii|)]'ioint 
 a Klialifa, Abu IJakr appointed a f<hMlifa; anil if I 
 leave the f)(!0])le without guidance, so did the Ajtostje 
 of God." But then; is also a, story that nJ'i.er a, vain 
 attempt to jiersuado one of the CJompanions to ]j(!rmit 
 himself to bo nominated, lie appointed an eh^ctive 
 council of six to make the clioice after liis death 
 under stringent conditions, which went all to wreck 
 
UTHMAN 17 
 
 through the pressure of circumstances. The Umay- 
 yads succeeded in carrying the election of Uthman, 
 one of their family, an old man and also a son-in-law 
 of Muhammad, who by rare luck for them was an 
 Early Believer. After his election it was soon evident 
 that he was going to rule as an Umayyad and not 
 as a Muslim. For generations back in Mecca, as has 
 already been said, there had been, according to tradi- 
 tion, a continual struggle for pre-eminence between 
 the families of Umayya and of Hashim. In the vic- 
 tory of Muhammad and the election of the first two 
 Khalifas, the house of Hashim had conquered, but it 
 had been the constant labor of the conquerors to re- 
 move all tribal and family distinctions and frictions 
 and to bring the whole body of the Arabs to regard 
 one another as brother Muslims. Now, with a Kha- 
 lifa of the house of Umayya, all that was swept away, 
 and it was evident that Uthman— a pious, weak man, 
 in the hands of his energetic kinsfolk — was drifting to 
 a point where the state would not exist for the Mus- 
 lims but for the Umayyads. His evil spirit was his 
 cousin Marwan ibn al-Hakam, whom he had ap- 
 pointed as his secretary and who eventually became 
 fourth Umayyad Khalifa. The father of this man, 
 al-Hakam ibn al-As, accepted Islam at the last mo- 
 ment when Mecca was captured, and, thereafter, was 
 banished by Muhammad for treachery. Not till the 
 reign of Uthman was he permitted to return, and his 
 son, bom after the Hijra, was the most active assert- 
 or of Umayyad claims. Under steady family press- 
 ure, Uthman removed the governors of provinces 
 who had suffered with Muhammad and fought in the 
 
18 CONSTITUTIOKAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 Path of God {sahil Allah), and put in their places nis 
 own relations, late embracers of the faith. He broke 
 through the Constitution of Umar and gifted away 
 great tracts of state lands. The feeling spread abroad 
 that in the eyes of the Khalifa an Umayyad could 
 do no wrong, and the Umayyads themselves were not 
 backward in affording examples. To the Muhajirs 
 and Ansar they were godless heathen, and probably 
 the Muhajirs and Ansar were right. Finally, the 
 indignation could no longer be restrained. Insurrec- 
 tions broke out in the camp-cities of al-Kufa and al- 
 Basra, and in those of Egypt and at last in al-Madina 
 itself. There, in a.h. 35 (a.d. 655), Uthman fell 
 under the daggers of conspirators led by a Muham- 
 mad, a son of Abu Bakr, but a religious fanatic 
 strangely different from his father, and the train was 
 laid for a long civil war. In the confusion that fol- 
 lowed the deed the chance of the legitimist party had 
 come, and Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the 
 Prophet, was chosen. 
 
 Fortunately this is is not a history of Islam, but of 
 Muslim political institutions, and it is, therefore, un- 
 necessary to go into the manifold and contradictory 
 stories told of the events of this time. These have 
 evidently been carefully redacted in the interests of 
 later orthodoxy, and to protect the character of men 
 whose descendants later came to power. The Alids 
 built up in favor of Ali a highly ingenious but flatly 
 fictitious narrative, embracing the whole early his- 
 tory and exhibiting him as the true Khalifa kept 
 from his rights by one after the other of the first 
 three, and suffering it all with angelic patience. This 
 
SHI'ITES AND SUNNITES 19 
 
 Taries from the extreme Slii'ite position, wliicli damns 
 all the three at a sweep as usurpers, through a more 
 moderate one which contents itself with cui'sing Umar 
 and Uthman, to a rejection of Uthman only, and 
 even, at the other extreme, satisfies itself with anath- 
 ematizing the later Umaryads. At this point the 
 Shi'ites join hands with the body of orthodox be- 
 Uevers, who are all seetai'ies of Ali to a certain de- 
 gi-ee. Yet this tendency has been counteracted to 
 some extent by a strongly catholic and irenic spirit 
 which manifests itself in Islam. After a controversy 
 is over and the figures in it have faded into the past, 
 Islam casts a still deeper veil over the controversy 
 itself and glorifies the actors on both sides into 
 fathers and doctors of the Church. An attempt is 
 made to forget that they had fought one another so 
 bitterly, and to hold to the fact only that they were 
 brother Muslims. The Shi'ites well so-called, for 
 Shi' a means sect, have never accepted this ; but it is 
 the usage of orthodox, commonly called Sunnite, Is- 
 lam. A concrete expression of any result reached by 
 the body of the believere then often tates the form of 
 a tradition assigned to Muhammad. In this case, it 
 is a saying of his that ten men, specified by name 
 and prominent leaders in these early squabbles, were 
 certain of Paradise. It has further become an article 
 in Muslim creeds, that the Companions of the Prophet 
 are not to be mentioned save with praise ; and one 
 school of theologians, in their zeal for the historic 
 Khalifate, even forbade the cursing of Tazid, the 
 slayer of al-Husayn (p. 28 below), and reckoned as 
 the worst of all the Umayyads, because he had been 
 
20 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 a Ehalifa in full and regular standing. This catholic 
 recognition of the unity of Islam we shall meet again 
 and again. 
 
 Abandoning, then, any attempt to trace the details 
 and to adjust the rights and wrongs of this story, we 
 return to the fixed fact of the election of Ali and the 
 accession to power of the legitimist party. This 
 legitimist party, or parties, had been gradually de- 
 veloping, and their peculiar and mutually discordant 
 views deserve attention. These views all glorified 
 Ali, the full cousin of Muhammad and husband of 
 his daughter Fatima, but upon very different grounds. 
 There could not but exist the feeling that a descend- 
 ant of the Prophet should be his successor, and the 
 children of Ali, al-Hasan and al-Husayn were his 
 only grandchildren and only surviving male descend- 
 ants. This, of course, reflected a dignity upon Ali, 
 their father, and gave him a claim to the Khalifate. 
 Again, Ali himself seems to have made a great and 
 hardly comprehensible impression upon his contem- 
 poraries. The proverb ran with the people, "There 
 is no sword save Dlm-l-faqar, and no youth save 
 Ali." He was not, perhaps, so great a general as 
 one or two others of his time, but he stood alone as 
 a warrior in single combat; he was a poet and an 
 orator, but no statesman. As one of the earliest of 
 the Early Believers, it might be expected that the 
 Muhajirs would support him, and so they did; but 
 the matter went much farther, and he seems to have 
 excited a feeling of personal attachment and devo- 
 tion different from that rendered to the preceding 
 Khalifas. Strange and mystical doctrines were afloat 
 
ALI ; CIVIL WAR 21 
 
 as to his claim. The idea of election was thrown 
 aside, and his adherents proclaimed his right by the 
 will and appointment of God to the successorship of 
 the Prophet. As God had appointed Muhammad as 
 Prophet, so He had appointed Ali as his helper in 
 life and his successor in death. This was preached 
 in Egypt as early as the year 32. 
 
 It will easily be seen that with such a following, 
 uniting so many elements, his election could be 
 brought about. Thus it was ; but an evil suspicion 
 rested upon him. Men thought, and probably right- 
 ly, that he could have saved the aged Uthman if he 
 had willed, and they even went the length of accus- 
 ing him of being art and part in the murder itself. 
 The ground was hollow beneath his feet. Further, 
 there were two other old Companions of the Prophet, 
 Talha and az-Zubayr, who thought they had a still 
 better claim to the Khalifate ; and they were joined 
 by A'isha, the favorite wife of Muhammad, now, as a 
 finished intrigante, the evil genius of Islam. Ali 
 had reaped all the advantage of the conspiracy and 
 murder, and it was easy to raise against him the cry 
 of revenge for Uthman. Then the civil war began. 
 In the struggle with Talha and az-Zubayr, Ali was 
 victorious. Both fell at the battle of the Camel 
 (a.h. 36), so called from the presence of A'isha 
 mounted on a camel like a chieftainess of the old 
 days. But a new element was to enter. The gov- 
 ernorship of Syria had been held for a long time by 
 Mu'awiya, an Umayyad, and there the Umayyad in- 
 fluence was supreme. There, too, had grown up a 
 spirit of religious indifference, combined with a pres- 
 
22 OONSTITXTTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 ervation of all the forms of the faith. Mu'awiya 
 was a statesman by nature, ami had moulded his 
 province into an almost independent kingdom. The 
 Syrian army was devoted to him, and could be de- 
 pended upon to have no other interests than his. 
 From the beginning of All's reign, he had been bid- 
 ing his time ; had not given his allegiance, but had 
 waited for the hour to strike for revenge for Uthman 
 and power for himself. The time came and Mu'awi- 
 ya won. We here pass over lightly a long and con- 
 tradictory story. It is enough to note how the irony 
 of history wrought itself out, and a son of the Abu 
 Sufyan who had done so much to persecute and op- 
 pose Muhammad in his early and dark days and had 
 been the last to acknowledge his mission, became his 
 successor and the ruler of his people. But with Ali 
 ends the revered series of the four " Khalifas who 
 followed a right course " {al-khulafa ar-rashidim), 
 reverenced now by all orthodox Muslims, and there 
 begins the division of Islam into sects, religious and 
 political — it comes to the same thing. 
 
 The Umayyads themselves clearly recognized that 
 with their accession to power a change had come in 
 the nature of theMuslim state. Mu'awiya said open- 
 ly that he was the first king in Islam, though he re- 
 tained and used officially the title of Khalifa and 
 Commander of the Faithful. Yet such a change 
 could not be complete nor could it carry with it the 
 whole people — that is clear of itself. For more than 
 one hundred years the house of Umayya held its 
 own. Syria was solid with it and it was supported 
 by many statesmen and soldiers ; but outside of 
 
KHARIJITES 23 
 
 Syria and north Ai-abia it could count on no part of 
 the population. An anti-Khalifa, Abd Allah, son of 
 the az-Zubajr of whom we have already heard, long 
 held the sacred cities against them. Oulj' in a.h. 75 
 (a.d. 692) was he killed after Mecca had been stormed 
 and taken by their armies. Southern Arabia and 
 Mesopotamia, with its camp-cities al-Kufa and al- 
 Basra, Persia and Egypt, were, from time to time, 
 more or less in revolt. These risings went in one or 
 other of two directions. There were two great anti- 
 Umayj^ad sects. At one time in Mu'awiya's contest 
 with Ali, he trapped Ali into the fatal step of arbitrat- 
 ing his claim to the Khalifate. It was fatal, for by 
 it Ali alienated some of his own party and gained 
 less than nothing on the other side. Part of All's 
 army seceded in protest and rebellion, because he — 
 the duly elected Khalifa — submitted his claim to any 
 shadow of doubt. On the other hand, they could \ 
 not accept Mu'awiya, for him they regarded as un- 
 duly elected and a mere usurper. Thus they drifted 
 and split into innumerable sub-sects. They were 
 called Kharijites — goers out — because they went out 
 from among the other Muslims, refused to regard 
 them as Muslims and held themselves apart. For 
 centuries they continued a thorn in the side of all 
 established authority. Their principles were abso- 
 lutely democratic. Their idea of the Khalifate was 
 the old one of the time of Abu Bakr and Umar. 
 The Khalifa was to be elected by the whole Muslim 
 community and could be deposed again at need. 
 He need be of no special family or tribe ; he might 
 be a slave, provided he was a good Muslim ruler. 
 
24 COKSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 Some admitted that a woman might be Khalifa, 
 and others denied the need of any Khalifa at all ; 
 ; the Muslim congregation could rule itself. Their re- 
 , ligious views were of a similarly unyielding and an- 
 tique cast, but with that we have nothing now to do. 
 It cannot be doubted that these men were the true 
 representatives of the old Islam. They claimed for 
 themselves the heirship to Abu Bakr and Umar, and 
 their claim was just. Islam had been secularized ; 
 worldly ambition, fratricidal strife, luxury, and sin 
 had destroyed the old bond of brotherhood. So they 
 drew themselves apart and went their own way, a 
 way which their descendants still follow in Uman, 
 in east Africa, and in Algeria. To them the orthodox 
 Muslims — meaning by that the general body of Mus- 
 lims — were antipathetic more than even Christians 
 or Jews. These were " people of a book " {ahl 
 hitab), i.e., followers of a revealed religion, and kindly 
 treatment of them was commanded in the Qur'an. 
 They had never embraced Islam, and were to be 
 judged and treated on their own merits. The non- 
 Kharijite Muslims, on the other hand, were rene- 
 gades {murtadds) and were to be killed at sight. It 
 is easy to understand to what such a view as this 
 led. Numberless revolts, assassinations, plunderings 
 marked their history. Crushed to the ground again 
 and again, again and again they recovered. They 
 were Arabs of the desert ; and the desert was always 
 there as a refuge. It is probable, but as yet un- 
 proved, that mingled with the political reasons for 
 their existence as a sect went tribal jealousies and 
 frictions ; of such there have ever been enough and 
 
IBADITES 25 
 
 to spare in Arabia. Naturally, under varying con- 
 ditions, their views and attitudes varied. In the 
 wild mountains of Khuzistan, one of their centres 
 and strongholds, the primitive barbarism of their 
 faith had full sway. It drew its legitimate conse- 
 quence, lived out its life, and vanished from the 
 scene. The more moderate section of the Kharijites 
 centred round al-Basra. Their leader there was Abd 
 Allah ibn Ibad, and from about the year 60 on 
 the schism between his followers and the more abso- 
 lute of these " come-outers " can be traced. It is 
 characteristic of the latter that they aided for a time 
 Abd Allah ibn az-Zubayr when he was besieged in 
 Mecca by the Umayyads, but deserted him finally be- 
 cause he refused to join the names of Talha and his 
 own father, az-Zubayr, with those of Uthman and 
 Ali in a general commination. The Kharijites were 
 all good at cursing, and the later history of this sec- 
 tion of them shows a process of disintegration by 
 successive secessions, each departing in protest and 
 cursing those left behind as heathen and unbehevers. 
 Characteristic, too, for the difference between the two 
 sections, were their respective attitudes toward the 
 children of their opponents. The more absolute 
 party held that the children of unbelievers were to 
 be killed with their parents; the followers of Abd 
 Allah ibn Ibad, that they were to be allowed to grow 
 up and then given their choice. Again, there was a 
 difference of opinion as to the standing of those who 
 held with the Kharijites but remained at home and 
 did not actually fight in the Path of God. These 
 the one party rejected and the other accepted. Again, 
 
^t) CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 were the non-Kharijites Muslims to the extent that 
 the Kharijites might live amongst them and mix with 
 them ? This the severely logical party denied, but 
 Abd Allah ibn Ibad affirmed. 
 
 From this it will be abundantly clear that the only 
 party with a possible future was that of Ibn Ibad. 
 ;' His sect survives to the present day under the name of 
 I Ibadites. Very early it spread to Uman, and, accord- 
 ing to their traditions, their first Imam, or president, 
 was elected about a.h. 134. He was of a family 
 which had reigned there before Islam, and from the 
 time of his election on, the Ibadites have succeeded 
 in holding Uman against the rest of the Muslim 
 world. Naturally, the election of the Imam by the 
 community has turned into the rule of a series of 
 dynasties ; but the theory of election has always held 
 fast. They were sailors, merchants, and colonizers 
 already by the tenth century a.d., and carried their 
 state with its theology and law to Zanzibar and the 
 coast of East Africa generally. Still earlier Ibadite 
 fugitives passed into North Africa, and there they 
 still maintain the simplicity of their republican ideal 
 and their primitive theological and legal views. 
 Their home is in the Mzab in the south of Algeria, 
 and, though as traders and capitalists they may travel 
 far, yet they always return thither. Any mingling 
 in marriage with other Muslims is forbidden them. 
 At the opposite extreme from these in political 
 matters stands the sect that is called the Shi'a. It, 
 as we have seen, is the name given to the party that 
 glorifies Ali and his descendants and regards the Kha- 
 lifate as belonging to them by right divine. How 
 
SHI'ITES 27 
 
 early this feeling arose we have already seen, but the 
 extremes to which in time the idea was carried, the 
 innumerable differing views that developed, the maze 
 of conspiracies, tortuous and underground in their 
 methods, some in good faith and some in bad, to 
 which it gave rise, render the history of the Shi'a the 
 most difficult side of a knowledge of the Muslim 
 East. Tet some attempt at it must be made. If 
 there was ever a romance in history, it is the story 
 of the founding of the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt ; if 
 there was ever the survival of a petrifaction in history, 
 it is the survival to the present day of the Assassins 
 and the Druses ; if there was ever the persistence of 
 an idea, it is in the present Shi'ite government in 
 Persia and in the faith in that Mahdi for whom the 
 whole world of Islam still looks to appear and bring 
 in the reign of justice and the truth upon the earth. 
 All these have sprung from the devotion to Ali and 
 his children on the part of their followers twelve 
 centuries ago. 
 
 In A.H. 40 (a.d. 660) Ali fell by the dagger of a 
 Kharijite. These being at the opposite pole from 
 the Shi'ites, are the only Muslim sect that curses and 
 abhors Ali, his family and all their works. Orthodox 
 Islam reveres Ali and accepts his Khalifate ; his fam- 
 ily it also reverences, but rejects their pretensions. 
 The instinct of Islam is to respect the accomplished 
 fact, and so even the Umayyads, one and all, stand in 
 the list of the successors of the Prophet, much as 
 Alexander VI and his immediate predecessors do in 
 that of the Popes. 
 
 To Ali succeeded his son, al-Hasan, but his name 
 
28 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 does not stand on the roll of the Khalifats as usually 
 reckoned. It shows some Shi'ite tinge when the 
 historian says, " In the Khalifate of al-Hasan," 
 and, thereafter, proceeds with, "In the days of 
 Mu'awiya," the Umayyad Khalifa who followed him. 
 Mu'awiya had received the allegiance of the Syrian 
 Muslims and when he advanced on al-Kufa, where al- 
 Hasan was, al-Hasan met him and gave over into his 
 hands all his supposed rights. That was in a.h. 41 ; 
 in A.H. 49 he was dead by poison. Twelve years 
 later al-Husayn, his brother, and many of his house 
 fell at Karbala in battle against hopeless odds. It is 
 this last tragedy that has left the deepest mark of all 
 on the Muslim imagination. Yearly when the fatal 
 day, the day of Ashura, the tenth of the month Mu- 
 harram, comes round, the story is rehearsed again at 
 Karbala and throughout, indeed, all the Shi'ite world 
 in what is a veritable Passion Play. No Muslim, 
 especially no Persian, can read of the death of al- 
 Husayn, or see it acted before his eyes, Avithout quiv- 
 ering and invoking the curse of God upon all those 
 who had aught to do with it or gained aught by it. 
 That curse has clung fast through all the centuries to 
 the name of Yazid, the Umayyad Khalifa of the time, 
 and only the stiffest theologians of the traditional 
 school have labored to save his memory through the 
 merits of the historical Khalifate. But even after 
 this tragedy it was not out with the blood of Muham- 
 mad. Many descendants were left and their party lived 
 on in strange, half underground fashion, as sects do in 
 the East, occasionally coming to the surface and 
 bursting out in wild and, for long, useless rebellion. 
 
SHl'lTE CONSTITUTIONAL THEOEIES 29 
 
 In these revolts the Shi'a was worthy of its name, 
 and split into many separate divisions, according to 
 the individuals of the house of Ali to whom alle- 
 giance was rendered and who were regarded as leaders, 
 titular or real. These subdivisions differed, also, in 
 the principle governing the choice of a leader and 
 in the attitude of the people toward him. Shi'ism, 
 from being a political question, became theological. 
 The position of the Shi'ite was and is that there must 
 be a law (nass) regulating the choice of the Imam, or 
 leader of the Muslim community; that that law is 
 one of the most important dogmas of the faith and 
 cannot have been left by the Prophet to develop itself 
 under the pressure of circumstances ; that there is 
 such an Imam clearly pointed out and that it is the 
 duty of the Muslim to seek him out and follow him. 
 Thus there was a party who regarded the leadership 
 as belonging to Ali himself, and then to any of his 
 descendants by any of his wives. These attached 
 themselves especially to his son Muhammad, known 
 from his mother as Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiya, who 
 died in 81, and to his descendants and successors. It 
 was in this sect that the most characteristic Shi'ite 
 views first developed. This Muhammad seems to 
 have been the first concerning whom it was taught, 
 after his death, that he was being preserved by God 
 aHve in retirement and would come forth at his ap- 
 pointed time to bring in the rule of righteousness 
 upon the earth. In some of the innumerable sub- 
 sects the doctrine of the deity, even, of Ali was early 
 held, in others a doctrine of metempsychosis, gen- 
 erally among men and especially from one Imam to 
 
30 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 liis successor; others, again, advanced the duty of 
 oeking the rightful Imam and rendering allegiance 
 iM) him till it covered the whole field of faith and 
 .lorals — no more was required of the believer. To 
 one of these sects, ai-Mukanna, " the Veiled Prophet 
 of Khorasan," adhered before he started on his own 
 account. 
 
 We have seen already that so early as 32 the doc- 
 trine had been preached in Egypt that Ali was the 
 God-appointed successor of the Prophet. Here we 
 have its legitimate development, which was all the 
 quicker as it had, or assumed, a theological basis, and 
 did not simply urge the claims to leadership of the 
 family of the Prophet after the fashion in which in- 
 heritance runs among earthly kings. That was the 
 position at first of the other and far more important 
 Shi'ite wing. It regarded the leadership as being in 
 the blood of Muhammad and therefore limited to the 
 children of Ali by his wife Fatima, the daughter of 
 Muhammad. Again, the attitude toward the person 
 of the leader varied, as we have already seen. One 
 party held that the leadership was_by the right of the 
 appointment of God, but that the leader himself was 
 simply a man as other men. These would add to 
 " the two words " {al-halimatani) of the creed, " There 
 is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Apostle of 
 God," a third clause, " and Ali is the representative 
 of God." Others regarded him as an incarnation of 
 divinity ; a continuing divine revelation in human 
 form. His soul passed, when he died, to his next 
 successor. He was, therefore, infalliblo and sinless, 
 and was to be treated with absolute, blind obedience. 
 
THE HIDDEN IMAM 31 
 
 Here there is a mingling of the most strangely varied 
 ideas. In Persia the people had been too long ac- 
 customed to looking upon their rulers as divine for 
 them to be capable of taking up any other position. 
 A story is told of the governor of a Persian province 
 who wrote to the Khalifa of his time that he was not 
 able to prevent his people from giving him the style 
 and treatment of a god ; they did not understand 
 any other kind of ruler; it was as much as his 
 authority was worth to attempt to make them desist. 
 From this attitude, combiaed with the idea of the 
 transmigration of souls, the extreme Shi'ite doctrine 
 was derived. 
 
 But though the party of Ali might regard the 
 descendants of Ali as semi-divine, yet their conspir- 
 acies and revolts were uniformly unsuccessful, and it 
 became a very dangerous thing to head one. The 
 party was willing to get up a rising at any time, 
 but the leader was apt to hang back. In fact, one of 
 the most curious features of the whole movement was 
 the uselessness of the family of Ali and the extent to 
 which they were utilized by others. They have been, 
 in a sense, the cat's-paws of history. Gradually they 
 themselves drew back into retirement and vanished 
 from the stage, and, with their vanishing, a new 
 doctrine arose. It was that of the hidden Imam. 
 We have already seen the case of Muhammad ibn 
 al-Hanafiya, whom Muslims reckon as the first of 
 these concealed ones. Another descendant of Ali, on 
 another line of descent, vanished in the same way in 
 the latter part of the second century of the Hijra, and 
 another about a.h. 260. Their respective followers 
 
32 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 held that they were being kept in concealment by 
 God and would be brought back at the appointed time 
 to rule over the world and bring in a kind of Muslim 
 millennium. This is the oriental version of the story 
 of Arthur in Avalon and of Frederick Barbarossa in 
 Kyffhaiiser. 
 
 But that has led us far away and we must go back 
 to the fall of the Umayyads and the again disap- 
 pointed hopes of the Alids. By the time of the last 
 Khalifa of the Umayyad house, Marwau II, a.h. 127- 
 132 (a.d. 744-750), the whole empire was more or less 
 in rebellion, partly Shi'ite and partly Kharijite. The 
 Shi'ites themselves had, as usual, no man strong 
 enough to act as leader ; that part was taken by as- 
 Saflfah, a descendant of al- Abbas, an uncle of Muham- 
 mad. The rebellion was ostensibly to bring again 
 into power the family of the Prophet, but under that 
 the Abbasids understood the family of Hashim, while 
 the Alids took it in the more exact sense of them- 
 selves. They were made a cat's-paw, the Abbasid 
 dynasty was founded, and they were thrown over. 
 Thus, the Kh^lifate remained persistently in the 
 hands of those who, up to the last, had been hostile 
 to the Prophet. This al-Abbas had embraced the 
 faith only when Mecca was taken by the Muslims. 
 Later historians, jealous for the good name of the 
 ancestor of the longest line of all the Successors, have 
 labored to build up a legend that al-Abbas stayed in 
 Mecca only because he could there be more useful in 
 the cause of his nephew. This is one of the per- 
 versions of early history of which the Muslim chron- 
 icles are full. 
 
UMATTADS OF SPAI^- 33 
 
 But the story of the Umayyads is not yet out. 
 From the ruin that overwhelmed them, one escaped 
 and fled to North Airica. There, he vainly tried to 
 draw together a power. At last, seeing in Spain 
 some better prospect of success, he crossed thither, 
 and by courage, statesmanship, and patience, carved 
 out a new Umayyad empire that lasted for 300 years. 
 One of his descendants in a.h. 317 (a.d. 929) took the 
 title of Khalifa and claimed the homage due to the 
 Commander of the Faithful. There is a story that 
 al-Mansur, the second Abbasid, once asked his court- 
 iers, "Who is the Falcon of Quraysh?" They 
 named one after another of the great men of the 
 tribe, beginning, naturally, with his majesty himself, 
 but to no purpose. "No," he said, "the Falcon 
 of Quraysh is Abd ar-Eahman, the Umayyad, who 
 found his way over deserts and seas, flung himself 
 alone into a strange country, and there, without any 
 helper but himself, built up a realm. There has 
 been none like him of the blood of Quraysh." 
 
CHAPTEE II 
 
 Shi'ite revolts against Abbasids; Idrisids; Zaydites; Imamites; 
 the Twelvers ; constitutional theory of modern Persia ; origin 
 of Fatimids ; Maymun the oculist ; plan of the conspiracy ; the 
 Seveners ; the Qarmatians ; Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi and found- 
 ing of Tatimid dynasty in North Africa ; their spread to Egypt 
 and to Syria; al-Hakim Bi'amrillah ; the Druses ; the Assas- 
 sins ; Saladin and the Ayyubids. 
 
 It is not in place here to deal with all the number- 
 less little Shi'ite revolts against the Abbasids which 
 now followed. Those only are of interest to us which 
 had more or less permanent effect on the Muslim 
 state and states. Earliest among such comes the 
 revolt which founded the dynasty of the Idrisids. 
 About the middle of the second century the Abba- 
 sids were hard pressed. The heavens themselves 
 seemed to mingle in the conflict. The early years of 
 their rule had been marked by great showers of 
 shooting stars, and the end of the age was reckoned 
 near by both parties. Messianic hope was alive, and 
 a Mahdi, a Guided of God, was looked for. This 
 had long been the attitude of the Alids, and the 
 Abbasids began to feel a necessity to gain for their 
 de facto rule the sanction of theocratic hopes. In 
 143 Halley's comet was visible for twenty days, and 
 in 147 there were again showers of shooting stars. 
 On the part of the Abbasids, homage was solemnly 
 rendered to the eldest son of al-Mansur, the Khalifa 
 
 34 
 
IDEISIBS 35 
 
 of the time, as successor of his father, under the title 
 al-Mahdi, and several sayings were forged and as- 
 cribed to the Prophet which told who and what 
 manner of man the Mahdi would be, in terms which 
 clearly pointed to this heir-apparent. The Alids, on 
 their side, were urged on to fresh revolts. These ris- 
 ings were still political in character and hardly at all 
 theological ; they expressed the claims to sovereignty 
 of the house of the Prophet. On the suppression of 
 one of them at al-Madina in 169, Idris ibn Abd Allah, 
 a grandson of al-Hasan, escaped to North Africa — 
 that refuge of the politically disaffected — and there 
 at the far-off Volubilis of the Romans, in the modern 
 Morocco, founded a state. It lasted till 375, and 
 planted firmly the authority of the family of Mu- 
 hammad in the western half of North Africa. Other 
 Alid states rose in its place, and in 961 the dynasty 
 of the Sharif s of Morocco was established by a Mu- 
 hammad, a descendant of a Muhammad, brother of 
 the same Abd Allah, grandson of al-Hasan. This 
 family still rules in Morocco and claims the title of 
 Khalifa of the Prophet and Commander of the Faith- 
 ful. Strictly, they are Shi'ites, but their sectarianism 
 sits lightly upon them ; it is political only and they 
 have no touch of the violent religious antagonism to 
 the Sunnite Muslims that is to be found in Persian 
 Shi'ism. As adherents of the legal school of Malik 
 ibn Anas, their Sunna is the same as that of ortho- 
 dox Islam. The Sahili of al-Bukhari (see below, 
 p. 79 ) is held in especially high reverence, and one 
 division of the Moorish army always carries a copy 
 of it as a talisman. They are really a bit of the sec- 
 
36 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 ond century of the Hijra crystallized and surviving 
 into our time. 
 
 Another Shi'ite line which lasts more or less down 
 to the present day, is that of the Zaydites of al- 
 Yaman. They were so called from their adherence 
 to Zayd, a grandson of al-Husayn, and their sect 
 spread in north Persia and south Arabia. The north 
 Persian branch is of little historic importance for our 
 purpose. For some sixty-four years, from 250 on, it 
 held Tabaristan, struck coins and exercised all sover- 
 eign rights ; then it fell before the Samanids. The 
 other branch has had a much longer history. It was 
 founded about 280, at Sa'da in al-Yaman and there, 
 and later at San'a, Zaydite Imams have ruled o£f and 
 on till our day. The Turkish hold upon south 
 Arabia has always been of the slightest. Sometimes 
 they have been absolutely expelled from the country, 
 and their control has never extended beyond the 
 limits of their garrisoned posts. The position of 
 these Zaydites was much less extreme than that of 
 the other Shi'ites. They were strictly Fatimites, 
 that is, they held that any descendant of Fatima 
 could be Imam. Further, circumstances might justify 
 the passing over, for a time, of such a legitimate 
 Imam and the election as leader of someone who had 
 no equally good claim. Thus, they reverenced Abu 
 Bakr and Umar and regarded their Khalifate as just, 
 even though Ali was there with a better claim. The 
 election of these two Khalifas had been to the ad- 
 vantage of the Muslim state. Some of them even 
 accepted the Khalifate of Uthman and only de- 
 nounced his evil deeds. Further, they regarded it as 
 
IMAMITES 37 
 
 possible that there might be two Imams at the same 
 time, especiaUy when they were in countries widely 
 apart. This, apparently, sprang from the sect be- 
 ing divided between north Persia and south Ara- 
 bia. Theologically, or philosophically — it is hard to 
 hold the two apart in Islam — the Zaydites were 
 accused of rationalism. Their founder, Zayd, the 
 grandson of al-Husayn, had studied under the 
 great Mu'tazilite, Wasil ibn Ata, of whom much 
 more hereafter. 
 
 But if the Zaydites were lax both in their theology 
 and in their theory of the state, that cannot be said 
 of another division of the Shi'ites, called the Imam- 
 ites on account of the stress which they laid on the 
 doctrine of the person of the Imam. For them the 
 Imam of the time was explicitly and personally in- 
 dicated, Ali by Muhammad and each of the others 
 in turn by his predecessor. But it was hard to rec- 
 oncile with this f( priori position that an Imam must 
 have been indicated, the fact that there was no agree- 
 ment as to the Imam who had been indicated. Down 
 all possible lines of descent the sacred succession was 
 traced until, of the seventy-two sects that the Prophet 
 had foretold for his people, seventy, at least, were 
 occupied by the Imamites alone. Further, the num- 
 ber of Hidden Imams was constantly running up ; 
 with every generation, AUds found it convenient to 
 withdraw into retirement and have reports given out 
 of their own deaths. Then two sects would come 
 into existence — one which stopped at the Alid in 
 question, and said that he was being kept in con- 
 cealment by God to be brought back at His pleas- 
 
38 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 ure ; and another which passed the Imamship on to 
 the next generation. Out of this chaos two sects, ad- 
 hering to two series of Imams, stand clear through 
 their historical importance. The one is that of the 
 Twelvers {Ithna'ashariya) ; theirs is the official creed 
 of modern Persia. About a.h. 260 a certain Mu- 
 hammad ibn al-Hasan, twelfth in descent from Ali, 
 vanished in the way just described. The sect which 
 looked for his return increased and flourished until, 
 at length, with the conquest of Persia in a.h. 907 
 (a.d. 1502) by the Safawids — a family of Alid descent 
 which joined arms to sainthood — Persia became 
 Shi'ite, and the series of the Shahs of Persia was 
 begun. The position of the Shah is therefore essen- 
 tially different from that of the Khalifa of the Sun- 
 nites. The Khalifa is the successor of Muhammad, 
 with a dignity and authority which inheres in him- 
 self; he is both king and pontiff; the Shah is a 
 mere locum tenens, and reigns only until God is 
 pleased to restore to men the true Imam. That 
 Imam is still in existence, though hidden from hu- 
 man eyes. The Shah, therefore, has strictly no legal 
 authority ; he is only a guardian of the public order. 
 True legal authority lies, rather, with the learned 
 doctors of religion and law. As a consequence of 
 this, the Shi'ites still have Mujtahids, divines and 
 legists who have a right to form opinions of their 
 own, can expound the original sources at first hand, 
 and can claim the unquestioning assent of their dis- 
 ciples. Such men have not existed among the Sun- 
 nites since the middle of the third century of the 
 Hijra ; from that time on all Sunnites have been 
 
FATIMIDS 39 
 
 compelled to swear to the words of some master or 
 other, long dead. 
 
 This division of the Shi'ites is the only one that 
 exists in great numbers down to the present day. 
 The second of the two mentioned above came to 
 power earlier, ran a shorter course, and has now van- 
 ished from the stage, leaving nothing but an histor- 
 ical mystery and two or three fossilized, half-secret 
 sects — strange survivals which, like the survivals of 
 geology, tell us what were the living and dominant 
 forces in the older world. It wiU be worth while to 
 enter upon some detail in reciting its history, both 
 for its own romantic interest and as an example of 
 the methods of Shi'ite propaganda. Its success 
 shows how the Abbasid empire was gradually under- 
 mined and brought to its fall. It itself was the most 
 magnificent conspiracy, or rather fraud, in all his- 
 tory. To understand its possibility and its results, 
 we must hold in mind the nature of the Persian race 
 and the condition of that race at this time. Herodo- 
 tus was told by his Persian friends that one of the 
 three things Persian youth was taught was to tell the 
 truth. That may have been the case in the time of 
 Herodotus, but certainly this teaching has had no 
 effect whatever on an innate tendency in the oppo- 
 site direction ; and it is just possible that Herodo- 
 tus's friends, in giving him that information, were 
 giving also an example of this tendency. Travellers 
 have been told curious things before now, but cer- 
 tainly none more curious than this. As we know the 
 Persian in history, he is a born Mar. He is, there- 
 fore, a bom conspirator. He has great quickness of 
 
/ 
 / 
 
 40 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 mind, adaptability, and, apart from religious emo- 
 tion, no conscience. In the third century of the 
 Hijra (the ninth A.D.), the Persians were either de- 
 voted Shi'ites or simple unbelievers. The one class 
 would do anything for the descendants of Ali ; the 
 other, anything for themselves. This second class, 
 further, would by preference combine doing some- 
 thing for themselves with doing something against 
 Islam and the Arabs, the conquerors of their coun- 
 try. So much by way of premise. 
 
 In the early part of this third century, there lived 
 at Jerusalem a Persian oculist named Maymun. He 
 was a man of high education, professional and other- 
 wise ; had no beliefs to speak of, and understood the 
 times. He had a son, Abd Allah, and trained him 
 carefully for a career. Abd Allah, however — known 
 as Abd Allah ibn Maymun — though he had thought 
 of starting as a prophet himself, saw that the time 
 was not ripe, and planned a larger and more magnif- 
 icent scheme. This was to be no ordinary conspir- 
 acy to burst after a few years or months, but one 
 requiring generations to develop. It was to bring 
 universal dominion to his descendants, and overthrow 
 Islam and the Arab rule. It succeeded in great part, 
 very nearly absolutely. 
 
 His plan was to unite all classes and parties in a 
 conspiracy under one head, promising to each indi- 
 vidual the things which he considered most desir- 
 able. For the Shi'ites, it was to be a Shi'ite conspir- 
 acy ; for the Kharijites, it took a Kharijite tinge ; 
 for Persian nationalists, it was anti-Arab; for free- 
 thinkers, it was frankly nihilistic. Abd Allah him- 
 
A UNIQUE CONSPIEACT 41 
 
 self seems to have been a sceptic of the most refined 
 stamp. The working of this plan was achieved by 
 a system of grades like those in freemasonry. His 
 emissaries went out, settled each in a village and 
 gradually won the confidence of its inhabitants. A 
 marked characteristic of the time was unrest and 
 general hostility to the government. Thus, there 
 was an excellent field for work. To the enormous 
 majority of those involved in it the conspiracy was 
 Shi'ite only, and it has been regarded as such by 
 many of its historians ; but it is now tolerably plain 
 how simply nihilistic were its ultimate principles. 
 The first object of the missionary was to excite re- 
 ligious doubt in the mind of his subject, by pointing 
 out curious difficulties and subtle questions in theol- 
 ogy. At the same time he hinted that there were 
 those who could answer these questions. If his sub- 
 ject proved tractable and desired to learn further, an 
 oath of secrecy and absolute obedience and a fee 
 were demanded — all quite after the modem fashion. 
 Then he was led up through several grades, gradu- 
 ally shaking his faith in orthodox Islam and its 
 teachers and bringing him to believe in the idea of 
 an Imam, or guide in religious things, till the fourth 
 grade was reached. There the theological system 
 was developed, and Islam, for the first time, abso- 
 lutely deserted. We have dealt already with the 
 doctrine of the Hidden Imam and with the present- 
 day creed of Persia, that the twelfth in descent from 
 Ali is in hiding and will return when his time comes. 
 But down the same line of descent seven Imams had 
 been reckoned to a certain vanished Isma'il, and this 
 
•±2 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 Isma'il was adopted by Abd Allah ibn Maymun as 
 his Imam and as titular head of his conspiracy. 
 Hence, his followers are called Isma'iliaus and Sev- 
 eners {Sah'iya). The story which is told of the split 
 between the Seveners and the Twelvers, which were 
 to be, is characteristic of the whole movement and of 
 the wider divergence of the Seveners from ordinary 
 Islam and its laws. The sixth Imam was Ja'far as- 
 Sadiq (d. a.h. 148) ; he appointed his son Isma'il as 
 his successor. But Isma'il was found drunk on one 
 occasion, and his father in wrath passed the Imamship 
 on to his brother, Musa al-Qazam, who is accord- 
 ingly reckoned as seventh Imam by the Twelvers. 
 One party, however, refused to recognize this trans- 
 / fer. Isma'il's drunkenness, they held, was a proof of 
 / his greater spirituality of mind ; he did not follow the 
 / face-value {mlir) of the law, but its hidden meaning 
 (batn). This is an example of a tendency, strong in 
 Shi'ism, to find a higher spiritual meaning lying 
 within the external or verbal form of the law ; and in 
 proportion as a sect exalted Ali, so it diverged from 
 literal acceptance of the Qur'an. The most extreme 
 Shi'ites, who tended to deify their Imam, were 
 known on that account as Batinites or Innerites. 
 On this more hereafter. 
 
 But to return to the Seveners : in the fourth grade 
 a further refinement was added. Everything went in 
 sevens, the Prophets as well as the Imams. Tlio 
 Prophets had been Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, 
 Jesus, Muhammad and Isma'il, or rather his son 
 Muhammad, for Isma'il himself had died in his 
 father's lifetime. Each of these Prophets had had a 
 
THE SYSTEM OF SEVENS 43 
 
 helper. The helper of Adam had been Seth; of 
 Noah, Shem ; and the helper of Muhammad, the son 
 of Isma'il, was Abd Allah ibn Maymun himself. Be- 
 tween each pair of Prophets there came six Imams — 
 it must be remembered that the world was never left 
 without an Imam — but these Imams had had no rev- 
 elation to make ; were only guides to already re- 
 vealed truth. Thus, we have a series of seven times 
 seven Imams, the first, and thereafter each seventh, 
 having the superior dignity of Prophet. The last of 
 the forty-nine Imams, this Muhammad ibn Isma'il, is 
 the greatest and last of the Prophets, and Abd Allah 
 ibn Maymun has to prepare the way for him and to 
 aid him generally. It is at this point that the ad- 
 herent of this system ceases to be a Muslim. The 
 idea of a series of Prophets is genuinely Islamic, but 
 Muhammad, in Muslim theology, is the last of the 
 Prophets and the greatest, and after him there will 
 come no more. 
 
 Such, then, was the system that those who passed 
 the fourth degree learned and accepted. The great 
 majority did not pass beyond ; but those who were 
 judged worthy were admitted to three further degrees. 
 In these degrees, their respect for religious teaching 
 of every kind, doctrinal, moral, ritual, was gradually 
 undermined ; the Prophets and their works were de- 
 preciated and philosophy and philosophers put in 
 their place. The end was to lead the very few who 
 were admitted to the inmost secrets of the conspiracy 
 to the same position as its foimder. It is clear what 
 a tremendous weapon, or rather machine, was thus 
 created. Each man was given the amount of light he 
 
44 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 could bear and which was suited to his prejudices, 
 and he was made to believe that the end of the whole 
 work would be the attaining of what he regarded as 
 most desirable. The missionaries were all things to 
 all men, in the broadest sense, and could work with 
 a Kharijite fanatic, who longed for the days of Umar ; 
 a Bedawi Arab, whose only idea was plunder ; a 
 Persian driven to wild cries and tears by the thought 
 of the fate of Ali, the well-beloved, and of his sons ; 
 a peasant, who did not care for any family or religion 
 but only wished to live in peace and be let alone by 
 the tax-gatherers ; a Syrian mystic, who did not know 
 very well what he thought, but lived in a world of 
 dreams ; or a materialist, whose desire was to clear 
 all religions out of the way and give humanity a 
 chance. All was fish that came to their net. So the 
 long seed-planting went on. Abd Allah ibn Maymun 
 had to flee to Salamiya in Syria, died there and went 
 to his own place — if he got his deserts, no desirable 
 one — and Ahmad, his son or grandson, took up the 
 work in his stead. With him the movement tends to 
 the surface, and we begin to touch hard facts and 
 dates. In southern Mesopotamia — what is called the 
 Arab Iraq — we find a sect appearing, nicknamed Qar- 
 matians, from one of their leaders. In a.h. 277 
 (a.d. 890-1) they were sufficiently numerous and 
 knew their strength enough to hold a fortress and 
 thus enter upon open rebellion. They were peasants, 
 we must remember, Nabateans and no Arabs, only 
 Muslims by compulsion, and thus what we have here 
 is really a Jacquerie, or Peasants' War. But a dis- 
 turbance of any kind suited the Isma'ilians. From 
 
UBAYD ALLAH AL-MAHDI 46 
 
 there the rising spread into Bahrayn and on to sonth 
 Arabia, varying in its character with the character of 
 the people. 
 
 But there was another still more important devel- 
 opment in progress. A missionary had gone to North 
 Africa and there worked with success among the 
 Berber tribes about Constantine, in what is now 
 Algeria. These have always been ready for any 
 change. He gave himself out as forerunner of the 
 ilahdi, promised them the good of both worlds, and 
 called them to arms. The actual rising was in a.h. 
 269 (a-D. 902). Then there appeared among them 
 Said, the son of Ahmad, the son of Abd Allah, the 
 son of Maymun the oculist; but it was not under 
 that name. He was now Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi him- 
 self, a descendant of Aii and of Muhammad ibn 
 Isma'il, for whom his ancestors were supposed to 
 have worked and builtup this conspiracy. In a.h 
 296 (a.d. 909) he was saluted as Commander of the 
 Faithful, with the title of al-Mahdi. So far the con- 
 spiracy had succeeded. This Fatimid dynasty, so 
 they caUed themselves from Fatima, their alleged 
 ancestress, the daughter of Muhammad, conquered 
 Egypt and Syria half a century later and held them 
 till A.H. 567 (a.d. 1171). When in a.h. 317 the Umay- 
 yads of Cordova also claimed the Khalifate and used 
 the title, there were three Commanders of the Faith- 
 ful at one time in the Muslim world. Yet it should 
 be noticed that the constitutional position of these 
 Umayyads was essentially different from that of the 
 Fatimids. To the Fatimids, the Abbasids were usurp- 
 ers. The Umayyads of Cordova, on the other hand. 
 
46 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 held, like the Zaydites and some jurisconsults of the 
 highest rank, that, when Muslim countries were so far 
 apart that the authority of the ruler of the one could 
 not make itself felt in the other, it was lawful to have 
 two Imams, each a true Successor of the Prophet. 
 The good of the people of Muhammad demanded it. 
 Still, the unity of the Khalifate is the more regular 
 doctrine. 
 
 But only half of the work was done. Islam stood 
 as firmly as ever and the conspiracy had only pro- 
 duced a schism in the faith and had not destroyed 
 it. Ubayd Allah was in the awkward position, on 
 the one hand, of ruling a people who were in great 
 bulk fanatical Muslims and did not understand 
 any jesting with their religion, and, on the other 
 hand, of being head of a conspiracy to destroy that 
 very religion. The Syrians and Axabs had appar- 
 ently taken more degrees than the Egyptians and 
 North Africans, and Ubayd Allah found himself 
 between the devil and the deep sea. The Qarma- 
 tians in Arabia plundered the pilgrim caravans, 
 stormed the holy city Mecca, and, most terrible of 
 all, carried off the sacred black stone. When an 
 enormous ransom was offered for the stone, they de- 
 clined — -they had orders not to send it back. Every- 
 one understood that the orders were from Africa. So 
 Ubayd Allah found it advisable to address them in a 
 public letter, exhorting them to be better Muslims. 
 The writing and reading of this letter must have been 
 accompanied by mirth, at any rate no attention was 
 paid to it by the Qarmatians. It was not till the 
 time of the third Fatimid Khalifa that they were 
 
perniirr-ed *.■> do busines-s -^Ith thst ^rone. Then 
 ther s-e::: :i ba^ \rith tie ex3?lar;-iTorT or arc":- 
 fed;- remait tL^: they liad carriei i: or -.ir.'.^r 
 oriers aiii now <ei.: it back imder orders.. Me;\r- 
 
 Eifvp: 07.: ^:o.~t:: mrrijig ihe people o-i Egypi frozn 
 l52;mi. Te: i: prodnoe-i one STr.i-ge voriJr.^iliTj iii.i 
 ■t~f5-o 5-ecT5. sn^vnger exen than the ~e:: to ■wHoh it 
 itself o^e.l i:? origin. The perso-_aliT7 is :li,i: o^i iil- 
 Hikin:Bi"aiirrillah. •who still rem.iins one o: the -ro:.:- 
 est nijsteries that are to be me: ^th inhistoiy. In 
 nianv — :.j5 he reminds ns c-nrionslT o: the nia.dness 
 of the -Tnlian honse; and. in tmth. snoh a seoret 
 movement as that O'f whieh he "^.is a part. (.Tirried 
 on ihrong-h generations from father to s:n. oonld not 
 bni leaxe a traoe on the brain. We must remember 
 
 sity :he head of the eonspiraoy. or even fnlly ini:i- 
 a:edii:.:o i:. In the Litter part of the Fatiniid rode 
 ■55-0 £nd 'distinc: tr.ioes of snch a po— er behind the 
 throne, consisting, as ■weniav imairine. of deso-en .tan ts 
 and pnt ds of those who had been hJbr initiated 
 from the nrst and had r-assed thronith all the grades. 
 In the case of al-Hahim. it is possihle. even. :o 
 trao-e. to a oertain extent, the deTelopment of his in- 
 ination. Ihrring the nrst pa^rt of his rei~n he tt^.- 
 f;\naticany Mnslim .and Shidte. He perseotited 
 altexnatelv the Christioms :\nd ihe -Te— s. and then 
 the orthodox and the Shidtes. In the .atter part, 
 there ^.ts a change. He bad, apparentlT. reached a 
 toint of vhilosrhical indifFerenee. for the perse:n- 
 tions of Christi-ims and ■Je'^s c-eased. and thr-se ■srho 
 
48 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 had been forced to embrace Islam were permitted to 
 relapse. This last was without parallel, till in 184-1 
 Lord Stratford de Eedcliffe wrung from the Porto 
 the concession that a Muslim who apostatized to 
 Christianity should not be put to death. But, 
 mingled with this indifference, tliero ajipeared a 
 strange but regular dovdiopment of Hlii'ite doctrine. 
 Sonu) of his followers began to proclaim openly that 
 the deity was incarnate in him, and it was evident 
 that he himself accepted and believed this. But 
 the Egyptian populace would have none of it, and the 
 too rash innovators had to flee. Some went to the 
 Lebanon and there preached to the native moun- 
 tain tribes. The results of their labors are the 
 Druses of to-day, who worship al-Hakim still and 
 expect his return to introdut-e the end of all thin^^s. 
 Finally, al-Hakim vanished on the night of Fobruai-y 
 12, A.D. 1021, and left a mystery unread to this day. 
 Whether he was murdt^ed, and if so why, or v.ui- 
 ished of free-will, and if so again why, we have no 
 means of telling. Our guess will depend upon our 
 reading of his character. So much is certain, that he 
 was a ruler of the autocratic type, who introduced 
 many reforms, most of which the people of his time 
 could not in the least understand and therefore mis- 
 represented as the mere whims of a tyrant, and many 
 of which, from our ignorance, are still obscure to us. 
 If we can imagine such a man of strong personality 
 and desire for the good of his pooph^ but with a 
 touch of madness in the brain, cast thus in the 
 midst between his orthodox sul)jects and a wholly 
 unbelieving inner government, we shall perhaps 
 
THE ASSASSINS 49 
 
 have the clew to the strange stories told of 
 him. 
 
 Another product of this conspiracy, and the last to 
 Avhich we shall refer, is the sect kno^vn as the As- 
 sassins, whose Grand Master was a name of terror to 
 the Crusaders as the Old Mtxn of the Mountjiin. It, 
 too, was founded, and apparently for a purpose of 
 personal vengeance, by a Pei-sian who began as a 
 Shi'ite and ended as nothing. He came to Egypt, 
 studied under the Fatimids — they had established at 
 Cairo a great school of science — and returned to 
 Persia as their agent to carry on their propaganda. 
 His methods were the same as theire, with a differ- 
 ence. That was the rediiction of assassination to a 
 fine art. From his eagle's nest of Alamut — such is 
 the meaning of the name — and later from Masyaf in 
 the Lebanon and other mountain fortresses, he and 
 his successors spreat! terror through Persia and 
 Syria and were only finally stamped out by the Mon- 
 gol fiood under Hulagu in the middle of the seventh 
 century of the Hijra (the 13th a.d.). Of the sect 
 there are still scattered remnants in Syi'ia and India, 
 and as late as 1866 an English judge at Bombay had 
 to decide a case of disputed succession according to 
 the law of the Assassins. Finally, the Fatimid 
 dynasty itself fell before the Km-d, Salah ad-Din, 
 the Saladin of our annals, and Egypt was again or- 
 thodox. 
 
CHAPTEE III 
 
 The problem of thi^ Abbaeids ; the House of Barmak ; the cnim- 
 bljng of the cnipin! ; t)io Prictorians of Baghdad ; tlic IJuway- 
 hids ; the situation of the Khalifa under them ; the Suljuqs ; the 
 possibilities of development under them ; tlie Mongols and the 
 Abbasid end; the Egyptian Ahhasids; the Oltomun SiilliiriB, 
 their heirs; theory of the Khalifiite; the nKidern situation; 
 the signs of sovereignty for Miislime ; five grounds of the <iiiini 
 of the Ottoman Sultan ; th(,' ronHcquenees for the Sultan ; other 
 Muslim constitutions ; the Shi'ites; thelbadites; the Wahlia- 
 bites ; the Brothi^rhood of as-Sanusi. 
 
 We must now return to the Abbasidn, wliose em- 
 pire we left crumbling away. It was a slirewd stroke 
 of policy on the part of its founder to put the new 
 capital, Baghdad, on the Tigris, right between Per- 
 sia, Syria and Arabia. For tho only hope of perma- 
 nence to the empire lay in welding these into a unity. 
 For a short time, in the hands of the first vigorous 
 rulers, and, especially, during fifty years of guidance 
 by the House of Barmak — Persians who flung in 
 their lot with the Abbasids and were tljcir stay till 
 the madness of Harun ar-H.'ishid cast them dowjj-- 
 this seemed to be succeeding ; but, just as the em- 
 pire of Charlemagne melted under his sons, so did 
 the empire of al-Mansur and al-Ma'mun. Tht; Bed- 
 awi trib(3S fell back into the desert and to the free 
 chaos of the old pre-Islamic life. As tho grcjat phil- 
 osophical historian, Ibn Khaldun, has remarked, the 
 Arabs by their nature are incapable of founding an 
 
 50 
 
CRFMBLIlSrG OF THE EMPIRE 51 
 
 empire except when imited by religious enthusiasm, 
 and are of all peoples least capable of goYerning an 
 empire when founded. After the first Abbasids, it is 
 a fatal error to view the Muslim dynasties as Arab 
 or to speak of the Muslim civilization as Arabian. 
 The conquered peoples overcame their conquerors. 
 Persian nationalism reasserted itself and in native 
 independent dynasties flung off the Arab yoke. 
 These dynasties were mostly Shi'ite ; Shi'ism, in 
 gi'eat part, is the revolt of the Aryan against Semit- 
 ic monotheism. The process in all this was gradual 
 but certain. Governors of provinces revolted and 
 became semi-independent. Sometimes they acknowl- 
 edged a shadowy sovereignty of the Khalifa, by hav- 
 ing his name on their coins and in the Friday prayers ; 
 sometimes they did not. At other times they were, 
 or claimed to be, Alids, and when Alids revolted, 
 they revolted absolutely. With them, it was a ques- 
 tion of couscience. At last, not even in his own City 
 of Peace or in his own palace was the Khalifa mas- 
 ter. As in Rome, so in Baghdad, a body-guard of 
 mercenaries assumed control and their leader was de 
 facto ruler. Later, from a.h. 320 to 447 (a.d. 932- 
 1055), the Sunnite Khalifa found himself the ward 
 and puppet of the Shi'ite Buwayhids. Baghdad it- 
 self they held from 334. But still, a curious spiritu- 
 al value — we cannot call it authority — was left to the 
 shadowy successors of Muhammad. Muslim princes 
 even in far-off India did not feel quite safe upon 
 their thrones unless they had been solemnly in- 
 vested by the Khalifa and given their fitting title 
 Those very rulers in whose power the Khalifa's life 
 
52 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 lay sought sanction from him for their rule. At one 
 time there seemed to be some hope tlmt the fatal 
 unity of theocratical Islam wo uld be broken and that 
 a dualism with promise of development through con- 
 flict — such as the rivalry between Popn and I'^mperor 
 which kept Europe alive and preventcnl both State 
 and Church from falling into decrepit decay — might 
 grow up ; that the Khalifa might become a purely 
 spiritual ruler with functions of his own, ruling with 
 mutual subordination and co-ordinate jurisdiction be- 
 side a temporal Sultan. The Buwayhids were Shi'- 
 ites and merely tolerated, for state reasons, the im- 
 pieties of the Sunnite Khalifas. But in 447 (a.d. 
 1055), Tughril Beg, the Saljuq, entered Baghdad, 
 was proclaimed Sultan of the Muslims and freed the 
 Khalifa from the Shi'ite yoke. By 470, all western 
 Asia, from the borders of Afghanistan to those of 
 Egypt and the Greek Emi)ive, were, Saljuq. With 
 the Saljuq Sultan as Emperor and the Khalifa as 
 Pope, there was a chance that the Mnsliiu State might 
 enter on a stage of healthy growth through conflit-t. 
 But that was not to be. Neither State nor Church 
 rose to the great opportunity and the experiment was 
 finally and forever cut off by the Mongol flood. 
 When the next great Sultanate — that of the Ottoman 
 Turks — arose, it gathered into its hands the reins of 
 the Khalifate as well. This is what might have been 
 in Islam, built on actual history in Euroj)e. The 
 situation that did arise in Islam may become more 
 clear to us if we can imagine that in Europe the vast 
 plans of Gregory VII. had been carried out and the 
 Pope had become the temporal as well as the spiritual 
 
SOVEREIGNTY OP KH ALT FATE 53 
 
 head of the Ohvistiau world. Such a situation would 
 have beeu similar to that in the world of Islam at its 
 earliest time during some few years under the dj'nasty 
 of the Umayyads, when the one temporal and spirit- 
 ual sovereign ruled from Samarqand to Spain. Then 
 we can imagine how the vast fabric of such an impe- 
 rial system broke down by its own weight. Under 
 conflicting claims of legitimacy, an anti-Pope arose 
 and the great schism began. Thereafter the process 
 of disintegration was still more rapid. Provinces 
 rose in insurrection and dropped away from each 
 rival Pope. Kingdoms grew up and the sovereigns 
 over them professed themselves to be the lieutenants 
 of the supreme Pontiff and sought investiture from 
 him. Last, the States of the Church itself — all that 
 was left to it — came under the rule of some one of 
 these princes and the Pope was, to all intents, a pris- 
 oner in his own palace. Yet the sovereignty of the 
 Khalifa was not simply a legal fiction, any more than 
 that of the Pope would have been in the parallel just 
 sketched. The Muslim princes thought it well to 
 seek spiritual recognition from him, just as Napoleon 
 I. found it prudent to have himself crowned by Pius 
 
 vn. 
 
 But a wave was soon to break in and sweep away 
 all these forms. It came with the Mongols under 
 Hulagu, Avho passed from the destruction of the As- 
 sassins to the destruction of Baghdad and the Kha- 
 Hfate. In a.h. (UHi (a.d. I'iSS), the city was taken and 
 the end of the Abbasids had come. An uncle of the 
 reigning Khalifa escaped and fled to Egypt, where 
 the Mamluk Sultan received him and gave him a 
 
54 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 spiritual court and ecclesiastical recognition. He 
 found it good to have a Khalifa of his own to use 
 in any question of legitimacy. The name had yet 
 so much value. Finally, in 1517, the Mamluk rule 
 went down before the Ottoman Turks, and the story 
 told by them is that the last Abbasid, when he died 
 in 1538, g;ive over his rights to their Sultan, Sulay- 
 man the Great. Since then, the Ottoman Sultan of 
 Constantinople has claimed to be the Khalifa of 
 Muhammad and the spiritual head of the Muslim 
 world. 
 
 Such were the fates of the Commanders of the 
 Faithful. We have traced them through a long and 
 devious course, full of confusions and comialications. 
 Leaving aside the legitimist party, the whole may be 
 summed in a word. The theoretical position was 
 that the Imam, or leader, must be elected by the 
 Muslim community, and that position has never, the- 
 oretically, been abandoned. Each new Ottoman 
 sovereign is solemnly elected by the Ulama, or canon 
 lawyers and divines of Constantinople. His tem- 
 poral sovereignty comes by blood ; in bestowing this 
 spiritual sovereignty the Ulama act as representatives 
 of the People of Muhammad. Thus the theoretical 
 position was liable to much modification in practice. 
 The Muslim community resolves itself into the people 
 of the capital ; still further, into the body-guard of 
 the dead Khalifa ; and, finally, as now, into the pe- 
 culiar custodians of the Faith. Among the Ibadites 
 the position from the first seems to have been that 
 only those learned in the law should act as electors. 
 Along with this, the doctrine developed that it was 
 
CONSTITUTIONAL QUESTION OF TO-DAY 65 
 
 the duty of the people to recoguize nnfait accompli 
 aud to do homage to a successful usui'per — until 
 another more successful should appear. They had 
 learned that it was better to have a bad ruler than no 
 ruler at all. This was the end of the democracy of 
 Islam. 
 
 Finally, it may be well to give some account of the 
 constitutional question as it exists at the present day. 
 The greatest of the Sultans of Islam is undoubtedly 
 the Emperor of India. Under his rule are far more 
 Muslims than fall to any other. But the theory of 
 the ^luslini State never contemplated the possibility 
 of Muslims living under the rule of an unbeliever. 
 For them, the world is divided into two parts, the 
 one is Dor al-Islam, abode of Islam ; and the other 
 is Bar aUarh, abode of war. In the end, Dar al- 
 harh must disappear into Dar al-Islam and the whole 
 world be Muslim. These names indicate with suf- 
 ficient clearness what the Muslim attitude is toward 
 non-Muslims. It is still a moot point among canon 
 lawyers, however, whether Jiliod, or holy war, may 
 be made, unprovoked, upon any Dar al-harh. One 
 thing is certain, there must be a reasonable prospect 
 of success to justify any suoli movement ; the lives of 
 Muslims must not be thrown away. Further, the 
 necessity of the case — in India, especially — has 
 brought up the doctrine that any country in which 
 the peculiar usages of Islam are protected and its 
 iujunctions — even some of them — followed, must be 
 regarded as Dar al-Lilam and that Jihcul within its 
 borders is forbidden. We may doubt, however, if 
 this doctrine would hold back the Indian Muslims to 
 
56 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 any extent if a good opportunity for a Jihad really 
 presented itself. The SLi'ites, it may be remarked, 
 cannot enter upon a Jihad at all until the Hidden 
 Imam returns and leads their armies. 
 
 Again the two signs of sovereignty for Muslims are 
 that the name of the sovereign should be on the 
 coinage and that he should be prayed for in the Friday 
 sermon (khutba). In India, the custom seems to be to 
 pray for " the ruler of the age " without name ; then 
 each worshipper can apply it as he chooses. But 
 there has crept in a custom in a few mosques of pray- 
 ing for the Ottoman Sultan as the Khalifa ; the Eng- 
 lish government busies itself little with these things 
 until compelled, and the custom will douljtless spread. 
 The Ottoman Sultan is certainly next greatest to the 
 Emperor of India and would seem, as a Muslim ruling 
 Muslims, to have an unassailable position. But in 
 his case also difficult and ambiguous constitutional 
 questions can be raised. He has claimed the Khali- 
 fate, as we have seen, since 1538, but the claim is a 
 shaky one and brings awkward responsibilities. As 
 stated at the present day, it has five grounds. First, 
 de facto light; the Ottoman Sultan won his title by 
 the sword and holds it by the sword. Second, elec- 
 tion ; this form has been already described. Third, 
 nomination by the last Abbasid Khalifa of Egypt ; 
 BO Abu Bakr nominated Umar to succeed him, and 
 precedent is everything in Islam. Fourth, possession 
 and guardianship of the two Harams, or Sacred Cit- 
 ies, Mecca and al-Madina. Fifth, pfissossion of some 
 relics of the Prophet saved from the sack of Baghdad 
 and delivered to Sultan Salim, on his conquest of 
 
THEORIES OF THE KHALIFATE 67 
 
 Egypt, by the last Abbasid. But these all shatter 
 against the fixed fact that absolutely accepted tradi- 
 tions from the Prophet assert that the Khalifa must 
 be of the family of Quraysh ; so long as there are 
 two left of that tribe, one must be Khalifa and the 
 other his helper. Still, here, as everywhere, the 
 principal of Ijma, Agreement of the Muslim peo- 
 ple, (see p. 105) comes in and must be reckoned 
 with. These very traditions are probably an expres- 
 sion in concrete form of popular agreement. The 
 Khalifate itself is confessedly based upon agreement. 
 The canon lawyei-s state the case thus : The Imamites 
 and Isma'ilians hold that the appointment of a leader 
 is incumbent upon God. There is only the difference 
 that the Imamites say that a leader is necessary in 
 order to maiutain the laws unimpaired, while the 
 Isma'ilians regard him as essential in order to give 
 instruction about God. The Kharijites, on the other 
 hand, recognize no fundamental need of an Imam ; 
 he is only allowable. Some of them held that he 
 should be appointed in time of public trouble to do 
 away with the trouble, thus a kind of dictator ; others, 
 in time of peace, because only then can the people 
 agree. The Mu'tazilites and the Zaydites held that 
 it was for man to appoint, but that the necessity was 
 based on reason ; men needed such a leader. Yet 
 some Mu'tazilites taught that the basis was partly 
 reason and partly obedience to tradition. On the 
 other hand, the Sunnites hold that the appointment 
 of an Imam is incumbent iipon men and that the 
 basis is obedience to the tradition of the Agreement 
 of the Muslim world from the earliest times. The 
 
68 CONSTITtJTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 community of Islam may have disputed over the in- 
 dividual to be appointed, but they never doubted 
 that the maintenance of the faith in its purity re- 
 quired a leader, and that it was, therefore, incumbent 
 on men to appoint one. The basis is Ijma, Agree- 
 ment, not Scripture or tradition from Muhammad or 
 analogy based on these two. 
 
 It will be seen from this that the de facto ground 
 to the claim of the Ottoman Sultan is the best. The 
 Muslim community must have a leader ; this is the 
 greatest Muslim ruling Muslims ; he claims the lead- 
 ership and holds it. If the English rule were to be- 
 come Muslim, the Muslims would rally to it. The 
 ground of election amounts to nothing, the nomina- 
 tion to little more, except for antiquarians ; the 
 possession of the Prophetic relics is a sentiment that 
 would have weight with the crowd only; no canon 
 lawyer would seriously urge it. The guardianship of 
 the two Harams is precarious. A Turkish reverse in 
 Syria would withdraw every Turkish soldier from 
 Arabia and the great Sharif families of Mecca, all of 
 the blood of the Prophet, would proclaim a Khalifa 
 from among themselves. At present, only the Turk- 
 ish garrison holds them in check. 
 
 But a Khalifa has responsibilities. He absolutely 
 cannot become a constitutional monarch in our sense. 
 He rules under law — divine law — and the people can 
 depose him if he breaks it ; but he cannot set up 
 beside himself a constitutional assembly and give it 
 rights against himself. He is the successor of Mu- 
 hammad and must rule, within limitations, as an ab- 
 solute monarch. So impossible is the modern Khali- 
 
PAN-ISLAMISM 69 
 
 fate, and so gigantic are its responsibilities. The 
 millions of Chinese Muslims look to him and all 
 Muslims of central Asia ; the Muslims of India who 
 are not Shi'ite also look to him. So, too, in Africa 
 and wherever in the world the People of Muhammad 
 have gone, their eyes turn to the Bosphorus and the 
 Great Sultan. This is what has been called the 
 modern Pan-Islamic movement ; it is a modern fact. 
 
 The position of the other Muslim sects we have 
 already seen. Of Shi'ite rulers, there are the Imam- 
 ites in Persia; scattered Zaydites still in south Arabia 
 and fugitive in Africa ; strange secret bodies of Isma- 
 'ilians — Druses, Nusayrites, Assassins — still holding 
 their own in mountain recesses, forgotten by the 
 world ; oldest of aU, the Sharifs of Morocco, who are 
 Sunnites and antedate all theological differences, hold- 
 ing only by the blood of the Prophet. At Zanzibar, 
 Uman and the Mzab in Algeria are the descendants 
 of the Kharijites. Probably, somewhere or other, 
 there are some fossilized descendants of every sect 
 that has ever arisen, either to trouble the peace of 
 Islam or to save it from scholastic decrepitude and 
 death. Insurrections and heresies have their own 
 uses. 
 
 It only remains to make mention of two modern 
 movements which ha.ve deeply affected the Islam of 
 to-day. The Pan-Islamic movement, noticed above, 
 strives as much as anything to bring the Muslim 
 world into closer touch with the science and thought 
 of the Christian world, rallying all the Muslim peo- 
 ples at the same time round the Ottoman Sultan as 
 their spiritual head and holding fast by the kernel of 
 
60 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 Islam. It is a reform movement whose treud is for- 
 ward. The other two, to which we now come, are 
 reform movements also, but their trend is backward. 
 They look to the good old days of early Islam and 
 try to restore them. 
 
 The first is that of the Wahhabites, so called from 
 Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (Slave of the Boun- 
 tiful), its founder, a native of Najd in central Arabia, 
 who died in 1787. His aim was to bring Islam 
 back to its primitive purity and to do away with all 
 the usages and beliefs which had arisen to cloud its 
 absolute monotheism. But attempts at reformation 
 in Islam have never led to anything but the founding 
 of new dynasties. They may begin with a saintly 
 reformer, but in the first or the second generation 
 there is sure to come the conquering disciple ; relig- 
 ion and rule go together, and he who meddles with 
 the one must next grasp at the other. The third 
 stage is the extinction of the new dynasty and the 
 vanishing of its party into a more or less secret sect, 
 the vitality of which is again directed into religious 
 channels. The Wahhabites were no exception. Their 
 rule extended from the Persian Gulf to the Eed Sea, 
 touched al-Taman and Hadramawt and included some 
 districts of the Pashalik of Baghdad. That was early 
 in the nineteenth century ; but now, after many dy- 
 nastic changes, the rule of the Wahhabites proper 
 has almost ceased, although the Turks have not 
 gained any new footing in Najd. There, a native 
 Arab dynasty has sprung up which is free from Turk- 
 ish control in every respect, and has its seat in Ha'il. 
 But the zeal of the Wahhabites gave an impulse to 
 
BROTHERHOOD OF AS-SANUSI 61 
 
 reform in the general body of Muslims which is not 
 yet, by any means, extinct. Especially in India, 
 their views have been widely spread by missionaries, 
 and at one time there was grave fear of a Wahhabite 
 insurrection. But dead parties in Islam seldom rise 
 again, and the life of Wahhabism has passed into the 
 Muslim Church as a whole. Politically it has failed, 
 but the spirit of reform remains and has undoubt- 
 edly influenced the second reform movement to which 
 we now come. 
 
 That is the Brotherhood of as-Sanusi, founded in 
 1837 by Muhammad ibn Ali as-Sanusi in order to re- 
 form and spread the faith. The tendency to organ- 
 ize has always been strong among Orientals, and in 
 Islam itself there have risen, as we have seen, from 
 the earliest times, secret societies for conspiracy and 
 insurrection. But apart from these dubious organi- 
 zations, religious feeling has also expressed itself in 
 brotherhoods closely corresponding to the monastic 
 orders of Europe, except that they were, and are, 
 self-governing and under no relations but those of 
 sentiment to the head of the Muslim Faith. Rather, 
 these orders of darwishes have been inclined toward 
 heresies of a mystical and pantheistic type more 
 than toward the development and support of the 
 severely scholastic theology of orthodox Islam. This 
 is a side of Muhammadanism with which we shall 
 have to deal in some detail hereafter. In the mean- 
 time, it is enough to say that the Brotherhood of 
 as-Sanusi is one of the orders of darwishes, but 
 distinguished from all its predecessors in its severely 
 reforming and puritanic character. It has taken up 
 
62 CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 
 
 the task of the Wahhabites and is working out the 
 same problem in a rather different way. Its princi- 
 ples are of the strictest monotheism ; aU usages and 
 ideas that do not accord with their views of the exact 
 letter of the Qur'an are prohibited. The present head 
 of the Brotherhood, the son of the founder, who him- 
 self died in 1859, claims to be the Mahdi and has es- 
 tablished a theocratic state at Jarabub, in the eastern 
 Sahara, between Egypt and Tripolis. The mother 
 house of the order is there, and from it missionaries 
 have gone out and established other houses through- 
 out all north Africa and Morocco and far into the 
 interior. The Head himself has of late retreated 
 farther into the desert. There is also an important 
 centre at Mecca, where the pilgrims and the Bedawis 
 are initiated into the order in great numbers. From 
 Mecca these brethren return to their homes aU over 
 the Muslim world, and the order is said to be especially 
 popular in the Malay Archipelago. So there has 
 sprung up in Islam, in tremendous ramifications, an 
 imperium in imperio. All the brethren in all the de- 
 grees — for, just as in the monastic orders of Europe, 
 there are active members and lay members — reverence 
 and pay blind obedience to the Head in his inacces- 
 sible oasis in the African desert. There he works 
 toward the end, and there can be little doubt what 
 that end will be. Sooner or later Europe — in the 
 first instance, England in Egypt and France in 
 Algeria — will have to face the bursting of this storm. 
 For this Mahdi is different from him of Khartum and 
 the southern Sudan in that he knows how to rule and 
 wait ; for years he has gathered arms and munitions, 
 
THE PROBLEM OF THE PUTUEE 63 
 
 and trained men for the great Jihad. When his plans 
 are ready and his time is come, a new chapter will be 
 opened in the history of Islam, a chapter which will 
 cast into forgetfulness even the recent volcanic out- 
 burst in China. It will then be for the Ottoman 
 Sultan of the time to show what he and his Khalifate 
 are worth. He will have to decide whether he will 
 throw in his lot with a Mahdi of the old Islam and 
 the dream of a Muslim millennium, or boldly turn to 
 new things and carry the Successorship and the 
 People of Muhammad to join the civilized world. 
 
PART II 
 SDebelcpmcnt of '^uti^ptuttnte 
 
 CHAPTEE I 
 
 The scope of jurisprudence among Muslims ; the earliest elements 
 in it, Arab custom, Jewish law, personality of Muhammad ; 
 his attitude toward law ; elements after death of Muhammad ; 
 Qur'an, Usage of the Prophet, common law of al-Madina; 
 conception of Sunna before Muhammad and after ; traditions 
 and their transmission ; traditions in book form ; influence of 
 Umayyads ; forgery of traditions ; the Muwaiia of Malik ibn 
 Anas ; the Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal ; the musannafs ; 
 al-Bukhari; Muslim; IbnMaja; at-Tirmidhi ; an-N"asa'i; al- 
 Baghawi ; the problem of the Muslim lawyers ; their sources ; 
 Roman law; the influence of the doctrine of the Responsa pru- 
 dentium ; Opinion in Islam ; the Law of Nature or Equity in 
 Islam ; istihsan ; istislah ; Analogy ; the patriarchal period in 
 Islam ; the Umayyad period ; the growth of the canon law. 
 
 In tracing tlie development of Muslim jurispru- 
 dence few of the difficulties are encountered which 
 surrounded Sir Henry Maine when he first examined 
 the origins and history of European law. We do not 
 need to push our researches back to the primitive 
 family, nor to work our way through periods of cen- 
 turies guided by the merest fragments of documents 
 and hints of usage. Our subject was born in the 
 light of history ; it ran its course in a couple of hun- 
 dred years and has left at every important point 
 
 65 
 
06 DEVELOPMENT OF JUUISPKUDENCE 
 
 authoritative evidences of its whence, its how, aud its 
 whither. Our difficulties are different, but sufficiently 
 great. Shortly, they are two. The mass of material 
 is overpowering ; the strangeness of the ideas involved 
 is perplexing. The wealth of material will become 
 plain, to some extent at least, as the history is traced ; 
 but for the strangeness of the contents, of the ar- 
 rangement and the atmosphere of these codes some 
 preparation must be given from the outset. How, 
 indeed, can we meet a legal code which knows no 
 distinction of personal or public, of civil or criminal 
 law ; which prescribes and describes the use of the 
 toothpick and decides when a wedding invitation may 
 be declined, which enters into the minutest and most 
 unsavory details of family life and lays down rules of 
 religious retreat ? Is it by some subtle connection of 
 thought that the chapter on oaths and vows follows 
 immediately that on horse-racing, and a section on 
 the building line on a street is inserted in a chapter 
 on bankruptcy and composition ? One thing, at least, 
 i is abundantly clear. Muslim law, in the most abso- 
 jlute sense, fits the old definition, and is the science of 
 all things, human and divine. It tells what we must 
 render to Caesar and what to God, what to ourselves, 
 and what to our fellows. The bounds of the Platonic 
 definition of rendering to each man his due it utterly 
 shatters. While Muslim theology defines everything 
 that a man shall believe of things in jjeaven and in 
 earth and beneath the earth — and tliis is no flat rhet- 
 oric — Muslim law prescribes everything that a man 
 shall do to God, to his neighbor, and to himself. It 
 takes all duty for its portion and defines all action in 
 
SCOPE OF MUSLIM LXW b7 
 
 terms of dutv. Xothing can escape the narrow meshes 
 of its net. One of the gieatest legists of Islam never 
 ate a watermelon because he conld not find that the 
 xtsage of the Prophet had laid down and sanctioned a 
 canonical method of doing so. 
 
 It will, tlieiefoie, be well for the strident to work 
 through the sketch of a code of Muslim law which is 
 insei-ted in Appendix I. Que has been chosen which 
 belongs to the school of ash-Shafi'i because of its gen- 
 eral accessibility. It should be remembered that 
 what is given is the merest table of contents. The 
 standard Arabic commentary on the book extends to 
 eight hundred and eleven closely priuted qiiarto 
 pages. Even a mere reading of this table of contents, 
 however, will show in how different a sphere of thought 
 from ours Muslim law moves and lives. But we must 
 retiim to the beginning of things, to the egg from 
 which this tremendous system was hatched. 
 
 The mother-city of Islam was the little town of 
 Tathiib, called Madinat an-Xabi, the City of the 
 Prophet, or, shortly, al-Madiua, ever since the Hijra 
 or Migration of Muhammad to it in the year 622 of 
 the Christian era. Here the first Muslim state was 
 founded, and the germinal principles of Muslim juris- 
 prudence fixed. Both state and jurisprudence were 
 the result of the inter-working of the same highly 
 complicated causes. The ferments in the case may 
 be classified and described as follows : First, in the 
 town itself before the appearance of Muhammad on 
 its little stage — little, but so momentous for the 
 future — there were two parties, often at war, oftener 
 at peace. There was a genuine .liab element and 
 
68 DEVELOPMENT OF JDRISPETJDENCE 
 
 there was a large settlement of Jews. To the Arabs 
 any conception of law was utterly foreign. Au Arab 
 tribe has no constitution; its system is one of in- 
 dividualism ; the single man is a sovereign and no 
 writ can lie against him ; the tribe can cast him forth 
 from its midst ; it cannot otherwise coerce him. So 
 'stands the case now in the desert, and so it was then. 
 Some slight hold there might be on the tribe through 
 the fear of the tribal God, but on the individual Arab, 
 always a somewhat cynical sceptic, that hold was of 
 the slightest. Further, the avenging of a broken 
 oath was left to the God that had witnessed the oath ; 
 if he did not care to right his client, no one else would 
 interfere. There was customary law, undoubtedly, 
 but it was protected by no sanction and enforced by 
 no authority. If both parties chose to invoke it, 
 well; if not, neither had anything to fear but the 
 anger of his opponent. That law of custom we shall 
 find again appearing in the system of Islam, but there 
 it will be backed by the sanction of the wrath of God 
 working through the authority of the state. The Jew- 
 ish element was in a different case. They may have 
 been Jewish immigrants, they may have been Jewish 
 proselytes — many Arab tribes, we know, had gone 
 over bodily to Judaism — but their lives were ruled 
 and guided by Jewish law. To the primitive and 
 divine legislation on Sinai there was an immense ac- 
 cretion by legal fiction and by usage ; the Roman 
 codes had left their mark and the customary law of 
 the desert as well. All this was working in the life 
 of the town when Muhammad and his little band of 
 fugitives from Mecca entered it. Being Meccans 
 
MUHAMMAD AS A LEGISLATOR 69 
 
 they must have brought with them the more devel- 
 oped legal ideas of that trading centre; but these 
 were of comparativelj- little account in the scale. The 
 new and dominating element was the personality of 
 Muhammad himself. His contribution was legisla- 
 tion pure and simple, the only legislation that has j 
 ever been in Islam. Till his death, ten years later, 
 he ruled his community as an absolute monarch, as a 
 prophet in his own right. He sat in the gate and 
 judged the people. He had no need of a code, for 
 his owu will was enough. He followed the custom- 
 ai-y law of the town, as it has been described above, 
 when it suited him, and when he judged that it was 
 best. If not, he left it and there was a revelation. 
 So the legislative part of the Qur'an grew out of such 
 scraps sent down out of heaven to meet the needs of 
 the squabbles and questions of the townsfolk of al- 
 Madiua. The system was one of pure opportunism ; 
 but of what body of legislation can that not be said ? 
 Of course, on the one hand, not all decisions were 
 backed by a revelation, and Muhammad seems, on the 
 other, to. have made a few attempts to deal system- 
 atically with certain standing and constantly recur- 
 ring problems — such, for example, as the conflicting 
 claims of heirs in an estate, and the whole compli- 
 cated question of divorce— but in general, the position 
 holds that Muhammad as a lawyer lived from hand 
 to mouth. He did not draw up any twelve tables or 
 ten commandments, or code, or digest ; he was there 
 and the people could come and ask him questions 
 when they chose, and that was enough. The concep- 
 uou of a rounded and complete system which will 
 
70 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPE0DENCE 
 
 meet any case and to which all cases must be ad- 
 justed by legal fiction or equity, the conception 
 which we owe to the genius and experience of the 
 Eoman lawyers, was foreign to his thought. From 
 time to time he got into difficulties. A revelation 
 proved too wide or too narrow, or left out some im- 
 portant possibility. Then there came another to 
 supplement or correct, or even to set the first quite 
 aside — Muhammad had no scruples about progressive 
 revelation as applied to himself. Thus, through these 
 interpretive acts, as we may call them, many flat con- 
 tradictions have come into the Qur'an and have proved 
 the delight of generations of Muslim jurisconsults. 
 
 Such, then, was the state of things legal in al- 
 Madina during the ten years of Muhammad's rule 
 there until his death in a.d. 632. Of law there was, 
 strictly speaking, none. In his decisions, Muham- 
 mad could follow certainly the customary law of the 
 town ; but to do so there was no necessity upon him 
 other than prudence, for his authority was absolute. 
 Yet even with such authority and such freedom, his 
 task was a hard one. The Jews, the native i^i'abs of 
 al-Madina, and his fellow fugitives from Mecca lived 
 in more or less of friction. He had to see to it that his 
 decisions did not bring that friction to the point of 
 throwing the whole community into a flame. The 
 Jews, it is true, were soon eliminated, but the influ- 
 ence of their law lasted in the customary law of the 
 town long after they themselves had become insig- 
 nificant. Still, with all this, the suitor before Mu- 
 hammad had no certainty on what basis his claims 
 would be judged ; whether it would be the old law of 
 
que' aw; usage of muhammad 71 
 
 the town, or a rough equity based on Muhammad's 
 own ideas, or a special revelation ad hoc. So far, 
 then, we may be said to have the three elements — / 
 common law, equity, legislation. Legal fiction we| 
 shall meet later ; Muhammad had no need of it. 
 
 But with the death of Muhammad in a.d. 632 the 
 situation was completely changed. We can now speak ; 
 of Muslim law ; legislation plays no longer any part ; ' 
 the process of collecting, arranging, coiTelating, and! 
 developing has begun. Consider the situation as it 
 must have presented itself to one of the immediate 
 successors of Muhammad, as he sat in his place and 
 judged the people. When a case came up for deci- 
 sion, there were several sources from which a law in 
 point might be drawn. First among them was the i 
 Qur^m It had been collected from the fragmentary 
 state in which Muhammad had left it by Abu Bakr, 
 his first Khalifa, some two years after his death. 
 Again, some ten years later, it was revised and given 
 forth in a final public recension by Uthman, the third 
 Khalifa. This was the absolute word of God — ■ 
 thoughts and language — and stood and, in theory, 
 still stands first of all sources for theology and law. 
 If it contained a law clearly applying to the case in 
 hand, there was no more to be said ; divine legisla- 
 tion had settled the matter. If not, recourse was 
 next had to the decis ions of_the Prophet. Had a 
 similar one come before him, and how had he ruled? 
 If the memories of the Companions of the Prophet, 
 the Sahibs, could adduce nothing similar from one of 
 his decisions, then the judge had to look further for 
 an authority. But the decisions of Muhammad had 
 
72 DEVELOPMENT OF JUEISPKUDENCE 
 
 been many, the memories of his Companions were 
 capacious, and possessed further, as we must recog- 
 nize with regret, a constructive power that helped 
 .the early judges of Islam out of many close corners. 
 */ But if tradition even — true or false — finally failed, then 
 the judgeTetl back on the common law of al-Madina, 
 that customary law already mentioned. When that, 
 too, failed, the last recourse was had to the common- 
 sense of the judge — roughly, what we would call 
 equity. At the beginning, therefore, of Muslim 
 law, it had the following sources — legislation, the 
 usage of Muhammad, the usage of al-Madina, 
 equity. Naturally, as time went on and the figure of 
 the founder drew back and became more obscure 
 and more venerated, equity fell gradually into dis- 
 use ; a closer search was made for decisions of that 
 founder which could in any way be pressed into ser- 
 vice; a method of analogy, closely allied to legal 
 fiction, was built up to assist in this, and the devel- 
 opment of Muslim jurisprudence as a system and a 
 science was fairly begun. Further, in later times, the 
 decisions of the first four Khalifas and the agree- 
 (-5) ment (ijma) of the immediate Companions of Mu- 
 hammad came to assume an importance only second 
 to that of Muhammad himself. Later still, as a re- 
 sult of this, the opinion grew up that a general agree- 
 ment of the jurisconsults of any particular time was 
 to be regarded as a legitimate source of law. But 
 we must return to consider our subject more broadly 
 and in another field. 
 
 The fact has already been brought out that the 
 sphere of law is much wider in Islam than it has ever 
 
LEGAL CLASSES OF ACTIOXS To 
 
 been •with ns. By it all the minutest acts of a Mus- 
 lim are guarded. Eui'ope, also. p:issed tlirougli a 
 stage similar to this in its sumptuary la-^s : and the 
 tendency towai-d inquisitorial legislation still exists 
 in America, but not even the most medijEvally mind- 
 ed American Western State has ventm-ed to put upon 
 its statute-book regulations as to the use of the tooth- 
 pick and the ^ash-cloth. Thus, the Muslim concep- 
 tion of laTv is so -wide as to reach essential difference. 
 A Mushm is told by his code not only what is re- 
 quired under penalty, but also what is either recom- 
 mended or disliked though without reward or peu;\lty 
 beinfif inTolved. He may certainly consult his law- 
 yer, to learn how near the wind he can sail without 
 unpleasant consequences; but he may also consult 
 him as his spiritual director with regard to the rela- 
 tive praiseworthiuess or blameworthiness of classes 
 of actions of which our law takes no cognizance. In ' 
 consequence, actions are divided by Mushm canon 
 lawyei-s (faqihs) into five classes. First, necessary 
 (fard or icajib) : a duty the omission of which is 
 punished, the doing rewarded. Secondly, recom- 
 mended {mandui or m-(>-':''"-'hh); the doing is re- 
 warded, but the omission is not punished. Thirdly, 
 permitted (ja'iz or inhaTi); legally iadifferent 
 Fomthly, disliked (mah-uh) : disapproved by the 
 law, but not imder penalty. Fifthly, forbidden (ha- 
 ram) ; an action punishable by law. All this being 
 so. it wiU be easily undei-stood that the record of the 
 mannei-s and customs of the Pi-ophet. of the little de- 
 tails of his hfe and conversation, came to assume a 
 high importance. Much of that was too petty ever 
 
74 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE 
 
 to reach expression in the great digests of law ; not 
 even the most zealous fixer of life by rule and line 
 would condemn his fellow-religionist because he pre- 
 ferred to carry a different kind of walking-stick from 
 that approved by the Prophet, or found it fitting to 
 arrange his hair in a different way. But still, all 
 pious Muslims paid attention to such things, and 
 fenced their lives about with the strictest Prophetic 
 precedent. In consequence of this, there early arose 
 in Islam a class of students who made it their busi- 
 ness to investigate and hand down the minutest de- 
 tails as to the habits of Muhammad. This was a 
 separate thing from the study of law, although fated 
 to be eventually connected with it. Even in the 
 time of the Jahiliya — the period before Islam, vari- 
 ously explained as the ignorance or as the rudeness, 
 uncivilizedness — it had been a fixed trait of the Arab 
 mind to hold closely to old paths. An inherent con- 
 servatism canonized the sunna — custom, usage — of 
 the ancients ; any stepping aside from it was a bid'a 
 — innovation — and had to win its way by its merits, 
 in the teeth of strong prejudice. With the coming 
 of Muhammad and the preaching of Islam, this an- 
 cestral sunna had in great part to yield. But the 
 temper of the Arab mind remained firm, and the 
 sunna of Muhammad took its place. Pious Muslims 
 did not say, " Such was the usage of our fathers, 
 and it is mine ; " but, " I follow the usage of the 
 Prophet of God." Then, just as the old sunna of 
 the heathen times had expressed itself through the 
 stories of great warriors, of their battles and loves ; 
 through anecdotes of wise men, and their keen and 
 
SUIsNA ; HADITH 75 
 
 eloquent words ; so it M-as with the sunna of the one 
 man, Muhammad. What he said, and what he did ; 
 what he refrained from doing ; what he gave quasi- 
 approval to by silence ; all was passed on in rapidly 
 increasing, pregnant little narratiyes. First, his im- 
 mediate Companions would note, either by commit- 
 ting to memory or to a written record, his utterances 
 and table-talk generally. We have evidence of sev- 
 eral such BosweUs, who fixed his words as they fell. 
 Later, probably, would come notes of his doings and 
 his customs, and of all the little and great happen- 
 ings of the town. Above all, a record was being 
 gathered of all the cases judged by him, and of his 
 decisions ; of all the answers which he gave to for- 
 mal questions on rehgious life and faith. All this 
 was jotted down by the Companions on sahifas — odd 
 sheets — just as they had done in the Ignorance with 
 the proverbs of the wise and their dark sayings. 
 The records of sayings were called hadiths ; the rest, 
 as a whole, sunna — custom, for its details was used 
 the plural, sunan — customs. At first, each man had 
 his own collection in memory or in writing. Then, 
 after the death of the Prophet and when his first 
 Companions were dropping off, these collections 
 were passed on to others of the second generation. 
 And so the chain ran on and in time a tradition 
 came to consist formally of two things — the text or 
 matter {mafii) so handed on, and the succession {is- 
 nad) over whose Kps it had passed. A said, " There 
 narrated to me B, saying, ' There narrated to 
 me C, saying,' " so far the isnad, until the last 
 link came, and the inatn, the Prophet of God said. 
 
76 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE 
 
 " Some of my injunctions abrogate others," or "Tlie 
 Jann were created of a smokeless flame," or what- 
 ever it might be. What has just been said suggests 
 that it was at first indifferent whether traditions were 
 preserved orally or in writing. That is true of the 
 first generation ; but it must be remembered at the 
 same time, that the actual passing on was oral ; the 
 writing merely aided the memory to hold that which 
 was already learned. But with time, and certainly 
 by the middle of the second century of the Hijra, two 
 opposing tendencies in this respect had developed. 
 Many continued to put their trust in the written 
 word, and even came to pass traditions on without 
 any oral communication. But for others there lay 
 grave dangers in this. One was evidently real. The 
 unhappy character of the Arabic script, especially 
 when written without diacritical points, often made 
 it hard, if not practically impossible, to understand 
 such short, contextless texts as the traditions. A 
 guide was necessary to show how the word should be 
 read, and how understood. At the present time a 
 European scholar will sometimes be helpless before 
 even a fully vocalized text, and must take refuge in 
 native commentaries or in that oral tradition, if it 
 still exists and he has access to it, which supplies at 
 least a third of the meaning of an Arabic book. 
 Strengthening this came theological reasons. The 
 words of the Prophet would be profaned if they were 
 in a book. Or, again, they would be too much hon- 
 ored and the Quran itself might be neglected. 
 This last fear has been justified to a certain extent 
 by the event. On these grounds, and many more. 
 
TRADITIO^rS I^^ LITEEATURE 77 
 
 the Avritiiig and transmitting in writing of traditions 
 came to be lieroely opposed ; and the opposition con- 
 tinued, as a theological exercise, long after many 
 books of traditions -svere ia existence, and after the 
 oral transmission had become the merest farce and 
 had even frankly dropped out. 
 
 It is to the formation of these books of traditions, 
 or, as we might say, traditions in literature, that we 
 must now turn. For long, the fragmentary mhi/as 
 and private collections made by separate scholars for 
 their o^mi use sufficed. Books dealing with law 
 {jiqh) were written before there wei-e any in that 
 department of literature called Jiadith. The cause of 
 this is tolerably plain. Law and treatises of law 
 were a necessity for the public and thus were encour- 
 aged by the state. The study of traditions, on the 
 other hand, was less essential and of a more personal 
 and private nature. Further, under the dynasty of 
 the Umayyads, who reigned from a.h. -il to a.h. 132, 
 theological literature was little encouraged. They 
 were simple heathen in all but name, and belonged, 
 and recognized that they belonged, not to Islam but 
 to the Jahihya. For reasons of state, they encouraged 
 and spread — also freely forged and encouraged others 
 to forge — such traditions as were favorable to their 
 plans and to their rale generally. This was neces- 
 sary if they were to carry the body of the people with 
 them. But they regarded themselves as kings and 
 not as the heads of the Muslim people. This same 
 device has been used after them by all the contend- 
 ing factions of Islam. Each party has sought sanc- 
 tion for its views by representing them in traditions 
 
78 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDBNOK 
 
 from the Prophet, and the thiug has gone so far that 
 
 on almost every disputed point there are absolutely 
 
 conflicting jirophetic utterances in circulation. It 
 
 , has even been held, and with some justification, 
 
 / 1 that the entire body of normative tradition at present 
 
 ' j in existence was forged for a purpose. With this 
 
 attitude of the Umayyads we shall have to deal at 
 
 greater length later. It is sufficient now to note that 
 
 the first real appearance of hadith in literature was 
 
 in the Mmoatta of Malik ibn Anas who died in a.h. 
 
 179. 
 
 Yet even this appearance is not so much of hadilh 
 for its own sake, as of usages bearing upon law and 
 of the law that can be drawn from these usages. 
 The book is a corpus iuris not a cotjius traditionum. 
 Its object was not so much to separate from the mass 
 of traditions in circulation those which could be re- 
 garded as sound of origin and to unite them in a 
 formal collection, as to build up a system of law 
 based partly on tradition. The previous works deal- 
 ing with law proper had been of a speculative char- 
 acter, had shown much subjective reliance on their 
 own opinion on the part of the writers and had 
 drawn little from the sacred usage of the Prophet 
 and quoted few of his traditional sayings. Against 
 that the book of Malik was a j)rote8t and formed a 
 link between such law books pure and the collections 
 of traditions pure with which we now come to deal. 
 I To Malik the main, or text, of a tradition had been 
 j the only thing'~oi importance. To the isnajl, or 
 j chain of authority running back to the Prophet, he 
 had paid little attention. He, as we have seen, was 
 
THE SirSXAP? T;' 
 
 a lawxer ;iz:a cihered Tr.idi:ioi:s. not for tiieir own 
 s.;vi:c dvaI to -u^e tieiii in l.iw. To oihrr*. tlie tradition ; 
 ^'.iS the tLjqj:. aiia too mneli care eorJd n n be c-"^eji 
 :o its ac:;r_s and i:* ai;thei.ticii_v. Ai:d the caie ■w.;* 
 reaUx called for. "With tie corpse of ::-Jie .>:::.'. the 
 po^^uij; dejiiand, tie s^^iyply of tr-.uii:!. ■_? had ;>''^^.> 
 giown iniTil tliere t, ,.< no donl t in tie inijnd of aiv- 
 one that ;\n cMiomioni^ prcporrioi: -nere >i- -rle fo-cf.- 
 li!-. To weed out tie sonrd ores, atteiitioii h.-id :o 
 be civen to tie .,-" , :J: :^e iiii:.:^;. v.r-jr. it nsd :.-< Iv 
 examined: the fact of their havini: been in ir.:cr- 
 oor.rse to be deteiicired ; tlie po?.i-:riiry of tie o;ise 
 in cei;er,\l to be tested. TLv.s tierexrere formed real 
 ool.ev:::i.s of sitrr-osed".y sound rraditions. -whioi 
 ■were oaied -'I',s'.a<i<. ieo^v.^e each tr;"idi;:on to^s 
 '",-..>";;ij — propped, sttyrorted — against tie Con:y;ui- 
 iors fron: Trhom it proceeded. In aecorduuie-e 't'^iti 
 tiis lilso tiev wexe arraniod aeoordinc to tie Com- 
 panions. After tie name of tie Companion ■weie 
 given all tie traditions le^^ding back t; him. One of 
 tie e:u-liest and greatest of these Ix'eks -svas ttie 
 31 <>-.jS of Ahmad ibn H;mi;J, who died a-H. i?41 ; 
 of him more hererifter. Tl.is book Las been printed 
 lecent^y at C;aio in six q.tiixto vo.nnies of •2.>fo 
 padres and is sid. to oontain abottt thirtv tiensaud 
 traditions coinc back to seven hundred Companions. 
 Ent another type of tra.dition-book vrss crowing 
 ttp. Jes.s mecianieal in ruT-tngement. It is tie ]!%>- 
 emnaf. the arranged, clas-siheo. — find in it tie rr;idi- 
 tions are arranged in chapters aoeoramg to tieir snh- 
 ject matter. Tie irst JLr;i.>u ',';."!/" to in;ike a permanexit 
 mark was the i^: ". — sound — of ai-Etiiirixi. wio 
 
80 DEVELOPMENT OF JUKISPRUDENOE 
 
 died in a. h. 257. It is still extant and is the most 
 respected of all the collections of traditions. The 
 I principle of arranyoinout in it is legal ; that iri, the 
 I traditions are classified in these chapters so as to af- 
 '! ford bases for a complete system of jurisprudcmce. 
 Al-Bukhari was a strong opponent of spoculalivo law 
 and his book was thus a protest against a tendency 
 which, as we shall see later, was strong in his time. 
 Another point in which al-Bukhari made his influ- 
 ence felt and with greater effect, was increased 
 severity in the testing of traditions. He established 
 very strict laws, though of a somewh;it mechanical 
 kind, and was most scrupulous in applying them. 
 His book contains about seven thousand traditions, 
 and he chose those, so at least runs the story, out of 
 six hundred thousand which he found in circulation. 
 The rest were rejected as failing to meet his tests. 
 How far the forgery of traditions had gone may Ije 
 seen from the example of Ibn Abi Awja, who was exe- 
 cuted in A.H. 155, and who confessed that he liad him- 
 self put into circulation four thousand that weie false. 
 Another and a similar Sali.ih is that of Muslim, who 
 J died in A.n. 261. He was not so markedly juristic 
 ; ( as al-Bukhari. His object was rather to purify the 
 I f mass of existing tradition from illegitimate accre- 
 tions than to construct a basis for a complete law 
 code. He has prefixed a valuable introduction on the 
 science of tradition generally. In some slight details 
 his principle of criticism differed from that of al- 
 Bukhari. 
 
 I These two collections, called the two SaJi.ihs — as- 
 { Sahihan — are technically jami's, i.e. they contain all 
 
THE SUKAN 81 
 
 the different classes of traditions, historical, ethical, 
 dogmatic and legal. They have also come to be, by 
 common agreement, the two most honored authorities 
 in the Muslim world. A believer finds it hard, if not 
 impossible, to reject a tradition that is found in 
 both. 
 
 But there are four other collections which are 
 called Sunan — Usages — and which stand only second | 
 to the two Sahihs. These are by Ibn Maja (d. 303), 
 Abu Da'ud as-Sijistani (d. 275), at-Tirmidhi (d. 279) 
 and an-Nasa'i (d. 303). They deal almost entirely with 
 legal traditions, those that tell what is permitted and 
 what is forbidden, and do not convey information on 
 religious and theological subjects. They are also 
 much more lenient in their criticisms of dubious tra- 
 ditions. To work exclusion with them, the rejection 
 needed to be tolerably unanimous. This was re- 
 quired by their stand-point and endeavor, which was 
 to find a basis for all the minutest developments and 
 details of jurisprudence, civil and religious. 
 
 These six books, the two SaMJis and the four 
 Sunans, came to be regarded in time as the principal 
 and all-important sources for traditional science. 
 This had already come about by the end of the fifth 
 century, although even after that voices of uncer- 
 tainty continued to make themselves heard. Ibn 
 Maja seems to have been the last to secure firm foot- 
 ing, but even he is included by al-Baghawi (d. 516) 
 in his Masabih as-sunna, an attempted epitome into 
 one book of what was valuable in all. Still, long 
 after that, Ibn Khaldun, the great historian (d. 808), 
 speaks of five fundamental works ; and others speak of 
 
82 DEVELOPMENT OP JURISPUUDENCE 
 
 seven, adding the Muwatta of Malik to the six above. 
 Others, again, especially in the West, extended the 
 number of canonical works to ten, though with vary- 
 ing members ; but all these must be regarded as 
 more or less local, temporary, and individual eccen- 
 tricities. The position of the six stands tolerably 
 firm. 
 
 So much it has been necessary to interpolate and 
 anticipate with regard to the students of tradition 
 whose interest lay in gathering up and preserving, 
 not in using and applying. From the earliest time, 
 then, there existed these two classes in the bosom of 
 Islam, students of tradition proper and of law proper. 
 For long they did not clash ; but a collision was in- 
 evitable sooner or later. 
 
 Yet, if the circle of the Muslim horizon had not 
 widened beyond the little market-town of al-Madina, 
 that collision might have been long in coming. Its 
 immediate causes' were from without, and are to be 
 found in the wave of conquest that carried Islam, 
 within the century, to Samarqand beyond the Oxus 
 and to Tours in central France. Consider what that 
 wave of conquest was and meant. Within fourteen 
 years of the Hijra, Damascus was taken, and within 
 seventeen years, all Syria and Mesopotamia. By the 
 year 21, the Muslims held Persia ; in 41 they were at 
 Herat, and in 56 they reached Samarqand. In the 
 West, Egypt was taken in the year 20 ; but the way 
 through northern Africa was long and hard. Car- 
 thage did not fall till 74, but Spain was conquered 
 with the fall of Toledo in 93. It was in a.d. 732, the 
 year of the Hijra 114, that the wave at last was 
 
KISE OF SPECULATIVE JURISPKLTDENCE 83 
 
 turned and the merey of Tours was Tvrouglit bv 
 Chillies the Hammer; but the Muslims still held 
 Xai'bomie and raided in Burgiimly and the Dauphine. 
 The wealth that llowed into Ai-abia from these expe- 
 ditions was euormous ; money and slaves and hixn- 
 ries of every kind went far to transform the old life of 
 hardness and simplicity. G^reat estates grew up : 
 fortunes were made and lost ; the intricacies of the 
 Spian and Pei'sian civilizations overcame their con- 
 querors. All this meant new legal conditions and 
 problems. The system that had sufficed to gaiard the 
 right to a few sheep or camels had to be transformed 
 before it would suffice to adjust the rights and claims 
 of a tribe of miUionnaires. But it must not be 
 thought that these expeditions were only campaigns 
 of plunder. T\'ith the Muslim armies eveiywhei-e 
 went law and justice, such as it was. Jurists accom- 
 panied each army and were settled in the great camp 
 cities which were built to hold the conquered lands. 
 Al-Basra and al-Kufa and Fustat, the parent of Cairo, 
 owe their origin to this, and it was in these new seats 
 of mihtaut Islam that speculative jurisprudence arose 
 and moulded the Muslim system. 
 
 The early lawyers had much to do and much to 
 learn, and it is to their credit that they recognized 
 both necessities. Muslim law is no product of the 
 desert or of the mind of Muhammad, as some have 
 said; but rather of the labor of these men, strug- 
 gling with a gigantic problem. They might haTSi 
 taken their task much more easily than they did; 
 they might have hved as 3Iuhammad had done, from 
 hand to mouth, and have concealed their own sloth 
 
84 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPEUDENCE 
 
 by force aud free invention of authorities. Bnt they 
 recognized their responsibility to God and man and 
 the necessity of building up a stable and complete 
 means of rendering justice. These armies of Mus- 
 lims, we must remember, were not like the hordes of 
 Attila or Chingis Khan, destroyers only. The lands 
 they conquered were put to hard tribute, but it was 
 under a reign of law. They recognized frankly that 
 it was for them that this mighty empire existed ; but 
 they recognized also that it could continue to exist 
 only with order and duty imposed upon all. They 
 saw, too, how deficient was their own knowledge and 
 learned willingly of the people among whom they had 
 come. And here, a second time, Roman law — the 
 parent-law of the world — made itself felt. There 
 were schools of that law in Syria at Csesarea and Bey- 
 rout, but we need not imagine that the Muslim jurists 
 studied there. Rather, it was the practical school of 
 the courts as they actually existed which they at- 
 tended. These courts were permitted to continue in 
 existence till Islam had learned from them all that 
 was needed. We can stiU recognize certain princi- 
 ples that were so carried over. That the duty of 
 proof lies upon the plaintiff, and the right of defend- 
 ing himself with an oath upon the defendant ; the 
 doctrine of invariable custom and that of the differ- 
 ent kinds of legal presumption. These, as expressed 
 in Arabic, are almost verbal renderings of the preg- 
 nant utterances of Latin law. 
 
 But most important of all was a liberty suggested 
 by that system to the Muslim jurisconsults. This was 
 through the part played in the older school by the 
 
KESPONSA PRUDENTIUM ; OPINION 85 
 
 Besponsa Prudentium, answers by prominent lawyers 
 to questions put to them by their clients, in which the 
 older law of the Twelve Tables was expounded, ex- 
 panded, and often practically set aside by their com- 
 ments. Sir Henry Maine thus states the situation : 
 "The authors of the new jurisprudence, during the 
 whole progress of its formation, professed the most 
 sedulous respect for the letter of the code. They were 
 merely explaining it, deciphering it, bringing out its 
 full meaning ; but then, in the result, by placing tests 
 together, by adjusting the law to states of fact which 
 actually presented themselves, and by speculating on 
 its possible application to others which might occur, 
 by introducing principles of interpretation derived 
 from the exegesis of other written documents which 
 fell under their observation, they educed a vast vari- 
 ety of canons which had never been dreamt of by the 
 compilers of the Twelve Tables, and which were in 
 truth rarely or never to be found there." All this 
 precisely applies to the development of law in Islam. 
 The part of the Twelve Tables was taken by the 
 statute law of the Qur'an and the case law derived 
 from the Usage of Muhammad ; that of the Roman 
 lurisprudentes by those speculative jurists who worked 
 mostly outside of al-Madina in the camp cities of 
 Mesopotamia and Syria — the very name for lawyer in 
 Arabic, faqih, plural fuqaJia, is a translation of pru- 
 dens, prvdentes ; and that of the Responsa, the an- 
 swers, by the "Opinion" which they claimed as a 
 legitimate legal method and source. Further, the 
 validity of a general agreement of jurisconsults "re- 
 minds us of the rescript of Hadrian, which ordains 
 
86 DBVELOPMEKT OF JURISPRUDENCE 
 
 that, if the opinions of the licensed prudentes all 
 agreed, such common opinion had the force of stat- 
 ute; but if they disagreed, the judge might follow 
 
 \{ which he chose." The Arabic term, ra'y, here ren- 
 dered Opinion, has passed through marked vicissi- 
 tudes of usage. In old Arabic, before it, in the view of 
 some, began to keep bad company, it meant an opin- 
 ion that was thoughtful, weighed and reasonable, as 
 opposed to a hasty dictate of ill-regulated passion. 
 In that sense it is used in a tradition — probably 
 forged — handed down from Muhammad. He was 
 sending a judge to take charge of legal affairs in 
 al-Yaman, and asked him on what he would base his 
 legal decisions. " On the Qur'an," he replied. " But 
 if that contains nothing to the purpose ? " " Then 
 upon your usage." "But if that also fails you?" 
 "Then I will follow my own opinion." And the 
 Prophet approved his purpose. A similar tradition 
 goes back to Umar, the first Khalifa, and it, too, is 
 probably a later forgery, written to defend this source 
 
 r of law. But, with the revolt against the use of Opin- 
 ion, to which we shall soon come, the term itself fell 
 into grave disrepute and came to signify an unfounded 
 
 , conclusion. In its extremest development it went 
 
 I beyond the Besponsa, which professed always to be 
 in exact accord with the letter of the older law, and 
 attained to be Equity in the strict sense ; that is, the 
 rejection of the letter of the law for a view supposed 
 to be more in accordance with the spirit of justice 
 itself. Thus, Equity, in the English sense, is the 
 law administered by the Court of Chancery and 
 claims, in the words again of Sir Henry Maine, to 
 
EQCITl; LEGAL FICTIOX 87 
 
 ■■ oTerride tlie older jimspnidence of the country on 
 the #rreiii;rli of an intrinsic ethical superioritr." In 
 Soman law. as introduced by the edict oi the Pnetor, 
 it was the law of Natme, "the part of law • which 
 natural reason appoints for all mankind.' " This is 
 represented in Islam under two forms, coTered by 
 two technical terms. The one is that the legist, in 
 spite of the fact that the luialogy of the fixed cod© 
 clearly points to one coiu'se, " considers it better '' 
 I .>:">■.!': to follow a different one ; and the other is 
 that, under the same conditions, he chooses a free 
 coiu-se " for the sake of general benefit to the com- ] 
 munity" I :'<:"--?««). Further scope of Equity Muslim 
 law never reache^l, and the legitimacy of these two 
 developments was, as we sk;^il see, bitterly contested. 
 The freedom of opinion, with its possibility of a sys- 
 tem of Eqtiity. had eventually to be given up, and all 
 that was left in its place was a pvrmissibility of an- 
 alogical deduction \qiy:xA. the nearest thing to which 
 in Western law is Leg;d Fiction. In a word, the 
 possibihty of development by Equity was lost, and 
 Legal Fiction entered in its j>lace. But this antici- 
 pates, and we must return to the strictly historical 
 movement. 
 
 Ihuring the tirst thirty years after the death of 
 Muhammad — the period covered.! by the reigns of the 
 four theocratic r.tlers whom Islam still calls "the 
 Foci- Just, or Ki^htly Gtiided Khalifas '" {al-KhuIofa 
 ar- \:>'iido,i — the two twin studies of tradition 
 {haditk) and of law ( ^qh) were f , stered and encour- 
 aged by the state. The centre of that state was still 
 in al-Madina, on ground sacred with the memories of 
 
88 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE 
 
 the Prophet, amid the scenes where he had himself 
 been lord and judge, and under the conditions in 
 which his life as ruler had been cast. All the sources, 
 except that of divine revelation, which had been 
 open to him, were open to his successors and they 
 made full use of all. Round that mother-hearth of 
 Islam was still gathered the great body of the im- 
 mediate Companions of Muhammad, and they formed 
 a deliberative or consulting council to aid the Khalifa 
 in his task. The gathering of tradition and the de- 
 veloping of law were vital functions ; they were the 
 basis of the public life of the state. This patriarchal 
 period in Muslim history is the golden age of Islam. 
 It ended with the death of Ali, in the year 40 of the 
 Hijra, and the succession of Mu'awiya in the follow- 
 ing year. " For thirty years," runs a tradition from 
 the Prophet, "my People will tread in my Path 
 (sunna) ; then will come kings and princes." 
 
 And so it was ; Mu'awiya was the first of the Umay- 
 yad dynasty and with him and them Islam, in all 
 but the name, was at an end. He and they were Arab 
 kings of the old type that had reigned before Muham- 
 mad at al-Hira and Ghassan, whose will had been their 
 law. The capital of the new kingdom was Damascus ; 
 al-Madina became a place of refuge, a Cave of Adul- 
 1am, for the old Muslim party. There they might 
 spin theories of state and of law, and lament the 
 good old days ; so long as there was no rebellion, the 
 Umayyads cared little for those things or for the men 
 who dreamt them. Once, the Umayyads were driven 
 to capture and sack the holy city, a horror in Islam 
 to this day. After that there was peace, the peace 
 
GROWTH OF CANON LAW 89 
 
 of the accomplished fact. This is the genuinely 
 Arab period in the history of Islam. It is a period 
 full of color and light and life ; of love and song, 
 battle and feasting. Thought was free and conduct 
 too. The great theologian of the Greek Church, John 
 of Damascus, held high office at the Umayyad court, 
 and al-Akhtal, a Christian at least in name, was their 
 poet laureate. It is true that the stated services of 
 religion were kept up and on every Friday the Khali- 
 fa had to entertain the people by a display of elo- 
 quence and wit in the weekly sermon. But the old 
 world was dead and the days of its unity would never 
 come again. So all knew, except the irreconcilable 
 party, the last of the true Muslims who still haunted 
 the sacred soil of al-Madina and labored in the old 
 paths. They gathered the traditions of the Prophet ; 
 they regulated their lives more and more strictly by 
 his usage ; they gave ghostly council to the pious 
 who sought their help ; they labored to build up 
 elaborate systems of law. But it was all elaboration 
 and hypothetical purely. There was in it no vitaliz- 
 ing force from practical life. 
 
 From this time on Muslim law has been more or 
 less in the position held by the canon law of the 
 Roman Church in a country that will not recognize it 
 yet dares not utterly reject it. The Umayyads were / 
 statesmen and opportunists ; they lived, in legal ' 
 things, as much from hand to mouth as Muhammad 
 had done. He cut all knots with divine legislation ; 
 they cut them with the edge of their will. Under^ f 
 them, as under him, a system of law was impossible.'"' 
 But at the same time, in quiet and in secret, this 
 
yO DEVELOPMENT OF JUEISPKUDEKCE 
 
 canon law of Islam was slowly growing up, slowly 
 rounding into full perfection of detailed correlation. 
 It was governing absolutely the private lives of all 
 the good Muslims that were left, and even the godless 
 Umayyads, as they had to preach on Fridays to the 
 People of Muhammad, so they had to deal with it 
 cautiously and respectfully. Of the names and lives 
 of these obscure jurists Uttle has reached us and it is 
 needless to give that little here. Only with the final 
 fall of the Umayyads, in the year of the Hijra 132, 
 do we come into the light and see the different schools 
 forming under clear and definite leaders. 
 
CHAPTEE II 
 
 The Abbasid revolution ; the compromise ; the problem of the Ab- 
 basids ; the two classes of canon lawyers and theologians ; the 
 rise of legal schools ; Abu Hanif a ; his application of Legal 
 Fiction ; istihsan : the Qadi Abu Yusuf ; Muhammad ibn al- 
 Hasan ; Sufyan ath-Thawri ; al-Awza'i ; Malik ibn Anas ; the 
 Usage of al-Madina ; istislah ; the doctrine of Agreement ; the 
 beginning of controversy ; traditionalists or historical lawyers 
 versus rationalists or philosophical lawyers; ash-Shafi'i, a 
 mediator and systematizer ; the Agreement of the Muslim 
 people a formal source ; ' ' My People will never agree in an 
 error ; " the resultant four sources, Qur'an, Usage, Analogy, 
 Agreement ; the traditionalist revolt ; Da'ud az-Zahiri and 
 literalism ; Ahmad ibn Hanbal ; the four abiding schools ; the 
 Agreement of Islam ; the Disagreement of Islam ; iurare in 
 verba magistri; the degrees of authority ; the canon and the 
 civil codes in Islam ; their respective spheres ; distribution of 
 schools at present day ; Shi'itelaw; Ibadite law. 
 
 That great revolution which brought the Abbasid 
 dynasty to power seemed at first to the pious theo- 
 logians and lawyers to be a return of the old days. 
 They dreamt of entering again into their rights ; that 
 the canon law would be the full law of the land. It 
 was only slowly that their eyes were opened, and 
 many gave up the vain contest and contented them- 
 selves with compromise. This had been rare under 
 the Umayyads ; the one or two canon lawyers who 
 had thrown in their lot with them had been marked 
 men. Az-Zuhri (d. 124), a man of the highest moral 
 and theological reputation who played a very im- 
 
 91 
 
92 DEVELOPMENT OP JUEISPEUDENCE 
 
 portant part in the first codifying of traditions, was 
 one of these, and the later pious historians have had 
 hard work to smooth over his connection with the 
 impious Umayyads. Probably — it may be well to 
 say here — the stories against the Umayyads have been 
 much heightened in color by their later tellers 
 and also az-Zuhri, being a man of insight and states- 
 manship, may have recognized that their rule was the 
 best chance for peace in the country. Muslims have 
 come generally to accept the position that unbelief 
 on the part of the government, if the government is 
 strong and just, is better than true belief and anarchy. 
 This has found expression, as all such things do, in 
 traditions put in the mouth of the Prophet. 
 
 But while only a few canonists had taken the part 
 of the Umayyads, far more accepted the favors of the 
 Abbasids, took ofEce under them and worked in their 
 cause. The Abbasids, too, had need of such men. It 
 was practically the religious sentiment of the people 
 that had overthrown the Umayyads and raised them 
 to power; and that religious sentiment, though it 
 could never be fully satisfied, must yet be respected 
 and, more important still, used. There is a striking 
 parallel between the situation then, and that of Scot- 
 land at the Eevolution Settlement of 1688. The 
 power of the Stuarts — that is, of the worldly Umay- 
 yads — had been overthrown. The oppressed Church 
 of the Covenant — that is, the old Muslim party — had 
 been freed. The state was to be settled upon a new 
 basis. What was that basis to be ? The Covenant- 
 ing party demanded the recognition of the Headship 
 of Christ — that the Kirk should rule the state, or 
 
THE PROBLEM OP THE ABBASIDS 93 
 
 should be the state, and that all other religious views 
 should be put under penalty. The old Muslim party 
 looked for similar things. That religious life should 
 be purified ; that the canon law should be again the 
 law of the state ; that the constitution of Umar should 
 berestored. How the Covenanters were disappointed, 
 how much they got and how much they failed to get, 
 needs no telling here. 
 
 Exactly in the same way it befell the old Muslims. 
 The theological reformation was sweeping and com- 
 plete. The first Abbasids were pious, at least out- 
 wardly; the state was put upon a pious footing. 
 The canon law also was formally restored, but with 
 large practical modifications. Canon lawyers were 
 received into the service of the state, provided they 
 were adaptable enough. Impossible men had no 
 place under the Abbasids ; their officials must be 
 pliable and dexterous, for a new modus vivendi was 
 to be found. The rough and ready Umayyad cut- 
 ting of the knot had failed ; the turn had now come 
 for piety and dexterity in twisting law. The court 
 lawyers learned to drive a coach and four through 
 any of the old statutes, and found their fortimes in 
 their brains. So the issue was bridged. But a large 
 party of malcontents was left, and from this time on 
 in Islam the lawyers and the theologians have di- 
 vided into two classes, the one admitting, as a mat- 
 ter of expediency, the authority of the powers of the 
 time and aiding them in their task as rulers ; the 
 other, irreconcilable and unreconciled, denouncing 
 the state as sunk in unbelief and deadly sin and its 
 lawyers as traitors to the cause of religion. To pur- 
 
94 DEVELOPMENT OF JUEISPETJDENCE 
 
 sue our parallel, they are represented in Scotland by 
 a handful of Covenanting congregations and in Amer- 
 ica by the much more numerous and powerful Re- 
 formed Presbyterian Church. 
 
 It is a significant fact that with the lifting of the 
 Umayyad pressure and the encouragement of legal 
 studies — such as it was — by the Abbasids, definite 
 and recognized schools of law began to form. What 
 had so long been in process in secret became public, 
 and its results crystallized under certain prominent 
 teachers. We will now take up these schools in the 
 order of the death dates of their founders ; we will 
 establish their principles and trace their histories. 
 We shall find the same conceptions recurring again 
 and again which have already been brought out, 
 Qur'an, tradition (hadith), agreement {ijma), opinion 
 (ra'y), analogy (qiyas), local usage (urf), preference 
 {istihsan), in the teeth of the written law — till at length, 
 when the battle is over, the sources will have limited 
 themselves to the four which have survived to the 
 present day — Qur'an, tradition, agreement, analogy. 
 And, similarly, of the six schools to be mentioned, 
 four only will remain to the present time, but these 
 of equal rank and validity in the eyes of the Believ- 
 ers. 
 
 The Abbasids came to power in the year of the 
 Hijra 132, and in 150 died Abu Hanifa, the first 
 student and teacher to leave behind him a systematic 
 body of teaching and a missionary school of pupils. 
 He was a Persian by race, and perhaps the most dis- 
 tinguished example of the rule that Muslim scientists 
 and thinkers might write in Arabic but were seldom 
 
ABtr HANIFA 95 
 
 of Arab blood. He does not seem to liave held office 
 as a judge or to have practised law at all. He was, 
 rather, an academic student, a speculative or philo- 
 sophical jurist we might call him. His system of 
 law, therefore, was not based upon the exigencies of 
 experience ; it did not arise from an attempt to meet 
 actual cases. We might say of it, rather, but in a 
 good sense, that it was a system of casuistry, an at- 
 tempt to build up on scientific principles a set of 
 rules which would answer every conceivable question 
 of law. In the hands of some of his pupils, when 
 applied to actual facts, it tended to develop into casu- 
 istry in a bad sense ; but no charge of perverting 
 justice for his own advantage seems to have been 
 brought against Abu Hanifa himself. His chief in- 
 struments in constructing his system were opinion 
 and analogy. He leaned little upon traditions of 
 the usage of Muhammad, but preferred to take the 
 Qur'anic texts and develop from them his details. But 
 the doing of this compelled him to modify simple 
 opinion — equivalent to equity as we have seen — and 
 limit it to analogy of some written statute (nass). He 
 could hardly forsake a plain res iudicata of Muham- 
 mad, and follow his own otherwise unsupported views, 
 but he might choose to do so if he could base it on 
 analogy from the Qur'an. Thus, he came to use what 
 was practically legal fiction. It is the application 
 of an old law in some sense or way that was never 
 dreamt of by the first imposer of the law, and which 
 may, in fact, run directly counter to the purpose of 
 the law. The fiction is that it is the original law that 
 is being observed, while, as a matter of fact, there 
 
96 DEVELOPMENT OP JTJRISPEUDENCE 
 
 has come in its place an entirely different law. So 
 Abu Hanifa would contend that he was following the 
 divine legislation of the Qur'an, while his adversaries 
 contended that he was only following his own opinion. 
 
 But if, on the one hand, he was thus limited from 
 equity to legal fiction, on another he developed a 
 new principle of even greater freedom. Reference 
 has already been made to the changes which were 
 of necessity involved in the new conditions of the 
 countries conquered by the Muslims. Often the law 
 of the desert not only failed to apply to town and 
 agricultural life; it was even directly mischievous. 
 On account of this, a consideration of local conditions 
 was early accepted as a principle, but in general 
 terms. These were reduced to definiteness by Abu 
 Hanifa under the formula of " holding for better " 
 {istiJisaii). He would say, "The analogy in the case 
 points to such and such a rule, but under the circum- 
 stances I hold it for better to rule thus and thus." 
 
 This method, as we shall see later, was vehemently 
 attacked by his opponents, as was his system in gen- 
 eral. Yet that system by its philosophical perfection 
 — due to its theoretical origin — and perfection in 
 detail — due to generations of practical workers — has 
 survived all attack and can now be said to be the 
 leading one of the four existing schools. No legal 
 writings of Abu Hanifa have reached us, nor does he 
 seem to have, himself, cast his system into a finished 
 code. That was done by his immediate pupils, and 
 especially by two, the Qadi Abu Yusuf, who died in 
 182, and Muhammad ibn al-Hasan, who died in 189. 
 The first was consulting lawyer and chief Qadi to the 
 
THE QADI Ar.U YUSTJF 97 
 
 great Khalifa Hanin ar-Rashid, and, if stories can be 
 believed, proved himself as complaisant of conscience 
 as a court casuist need be. Innumerable are the 
 tales afloat of his minute knowledge of legal subtleties 
 and his fertUity of device in applying them to meet 
 the Tvhims of his master, Harun. Some of them have 
 found a resting place in that great mirror of mediaeval 
 Muslim life, The Tliousand aiid One Nights ; reference 
 may be made to Night 296. Through his influence, 
 the school of Abu Hanifa gained an official impor- 
 tance which it never thereafter lost. He wrote for 
 Harun a book which we have still, on the canon law 
 as applied to the revenues of the state, a thorny and al- 
 most impossible subject, for the canon law makes reaUy 
 no provision for the necessary funds of even a simple 
 form of government and much less for such an array 
 of palaces and officials as had grown up around the 
 Abbasids. His book is marked by great piety in ex- 
 pression and by ability of the highest kind in recon- 
 ciling the irreconcilable. 
 
 But all the canon lawyers did not fall in so easily 
 with the new ways. Many found that only in ascet- 
 icism, in renunciation of the world and engaging in 
 pious exercises was there any chance of their main- 
 taining the old standards in a state that was for 
 them based on oppression and robbery. One of 
 these was Sufyan ath-Thawri, a lawyer of high re- 
 pute, who narrowly missed founding a separate school 
 of law and who died in 161. There has come down 
 to us a correspondence between him and Harun, 
 which, though it cannot possibly be genuine, throws 
 much light on the disappointment of the sincerely 
 
98 DEVELOPMENT OE JURISPKtJDEJSTCE 
 
 religious section. Harun writes on his accession to 
 the Khalifate (170), complaining that Sufyan had not 
 visited him, in spite of their bond of brotherhood, 
 and offering him wealth from the public treasury. 
 Sufyan replied, denouncing such use of public funds 
 and all the other uses of them by Harun — many 
 enough — except those precisely laid down in the 
 codes. On the basis of these, Harun would have had 
 to work for his own living. There are also other 
 denunciations for crimes in the ruler which he pun- 
 ished in others. Harun is said to have kept the letter 
 and wept over it at intervals, but no change of life on 
 his part is recorded. Apparently, with the accession 
 of the Abbasids ascetic and mystical Islam made a 
 great development. It became plain to the pious 
 that no man could inherit both this world and the 
 next. 
 
 While Abu Hanifa was developing his system in 
 Mesopotamia, al-Awza'i was working similarly in 
 Syria. He was born at Baalbec, lived at Damascus, 
 and at Beyrout where he died in 157. Of him and 
 his teaching we know comparatively little. But so 
 far it is clear that he was not a speculative jurist of 
 the same type as Abu Hanifa, but paid especial at- 
 tention to traditions. At one time his school was 
 followed by the Muslims of Syria and the entire 
 West to Morocco and Spain. But its day was a short 
 one. The school of Abu Hanifa, championed by Abu 
 Yusuf with his tremendous influence as chief Qadi 
 of the Abbasid empire, pushed it aside, and at the 
 present day it has no place except in history. For 
 us, its interest is that of another witness to the early 
 
MALIK IBN ANAS 99 
 
 rise and spread of systems of jurisprudence outside 
 of Arabia. 
 
 In AH. 179, tkree years before the death of Abu 
 Tusuf and twenty-nine after that of Abu Hanifa, 
 there died at al-Madina the founder and head of 
 an independent school of a very different type. This 
 was Malik ibn Anas, imder whose hands what we may 
 call, for distinction, the historical school of al-Ma- 
 dina took form. Al-Madina, it will be remembered, 
 was the mother-city of Muslim law. It was the 
 special home of the traditions of the Prophet and the 
 scene of his legislative and judicial life. Its pre- 
 Islamic customary law had been sanctioned, in a 
 sense, by his use. It had been the capital of the 
 state in its purest days. From the height of all these 
 privileges its ti-aditionists and lawyers looked down 
 upon the outsiders and po.ycenus who had begun to 
 intermeddle in sacred things. 
 
 But it must not be thought that this school was of 
 a rigid traditionism. The case was quite the reverse, 
 and in many respects it is hard to make a distinction 
 between it and that of Abu Hanifa. Its first soui-ce 
 was, of necessity, the Qur'an. Then came the usage of 
 the Prophet. This merged into the usage of the Suc- 
 cessors of the Prophet and the imwiitten custom of 
 the town. It will be seen that here the historical 
 weight of the place came to bear. No other place, no 
 other community, could furnish that later tradition 
 with anything like the same authority. Further, Malik 
 ibn Anas was a practical jurist, a working judge. He 
 was occupied in meeting real cases from day to day. 
 When he sat in public and judged the people, or 
 
100 DEVELOPMENT OF JTJKISPEUDENCE 
 
 with liis pupils around him and exijounded and de- 
 veloped the law, he could look back upon a line of 
 canon lawyers who had sat in his place and done 
 as he was doing. In that lies the great difference. 
 He was in practical touch with actual life ; that was 
 one point ; and, secondly, he was in the direct line 
 of the apostolic succession, and in the precise en- 
 vironment of the Prophet. So when he went beyond 
 Qur'an, prophetic usage, agreement, and gave out 
 decisions on simple opinion, the feeling of the com- 
 munity justified him. It was a different thing for 
 Malik ibn Anas, sitting there in state in al-Madina, 
 to use his judgment, than for some quick-brained 
 vagabond of a Persian or Syrian proselyte, some 
 pauvre diahle with neither kith nor kin in the coun- 
 try, to lay down principles of law. So the pride of 
 the city of the Prophet distinguished between him and 
 Abu Hanifa. 
 
 But though the speculative element in the school 
 of Malik, apart from its local and historical environ- 
 ment, which gave it unifying weight, was essentially 
 the same as in the school of Abu Hanifa, yet it is 
 true that at al-Madina it played a less important 
 part. Malik used tradition more copiously and took 
 refuge in opinion less frequently. Without opinion, 
 he could not have built his system ; but for him it 
 was not so much a primary principle as a means 
 of escape. Yet one principle of great freedom he 
 did derive from it and lay down Avith clearness ; it 
 is the conception of the public advantage {istislali). 
 When a rule would work general injury it is to be 
 set aside even in the teeth of a valid analogy. This, 
 
THE DOCTRINE OF AGREEMENT 101 
 
 it will be seen, is nearly the same as the preference 
 of Abu Hanifa. The technical term istislah, chosen 
 by Malik to express his idea, was probably intended 
 to distinguish it from that of Abu Hanifa, and also 
 to suggest in the public advantage {maslaha) a more 
 Talid basis than the mere preference of the legist. 
 
 Another conception which Malik and his school 
 developed into greater exactitude and force was that 
 of the agreement {ijma). It will be remembered that 
 from the death of Muhammad all the surviving Com- 
 panions resident in al-Madina formed a kind of con- 
 sxiltive council to aid the Khalifa with their store of 
 tradition and experience. Their agreement on any 
 point was final ; it was the voice of the Church. This 
 doctrine of the infallibility of the body of the be- 
 lievers developed in Islam until at its widest it 
 was practically the same as the canon of catholic 
 truth formulated by Vincent of Lerins, Quod ubique, 
 quod semper, quod ah omnibus. But Malik, according 
 to the usual view, had no intention of granting any 
 such deciding power to the outside world. The world 
 for him was al-Madina and the agreement of al- 
 Madina established catholic verity. Yet there are 
 narratives which suggest that he approved the agree- 
 ment and local usage of al-Madina for al-Madina be- 
 cause they suited al-Madina. Other places might 
 also have their local usages which suited them better. 
 
 In the next school we shall find the principle of 
 agreement put upon a broader basis and granted 
 greater weight. Finally, Malik is the first founder 
 of a system from whom a law book, the Muiuatta 
 mentioned above, has come down to us. It is not 
 
102 DEVELOPMENT OF .TtTRISPRUDBNCE 
 
 in the exact sense, a manual or code ; rather a col- 
 lection of materials for a code with remarks by the 
 collector. He gives the traditions which seem to him 
 of juristic importance — about seventeen hundred in 
 all — arranged according to subject, and follows up 
 each section, when necessary, with remarks upon the 
 usage of al-Madina, and upon his own view of the 
 matter. When he cannot find either tradition or 
 usage, he evidently feels himself of sufficient author- 
 ity to follow his own opinion, and lay down on that 
 basis a binding rule. This, however, as we have 
 seen, is very different from allowing other people, 
 outsiders to al-Madina, to do the same thing. The 
 school founded by Malik ibn Anas on these principles 
 is one of the surviving foiir. As that of Abu Hanifa 
 spread eastward, so that of Malik spread westward, 
 and for a time crushed out all others. The firm grip 
 which it has especially gained in western North 
 Africa may be due to the influence of the Idrisids 
 whose founder had to flee from al-Madina when 
 Malik was in the height of his reputation there, and 
 also to hatred of the Abbasids who championed the 
 school of Abu Hanifa. 
 
 But now we pass from simple development to 
 development through conflict. Open conflict, so far 
 as there had been any, had covered points of detail ; 
 for example, the kind of opinion professed by Abu 
 Hanifa, on the one hand, and by Malik, on the other. 
 One of the chiefest of the pupils of Abu Hanifa, the 
 Muhammad ibn al-Hasan already mentioned, spent 
 three years in study with Malik at al-Madina and 
 found no difficulty in thus combining his schools. 
 
HISTORICAL ». PHILOSOPHICAL LAWYERS 103 
 
 The conflict of the future was to be difierent and to 
 touch the very basis of things. The muttering of 
 the coming storm had been heard for long, but it 
 was now to bm-st. Exact dates we cannot give, but 
 the reaction must have been progressing in the latter 
 part of the life of Malik ibn Anas. 
 
 The distinction drawn above between traditionists 
 and lawyers will be remembered, and the promise of 
 future collision which always has come between his- 
 torical or empirical, and speculative or philosophical 
 students of systems of jurisprudence. The one side 
 points to the absurdities, crudities, and inadequacies 
 of a system based upon tradition and developing by 
 usage ; the other says that we are not wise enough 
 to rewrite the laws of our ancestors. These urge a 
 necessity ; those retort an inability. Add to this a 
 belief on the part of the traditionists that they were 
 defending a divine institution and the situation is 
 complete as it now lay in Islam. The extreme right 
 said that law should be based on Qur'an and tradition 
 only; the extreme left, that it was better to leave 
 untrustworthy and obscure traditions and work out a 
 system of rules by logic and the necessities of the 
 case. To and fro between these two extremes swayed 
 the conflict to which we now come. 
 
 In that conflict thiee names stand out : ash-Shafi'i 
 who died in 204, Ahmad ibn Hanbal who died in 241 
 and Da'ud az-Zahiri who died in 270. Strangely 
 enough, the first of these, ash-Shafi'i, struck the 
 mediating note and the other two diverged further 
 and further from the via media thus shown toward 
 a blank traditionism. 
 
104 DEVELOPMENT OF JUEISPRUDENCE 
 
 Ash-Shafl'i is without question one of the greatest 
 figures in the history of law. Perhaps he had not 
 the originality and keenness of Abu Hanifa ; but he 
 had a balance of mind and temper, a clear vision and 
 full grasp of means and ends that enabled him to say 
 what proved to be the last word in the matter. After 
 him came attempts to tear down ; but they failed. 
 The fabric of the Muslim canon law stood firm. There 
 is a tradition from the Prophet that he promised that 
 with the end of every century would come a restorer 
 of the faith of his people. At the end of the first 
 century was the pious Khalifa, Umar ibn Abd al- 
 Aziz, who by some accident strayed in among the 
 Umayyads. At the end of the second came ash- 
 Shafi'i. His work was to mediate and systematize 
 and bore especially on the sources from which rules 
 of law might be drawn. His position on the positive 
 side may be stated as one of great reverence for 
 tradition. "If you ever find a tradition from the 
 Prophet saying one thing," he is reported to have 
 said, " and a decision from me saying another thing, 
 follow the tradition." An absolutely authentic — ac- 
 cording to Muslim rules of evidence — and clear tra- 
 dition from the Prophet he regarded as of equally 
 divine authority with a passage in the Qur'an. Both 
 were inspired utterances, if slightly different in form ; 
 the Qur'an was verbally inspired; such traditions 
 were inspired as to their content. And if such a 
 tradition contradicted a Qur'anic passage and came 
 after it in time, then the written law of the Qur'an 
 was abrogated by the oral law of the tradition. But 
 this involved grave difficulties. The speculative ju- 
 
AGKEEMENT AS A SOURCE 105 
 
 rists had defended tlieii' position from the beginning 
 by pointing to the many contradictory traditions 
 which were afloat, and asking how the house of tradi- 
 tion could stand when so divided against itself. A 
 means of reconciUng traditions had to be found, and 
 to this ash-Shafi'i gave himself. We need not go 
 over his methods here ; they were the same that have 
 always been used in such emergencies. The worship 
 of the letter led to the straining of the letter, and to 
 explaining away of the letter. 
 
 But there lay a rock in his course more dangerous 
 than any mere contradiction in differing traditions. 
 Usages had grown up and taken fast hold which were 
 in the teeth of all traditions. These usages were in 
 the individual life, in the constitution of the state, 
 and in the rules and decisions of the law courts. The 
 pious theologian and lawyer might rage against them 
 as he chose ; they were there, firmly rooted, immovable. 
 They were not arbitrary changes, but had come about 
 in the process of time through the revolutions of 
 circumstances and varying conditions. Ash-Shafi'i 
 showed his greatness by recognizing the inevitable 
 and providing a remedy. This lay in an extension of 
 the principle of agreement and the erection of it into 
 a formal source. Whatever the community of Islam 
 has agreed upon at any time, is of God. TTe have 
 met this principle before, but never couched in so ab- 
 solute and catholic a form. The agreement of the 
 immediate Companions of Muhammad had weight 
 with his first Successoi-s. The agi-eement of these 
 first Companions and of the first generation after 
 them, had determining weight in the early church. 
 
106 DEVELOPMENT OP JURI8PKUDEN0E 
 
 The agreement of al-Maclina had weight with Malik 
 ibn Anas. The agreement of many divines and le- 
 gists always had weight of a kind. Among lawyers, 
 a principle, to the contrary of which the memory of 
 man ran not, had been determining. But this was 
 wider, and from this time on the unity of Islam was 
 assured. The evident voice of the People of Muham- 
 mad was to be the voice of God. Yet this principle, 
 if full of hope and value for the future, involved the 
 canonists of the time in no small difficulties. Was it 
 conceivable that the agreement could override the 
 usage of the Prophet ? Evidently not. There must, 
 then, they argued, once have existed some tradition 
 to the same effect as the agreement, although it had 
 now been lost. Some such lost authority must be 
 presupposed. This can remind us of nothing so 
 much as of the theory of the inerrant but lost original 
 of the Scriptures. And it had the fate of that theory. 
 The weight of necessity forced aside any such trifling 
 and the position was frankly admitted that the agree- 
 ment of the community was a safer and more certain 
 basis than traditions from the Prophet. Traditions 
 were alleged to that effect. " My People will never 
 agree in an error," declared Muhammad, or, at least, 
 the later church made him so declare. 
 
 But ash-Shafi'i found that even the addition of 
 agreement to Qur'an and Prophetic usage did not 
 give him basis enough for his system. Opinion he 
 utterly rejected ; the preference of Abu Hanifa and 
 the conception of the common welfare of Malik ibn 
 Anas were alike to him. It is true also that both 
 had been practically saved undei agreement. But 
 
AXAIX>GT ; THE FOUR SOrECES K~ 
 
 he held f ;isr by anali^r, whether btxsed on the Qur'aa 
 
 or on the u&age of the Prophet. It "wa^. an essential 
 instrument for his purpose. As w;isi said, " The laws 
 of the Quran and of the usage are hniited ; the pos- 
 sible eases .n e unlimited ; that which is unlimited can 
 never be cent:iined in that which is limited." But in 
 :ish-Sha£"i's use of an;ilogT there is a distinction to 
 be obserTed. In seeking to establish a parallelisna 
 between a oa*e that has arisen and a rule in the 
 Quran or tisage. which is Rim flar iu some points bnt 
 not precisely p;u-allel, are we to look to external 
 points of resemblance, or may we go fm-ther and seek 
 to determine the reason {ilhi^ lying behind the rule 
 and from that draw our an;ilogy? The point seems 
 simple enough and the early speetilative jurists sought 
 the reason. For that they were promptly attacked 
 by the traditionists. Siieh a method w:is an attempt 
 to look into the mysteries of God, they were told ; 
 man has no business to inquire after reasons. aU he 
 has to do is to obey. The point thus raised was 
 fought over for centuries and schools are classiiied 
 according to their attitude toward it. The position 
 of ash-Sh;\ti"i seems to have been that the reason for 
 a command was to be considered in drawing an anal- 
 ogT, but that there must be some clear gnide. in the 
 text, itself, pointing to the reason. He thns left him- 
 self free to consider the causes of the divine com- 
 mands and yet produced the appearance of avoiiiing 
 anv irreverence or impiety in doing so. 
 
 Such then are the four soraves or bases (e>'j'i of 
 jurisprudence as accepted and defined by ash-Shaiii — 
 Qur'an, prophetic iisa^fe. analogy, agreement The 
 
108 DEVELOPMENT OP JURISPBUDENCE 
 
 last has come to bear more and more weight. Every 
 Shafi'ite law book begins each section with words to 
 this effect, " The Ijasis of this rule, before the agree- 
 ment {qahla-l-ijma), is " Qur'an or usage as the case 
 may be. The agreement must put its stamp on 
 every rule to make it valid. Further, all the now 
 existing schools have practically accepted ash-Shafi'i's 
 classification of the sources and many have contended 
 that a lawyer, no matter what his school, who does 
 not use all these four sources, cannot be permitted 
 to act as a judge. Ash-Shafi'i has accomplished his 
 own definition of a true jurist, " Not he is a jurist 
 who gathers statements and prefers one of them, but 
 he who establishes a new principle from which a 
 hundred branches may spring.'' 
 
 But the extreme traditionists were little satisfied 
 with this compromise. They oljjected to analogy 
 and they objected to agreement ; nothing but the 
 pure law of God and the Prophet would satisfy them. 
 And their numbers were undoubtedly large. The 
 common people always heard traditions gladly, and 
 it was easy to turn to ridicule the subtleties of the 
 professional lawyers. How much simpler, it struck 
 the average mind, it would be to follow some clear 
 and unambiguous saying of the Prophet ; then one 
 could feel secure. This desire of the plain man to 
 take traditions and interpret them strictly and liter- 
 ally was met by the school of Da'ud az-Zahiri, David 
 the literalist. He was bom three or four years be- 
 fore the death of ash-Shafi'i, which occurred in 204. 
 He was trained as a Shafi'ite and that, too, of the nar- 
 rower, more traditional type ; but it was not tradi- 
 
da'ud az-zahiri 109 
 
 tional enough for him. So he had to cut himself 
 loose and form a school of his own. He rejected 
 utterly analogy ; he limited agreement, as a source, 
 to the agreement of the immediate Companions of 
 Muhammad, and in this he has been followed by the 
 Wahhabites alone among moderns ; he limited him- 
 self to Qui-'an and prophetic usage. 
 
 In another point also, he diverged. Ash-Shafi'i 
 had evidently exercised a very great personal influence 
 upon his followers. All looked up to him and were 
 prepared to swear to his words. So there grew up a 
 tendency for a scholar to take a thing upon the word 
 of his master. " Ash-Shafi'i taught so ; I am a 
 Shafi'ite and I hold so." This, too, Da'ud utterly re- 
 jected. The scholar must examine the proofs for him- 
 self and form his own opinion. But he had another 
 pecuharity, and one which gained him the name of 
 literalist. Everything, Qur'an and tradition, must be 
 taken in the most exact sense, however absurd it 
 might be. Of course, to have gone an inch beyond 
 the very first meaning of the words would have been 
 to stray in the dhection of analogy. Yet, as fate 
 would have it, to analogy, more or less, he had in 
 the end to come. The inexorable law that the hm- 
 ited cannot bound the unlimited was proved again. 
 "Analogy is like carrion," confessed a very much 
 earlier traditionist, " when there is nothing else you 
 eat it." Da'ud tried to make his meal more palata- 
 ble by a change in name. He called it a proof 
 (dalil) instead of a source (asl) ; but what difference 
 of idea he involved in that it is hard to determine. 
 This brought him to the doctrine of cause, already 
 
110 DEVELOPMENT OF JUEISPKUDENCE 
 
 mentioned. Were we at liberty to seek the cause of 
 a divine word or action and lead our " proof " from 
 that ? If the cause was directly stated, then Da'ud 
 held that we must regard it as having been the cause 
 in this case ; but we were not at liberty, he added, to 
 look for it, or on it, as cause in any other case. 
 
 It is evident that here we have to do with an im- 
 possible man and school, and so the Muslim world 
 found. Most said roundly that it was illegal to per- 
 mit a Zahirite to act as judge, on much the same 
 grounds that objection to circumstantial evidence will 
 throw out a man now as juror. If they had been using 
 modern language, they would have said that it was 
 because he was a hopeless crank. Yet the Zahirite 
 school lasted for centuries and drew long conse- 
 quences, historical and theological, for which there is 
 no space here. It never held rank as an acknowl- 
 edged school of Muslim law. 
 
 We now come to the last of the four schools, and 
 it, strange as its origin was, need not detain us long. 
 The Zahirite reaction had failed through its very ex- 
 tremeness. It was left to a dead man and a devoted 
 Shafi'ite to head the last attack upon the school of his 
 master. Ahmad ibn Hanbal was a theologian of the 
 first rank; he made no claim to be a constructive 
 lawyer. His Musnad has already been dealt with. 
 It is an immense collection of some thirty thousand 
 traditions, but these are not even arranged for le- 
 gal purposes. He suffered terribly for the orthodox 
 faith in the rationalist persecution under the Khalifa 
 al-Ma'mun, and his sufferings gained him the posi- 
 tion of a saint. But he never dreamed of forming a 
 
PRINCIPLES OF UlflTY AND VAEIETT 111 
 
 school, least of all in opposition to his master, ash- 
 Shafi'i. He died in 241, and after his death his 
 disciples drew together and the fourth school was 
 founded. It was simply reactionary and did not 
 make progress in any way. It minimized agreement 
 and analogy and tended toward literal interpretation. 
 As might be expected from its origin, its history has 
 been one of violence, of persecution and counter- 
 persecution, of insurrection and riot. Again and 
 again the streets of Baghdad ran blood from its 
 excesses. It has now the smallest following of the 
 four surviving schools. 
 
 There is no need to pursue this history further. 
 With ash-Shafi'i the great development of Muslim ju- 
 risprudence closes. Legislation, equity, legal fiction 
 have done their parts ; the hope for the future lay, and 
 Ues, in the piinciple of the agreement. The common- 
 sense of the Muslim community, working through 
 that expression of catholicity, has set aside in the 
 past even the undoubted letter of the Qur'an, and in 
 the future will still further break the grasp of that 
 dead hand. It is the principle of unity in Islam. 
 But there is a principle of variety as well. The four 
 schools of law whose origin has been traced are all 
 equally valid and their decisions equally sacred in 
 Muslim eyes. The believer may belong to any one 
 of these which he chooses ; he must belong to one ; 
 and when he has chosen his school, he accepts it and 
 its rules to the utteiTQost. Yet he does not cast out as 
 heretics the followers of the other schools. In every 
 chapter their codes differ more or less ; but each 
 school bears with the others ; sometimes, it may be, 
 
112 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPRUDENCE 
 
 with a superior tone, but still bears. This liberty of 
 variety in unity is again undoubtedly due to the 
 agreement. It has expressed itself, as it often does, 
 in apocryphal traditions from the Prophet, the last 
 rag of respect left to the traditionist school. Thus 
 we are told that the Prophet said, " The disagree- 
 ment of My People is a Mercy from God." This 
 supplements and completes the other equally apocry- 
 phal but equally important tradition : " My People 
 will never agree upon an error." 
 
 But there is a third principle at work which we 
 cannot view with the same favor. As said above, 
 every Muslim must attach himself to a legal school, 
 and may choose any one of these four. But once he 
 has chosen his school he is absolutely bound by 
 the decisions and rules of that school. This is the 
 principle against which the Zahirites protested, but 
 their protest, the only bit of sense they ever showed, 
 was in vain. The result of its working throughout cen- 
 turies has been that now no one — ^except from a spirit 
 of historical curiosity — ever dreams of going back from 
 the text-books of the present day to the works of the 
 older masters. Further, such an attempt to get be- 
 hind the later commentaries would not be permitted. 
 We have comment upon comment upon comment, 
 abstract of this and expansion of that ; but each 
 hangs by his predecessor and dares not go another 
 step backward. The great masters of the four schools 
 settled the broad principles ; they were authorities of 
 the first degree {mujtahidun mutlaq), second to Mu- 
 hammad in virtue of his inspiration only. Second, 
 came the masters who had authority within the sep- 
 
THE CANON AND CIVIL CODES 113 
 
 arate schools {mujtahidun fi-l-madhaliih) to determine 
 the questions that arose there. Third, masters of 
 still lesser rank for minor points {mujtahidun hil- 
 fatwa. And so the chain runs on. The possibility 
 of a new legal school arising or of any considerable 
 change among these existing schools is flatly denied. 
 Every legist now has his place and degree of Uberty 
 fixed, and he must be content. 
 
 These three principles, then, of catholic unity and 
 its ability to make and abrogate laws, of the liberty 
 of diversity in that unity, and of blind subjection to 
 the past within that diversity, these three principles 
 must be our hope and fear for the Muslim peoples. 
 ^Tiat that future will be none can tell. The grasp 
 of the dead hand of Islam is close, but its grip at 
 many points has been forced to relax. Very early, 
 as has already been pointed out, the canon law had 
 to give way to the will of the sovereign, and ground 
 once lost it has never regained. Now, in every 
 Muslim country, except perhaps the Wahhabite state 
 in central Arabia, there are two codes of law admin- 
 istered by two separate courts. The one judges by 
 this canon law and has cognizance of what we may 
 call private and family affairs, marriage, divorce, in- 
 heritance. Its judges, at whose head in Turkey 
 stands the Shaykh al-Islam, a dignity first created by 
 the Ottoman Sultan Muhammad II in 1453, after 
 the capture of Constantinople, also give advice to 
 those who consult them on such personal matters as 
 details of the ritual law, the law of oaths and vows, 
 etc. The other court knows no law except the cus- 
 tom of the country {ur/, ada) and the will of the 
 
114 DEVELOPMENT OF JURISPEUDENOE 
 
 ruler, expressed often in what are called Qanuns, 
 statutes. Thus, in Turkey at the present day, be- 
 sides the codices of canon law, there is an accepted 
 and authoritative corpus of such Qanuns. It is based 
 on the Code Napoleon and administered by courts 
 under the Minister of Justice. This is the nearest 
 approach in Islam to the development by statute, 
 which comes last in Sir Henry Maine's analysis of 
 the growth of law. The court guided by these Qanuns 
 decides all matters of public and criminal law, all 
 affairs between man and man. Such is the legal 
 situation throughout the whole Muslim world, from 
 Sulu to the Atlantic and from Africa to China. The 
 canon lawyers, on their side, have never admitted 
 this to be anything but flat usurpation. There have 
 not failed some even who branded as heretics and 
 unbelievers those who took any part in such courts 
 of the world and the devil. They look back to the 
 good old days of the rightly guided Khalifas, when 
 there was but one law in Islam, and forward to the 
 days of the Mahdi when that law will be restored. 
 There, between a dead past and a hopeless future, we 
 may leave them. The real future is not theirs. Law 
 is greater than lawyers, and it works in the end for 
 justice and life. 
 
 Finally, it may be well to notice an important and 
 necessary modification which holds as to the above 
 statement that a Muslim may choose any one of the 
 four schools and may then follow its rules. As might 
 be expected, geographical influences weigh over- 
 whelmingly in this choice. Certain countries are 
 Hanifite or Shafi'ite ; in each, adherents of the other 
 
DISTRIBUTION OF SCHOOLS 115 
 
 sects are rare. This geographical position may be 
 given roughly as follows : central Asia, northern India, 
 and the Turks everywhere are Hanifite. Lower Egypt, 
 Syria, southern India and the Malay Archipelago are 
 Shafi'ite. Upper Egypt and North Africa west of 
 Egypt are Malikite. Practically, only the Wahha- ] 
 bites in central Arabia are Hanbalites. Further, the 
 position holds in Islam that the country, as a whole, i 
 follows the legal creed of its ruler, just as it follows j 
 his religion. It is not only cuius regio eius religio, j 
 but cuius religio eius lex. Again and again, a revolu- 
 tion in the state has driven one legal school from 
 power and installed another. Yet the situation oc- 
 curs sometimes that a sovereign finds his people di- 
 vided into two parties, each following a different rite, 
 and he then recognizes both by appointing Qadis be- 
 longing to both, and enforcing the decisions of these 
 Qadis. Thus, at Zanzibar, at present, there are eight 
 Ibadite judges and two Shafi'ite, all appointed by the 
 Sultan and backed by his authority. On the other 
 hand, the Turkish government, ever since it felt itself 
 strong enough, has thrown the full weight of its in- 
 fluence on the Hanifite side. In almost all countries 
 under its rule it appoints Hanifite judges only ; valid 
 legal decisions can be pronounced only according to 
 that rite. The private needs of non-Hanifites are 
 met by the appointment of salaried ifz/<is— givers of 
 fatwas, or legal opinions — of the other rites. 
 
 In the above sketch there have been of necessity 
 two considerable omissions. The one is of Shi'ite 
 and the other of Ibadite law. Neither seems of 
 sufScient importance to call for separate treatment. 
 
116 DEVELOPMENT OF JUKISPRUDENCE 
 
 The legal system of the Shi'ites is derived from that 
 of the so-called Sunnites aud differs in details only. 
 We have seen already (p. 38) that the Shi'ites still 
 have Mujtahids who are not bound to the words of a 
 master, but can give decisions on their own responsi- 
 bility. These seem to Lave in their hands the teach- 
 ing power which strictly belongs only to the Hidden 
 Imam. They thus represent the principle of author- 
 ity which is the governing conception of the Shi'a. 
 The Sunnites, on the other hand, have reached the 
 point of recognizing that it is the People of Muham- 
 mad as a whole which rules through its agreement. 
 In another point the Shi'ite conception of authority 
 affects their legal system. They utterly reject the 
 idea of co-ordinate schools of law ; to the doctrine of 
 the varying (ikhtilaf) as it is called, and the liberty 
 of diversity which lies in it, they oppose the authority 
 of the Imam. There can be only one truth and there 
 can be no trifling with it even in details. Among the 
 Shi'ites of the Zaydite sect this was affected also by 
 their philosophical studies and a philosophical doc- 
 trine of the unity of truth ; but to the Imamites it is 
 an authoritative necessity and not one of thought. 
 Thus on two important points the Shi'ites lack the 
 possibility of freedom and development which is to 
 be found with the Sunnites. Of the jurisprudence of 
 the Ibadites we know comparatively little. A full 
 examination of Ibadite Jlqh would be of the high- 
 est interest, as the separation of its line of descent 
 goes far back behind the formation of any of the 
 orthodox systems and it must have been codified to a 
 greater or loss extent by Abd Allah ibn Ibad himself. 
 
IBADITES 117 
 
 Its basis appears to be three-fold, Qur'an, prophetic 
 usage, agreement — naturally that of the Ibadite com- 
 munity. There is no mention of analogy, and tradi- 
 tions seem to have been used sparingly and critically. 
 Qur'an bore the principal emphasis. See above, 
 (p. 26) for the Ibadite position on the form of the 
 state and on the nature of its headship. 
 
PART III 
 CHAPTEE I 
 
 The three principles in the development ; first religious question- 
 ings; Murji'ites, Kharijites, Qadarites; influence of Christi- 
 anity ; the Umayyads and Abbasids ; the Mu'tazilites ; the 
 Qualities of God; the Vision of God; the creation of the 
 Qur'an. 
 
 Befobe entering upon a consideration of the devel- 
 opment of the theology of Islam, it will be well to 
 mark clearly the three principles which run continu- 
 ously through that development, which conditioned 
 it for evil and for good and which are still working 
 in it. In dealing with jurisprudence and with the 
 theory of the state, we have already seen abundantly 
 how false is the current idea that Islam has ceased 
 to grow and has no hope of future development. The 
 organism of Islam, like every other organism, has 
 periods of rest when it appears to have reached a 
 cul de sac and to have outlived its life. But after 
 these periods come others of renewed quickening and 
 its vital energy pours itself forth again alter et idem. 
 In the state, we saw how the old realms passed into 
 decrepitude and decay, but new ones rose to take 
 their places. The despotism by the grace of God of 
 
 119 
 
120 THEOLOGY 
 
 formal Islam was tempered by the sacred right of 
 insurrection and revolution, and the People of Mu- 
 hammad, in spite of kings and princes, asserted, from 
 time to time, its unquenchable vitality. 
 
 In theology the spirit breathes through single 
 chosen men more than through the masses ; and, in 
 consequence, our treatment of it will take biographi- 
 cal form wherever our knowledge renders that pos- 
 sible. 
 
 But whether we have men or naked movements, the 
 begetters of which are names to us or less, three 
 threads are woven distinctly through the web of Mus- 
 lim religious thought. There is tradition (naql) ; there 
 is reason (ac/Z) ; and there is the unveiling of the mys- 
 tic (kashf). They were in the tissue of Muhammad's 
 brain and they have been in his church since he died. 
 Now one would be most prominent, now another, ac- 
 cording to the thinker of the time ; but all were pres- 
 ent to some degree. Tradition in its strictest form 
 lives now only with the Wahhabites and the Brother- 
 hood of as-Sanusi ; reason has become a scholastic 
 hand-maid of theology except among the modern 
 Indian Mu'tazilites, whom orthodox Islam would no 
 more accept as Muslims than a Trinitarian of the 
 Westminster confession would give the name of 
 Christian to a Unitarian of the left wing ; the inner 
 light of the mystic has assumed many forms, running 
 from plainest pantheism to mere devout ecstasy. 
 
 But in the church of Muhammad they are all work- 
 ing still; and the catholicity of Islam, in spite of zeal- 
 ots, persecutions and counter-persecutions, has at- 
 tained here, too, as in law, a liberty of variety in unity. 
 
THE THREE PRINCIPLES 121 
 
 Two of the principles we have met already in the 
 students of liadith and of speculative law. The Hau- 
 balites maintained in theology their devotion to tradi- 
 tion ; thev fought for centuries all independent think- 
 ing which sought to rise above what the fathers had 
 told ; they fought even scholastic theology of the 
 strictest type and would be content with nothing biit 
 the rehearsal of the old dogmas in the old forms ; they 
 fought, too, the mystical life in all its phases. On the 
 other hand, Abu Hauifa was tinged with rationalism 
 and speculation in theology as in law, and his follow- 
 ers have walked in his path. Even the mystical light 
 has been touched in oiu' view of the theory of the 
 state. It has iloiuished most among the Shi'ites, 
 who are driven to seek and to find an inner meaning 
 under the plain word of the Qur'an, and whose devo- 
 tion to Ali and his house and to their divine mission 
 has kept alive the thought of a continuous speaking 
 of God to mankind and of an exalting of mankind 
 into the presence of God. It is for the student, then, 
 to watch and hold fast these three guiding threads. 
 
 The development of Muslim theology, like that of 
 jurisprudence, could not begin till after the death of 
 Muhammad. So long as he lived and received infal- 
 lible revelations in solution of all questions of faith 
 or usage that might come up, it is obvious that no 
 system of theology could be formed or even thought 
 of. Traditions, too, which have reached us, even 
 show him setting his face against all discussions of 
 dogma and repeating again and again, in answer to 
 metaphysical and theological questions, the crude 
 
122 THEOLOGY 
 
 anthropomorphisms of the Qur'an. But these ques- 
 tions and answers are probably forgeries of the later 
 traditional school, shadows of future warfare thrown 
 back upon the screen of the patriarchal age. Again, 
 in the first twenty or thirty years after Muhammad's 
 death, the Muslims were too much occupied with the 
 propagation of their faith to think what that faith 
 exactly was. Thus, it seems that the questioning 
 spirit in this direction was aroused comparatively 
 late and remained for some time on what might be 
 called a private basis. Individual men had their in- 
 dividual views, but sects did not quickly arise, and 
 when they did were vague and hard to define in their 
 positions. It may be said, broadly, that everything 
 which has reached us about the early Muslim heresies 
 is uncertain, confused and unsatisfactory. Names, 
 dates, influences and doctrines are all seen through 
 a haze, and nothing more than an approximation to 
 an outline can be attempted. Vague stories are handed 
 down of the early questionings and disputings of 
 certain ahl-al-ahwa, " people of wandering desires," 
 a name singularly descriptive of the always flighty 
 and sceptical Arabs ; of how they compared Script- 
 ure with Scripture and got up theological debates,, 
 splitting points and defining issues, to great scandal 
 and troubling of spirit among the simpler-minded 
 pious. These were not yet heretics ; they were the 
 first investigators and systematizers. 
 
 Yet two sects loom up through the mist and their 
 existence can be tolerably conditioned through the 
 historical facts and philosophical necessities of the 
 time. The one is that of the Murji'ites, and the other 
 
MtTRJl'lTES 123 
 
 of the Qadarites. A Murji'ite is literally " one who 
 defers or postpones," in this case postpones judgment 
 until it is pronounced by God on the Day of Judg- 
 ment. They arose as a sect during and out of the 
 civil war between the Shi'ites, the Kharijites and 
 the Umayyads. All these parties claimed to be Mus- 
 lims, and most of them claimed that they were the 
 only true Muslims and that the others were un- 
 believers. This was especially the attitude of the 
 Shi'ites and Kharijites toward the Umayyads; to 
 them, the Umayyads, as we have seen already, were 
 godless heathen who professed Islam, but oppressed 
 and slaughtered the true saints of God. The Mur- 
 ji'ites, on the other hand, worked out a view on which 
 they could still support the Umayyads without homo- 
 logating all their actions and condemning all their 
 opponents. The Umayyads, they held, were de facto 
 the rulers of the Muslim state ; fealty had been 
 sworn to them and they confessed the Unity of God 
 and the apostleship of the Prophet. Thus, they 
 were not polytheists, and there is no sin that can 
 possibly be compared with the sin of polytheism 
 (shirk). It was, therefore, the duty of all Muslims to 
 acknowledge their sovereignty and to postpone until 
 the secrets of the Last Day all judgment or condemna- 
 tion of any sins they might have committed. Sins 
 less than polytheism could justify no one in rising in 
 revolt against them and in breaking the oath of fealty. 
 Such seems to have been the origin of the Murji'ites, 
 and it was the origin also of the theory of the ac- 
 complished fact in the state, of which we have had to 
 take account several times. Thus, between the fa- 
 
124 THEOLOGY 
 
 natical venerators of the canon law, to whom all the 
 Khalifas, after the first four, were an abomination, 
 and the purely worldly lawyers of the court party, 
 there came a group of pious theologians who taught 
 that the good of the Muslim community required 
 obedience to the ruler of the time, even though his 
 personal unworthiness were plain. As a consequence, 
 success can legitimate anything in the Muslim state. 
 But with the passing away of the situation which 
 gave rise to Murji'isih, it itself changed from politics 
 to theology. As a political party it had opposed the 
 political puritanism of the Kharijites ; it now came to 
 oppose the uncompromising spirit in which these 
 damned all who differed from them even in details 
 and brandished the terrors of the wrath of God over 
 their opponents. It is true that this came natural to 
 Islam. The earlier Muslims seem in general to have 
 been oppressed by a singularly gloomy fatalism. To 
 use modern theological language, they labored un- 
 der a terrible consciousness of sin. They viewed 
 the world as an evil temptress, seducing men from 
 heavenly things. Their lives were hedged about 
 with sins, great and little, and each deserved the 
 eternal wrath of God. The recollection of their lat- 
 ter end they kept ever before them and the terrors 
 that it would bring, for they felt that no amount of 
 faith in God and His Prophet could save them in the 
 judgment to come. The roots of this run far back. 
 Before the time of Muhammad and at his time there 
 were among the Arab tribes, scattered here and there, 
 many men who felt a profound dissatisfaction with 
 heathenism, its doctrines and religious rites. The 
 
THE WRATH OF &0D IN^ ISLAM 1'25 
 
 oonception of God and the bm-den of life pressed 
 lieavily upon tliem. They saw men pass away and 
 descend into the graye, and they asked whither they 
 had gone and what had become of them. The thought 
 of this fleeting, transitory life and of the ocean of 
 darkness and mystery that lies around it, drove them 
 away to seek ti-uth in solitude and the deserts. They 
 were called Hanifs — the word is of Tery doubtful 
 derivation — -and Muhammad himself, in the early 
 part of his career, reckoned himself one of them. But 
 we have evidence from heathen Ai-ab poetry that these 
 Hanifs were regarded as much the same as Cln-istian 
 monks, and that the term /ia;H/' was used as a syn- 
 onym for rahib, monk. 
 
 And, in tmth, the very soul of Islam sprang from 
 these solitary hermits, scattered here and there 
 throughout the desert, consecrating their lives to 
 God, and fleeing from the wrath to come. Even in 
 pre-Islamic Arabic poetry we feel how strong was 
 the impression made on the Arab mind by the gaunt, 
 weii"d men with their en^Uess watchings and night 
 prayers. Again and again there is allusion to the 
 lamp of the hermit shining through the darkness, and 
 we have pictures of the caravan or of the soKtary 
 traveller on the night journey cheered and guided by 
 its glimmer. These Christian hermits and the long 
 deserted ruins telling of old, forgotten tribes — judged 
 and overthrown by God, as the Arabs held and hold — 
 that lie throughout the Syrian waste and along the 
 caravan routes were the two things that most stirred 
 the imagination of Muhammad and went to form his 
 faith. To Muhammad, and to the Semite alwavs, the 
 
126 THEOLOGY 
 
 whole of life was but a long procession from the 
 great deep to the great deep again. Where are the 
 kings and rulers of the earth ? Where are the peoples 
 that were mighty in their day ? The hand of God 
 smote them and they are not. There is naught real in 
 the world but God. From Him we are, and unto 
 Him we return. There is nothing for man but to 
 fear and worship. The world is deceitful and makes 
 sport of them that trust it. 
 
 Such is the oversong of all Muslim thought, the 
 faith to which the Semite ever returns in the end. 
 To this the later Murji'ites opposed a doctrine of 
 Faith, which was Pauline in its sweep. Faith, they 
 declared, saved, and Faith alone. If the sinner be- 
 lieved in God and His Prophet he would not remain 
 in the fire. The Kharijites, on the other hand, held 
 that the sinner who died unrepentant would remain 
 therein eternally, even though he had confessed Is- 
 lam with his lips. The unrepentant sinner, they 
 considered, could not be a believer in the true sense. 
 This is still the Ibadite position, and from it devel- 
 oped one of the most important controversies of Is- 
 lam as to the precise nature of faith. Some extreme 
 Murji'ites held that faith (iman) was a confession in 
 the heart, private intercourse with God, as opposed 
 to Islam, public confession with the lips. Thus, one 
 could be a believer (mumin), and outwardly confess 
 Judaism or Christianity ; to be a professed Muslim 
 was not necessary. This is like the doctrine of the 
 Imamites, called taqiya, that it is allowable in time 
 of stress to dissemble one's religious views ; and it 
 is worth noticing that Jahm ibn Saf wan (killed, 131 ?), 
 
one of these extreme Murji'ites. was a Persian pros- 
 elvte in rebellion agaicst the -li-ab mle, and of the 
 loosest religious conduct. But these Antinomians 
 \reie no more Muslims than the Anabaptists of M\m- 
 ster had a claim to be Clixistiaiis. The other wing 
 of the Mmji'ites is represented by Abu Htmifa, who 
 held that faith (i"i.iti,;^ is acknowledgment with the 
 tougue as well as the heart and that works are a neces- 
 sary supplement. This is httle different from the 
 orthodox position which grew up, that persuasion, 
 confession, tmd works made np faith. "When ilniji- 
 ism drojjped out of existence as a sect it left as its 
 contribution to Islam a distinction between great and 
 little sins Inl-'rc.-f. fzj^irvJ'. and the position that even 
 great sins, if not involving polytheism ■.>':iVa'\ would 
 not exclude the believer forever from the Garden. 
 
 The second sect, that of Qadiuires. had its origin 
 in a philosophical necessity of the human mind. A 
 pierception of the contradiction between man s con- 
 sciousness of freedom and responsibility, on the one 
 hand, and the absolute mle and predestination of 
 God. on the other, is the usual beginning of the think- 
 ing life, both in individuals and in races. It was so 
 in Islam. In theology as in law, Muhammad had 
 been an opporttuiist pure and simple. On the one 
 hand, his Allah is the absolure Semitic despot who 
 guides aright and leads astray, who seals np the 
 hearts of men :\nd opens them again, who is mighty 
 over aU. On the other hand, men are exhorted to 
 repentance, ;ind punishment is threatened against 
 them if they remain hardened in their unbelief. All 
 these phases of a wandering and intensely sabjective 
 
128 THEOLOGY 
 
 mind, whioli lived only in the perception of the mo- 
 ment, appear in the Qur'an. Muhammad was a 
 poet rather than a theologian ; just as he was a proph- 
 et rather than a legislator. As soon, then, as the 
 Muslims paused in their career of conquest and be- 
 gan to think at all, they thought of this. Naturally, 
 so long as they were fighting in the Path of God, it 
 was the conception of God's absolute sovereignty 
 which most appealed to them ; by it their fates were 
 fixed, and they charged without fear the ranks of the 
 unbelievers. In these earliest times, the fatalistic 
 passages bore most stress and the others were ex- 
 plained away. This helped, at least, to bring it 
 about that the party which in time came to profess 
 the freedom of man's will, began and ended as an 
 heretical sect. But it only helped, and we must never 
 lose sight of the fact that the eventual victory in Is- 
 lam of the absolute doctrine of God's eternal decree 
 was the victory of the more fundamental of Muham- 
 mad's conflicting conceptions. The other had been 
 much more a campaigning expedient. 
 
 This sect of Qadarites, whose origin we have 
 been conditioning, derived its name from their posi- 
 tion that a man possessed qadar, or power, over his 
 actions. One of the first of them was a certain 
 Ma'bad al-Juhani, who paid for his heresy with his 
 life in a.h. 80. Historians tell that he with Ata ibn 
 Yassar, another of similar opinions, came one day to 
 the celebrated ascetic, al-Hasan al-Basri (d. 110), 
 and said, " O Abu Sa'id, those kings shed the blood 
 of the Muslims, and do grievous things and say 
 that their works are by the decree of God." To 
 
OKIGIN" OF MU'TAZILITES 129 
 
 this al-Hasan replied, "The enemies of God lie." 
 The story is only important as showing how the 
 times and their changes were widening men's 
 thoughts. Very soon, now, we come from these 
 drifting tendencies to a formal sect with a formal 
 secession and a fixed name. The Murji'ites and 
 the Qadarites melt from the scene, some of their 
 tenets pass into orthodox Islam ; some into the new 
 sect. 
 
 The story of its founding again connects with the 
 outstanding figure of al-Hasan al-Basri. He seems 
 to have been the chief centre of the rehgious life and 
 movements of his time ; his pupils appear and his in- 
 fluence shows itself in all the later schools. Some- 
 one came to him as he sat among his papils and 
 asked what his view was between the conflicting 
 Murji'ites and Wa'idites, the first holding that the 
 committer of a great sin, if he had faith, was not an 
 unbeUever, was to be accepted as a Muslim and his 
 case left in the hands of God ; the other laying more 
 stress upon the threats (wa'id) in the Book of God 
 and teaching that the committer of a great sin could 
 not be a believer, that he had, ipso facto, abandoned 
 the true faith, must go into the Fire and abide there. 
 Before the master could reply, one of his pupils — 
 some say Amr ibn Ubayd (d. circ. 144), others, 
 Wasil ibn Ata (d. 131) — broke iu with the assertion 
 of an intermediate position. Such an one was neither 
 a believer nor an unbeliever. Then he left the circle 
 which sat round the master, went to another part 
 of the mosque and began to develop his view to 
 those who gathered round him. The name believer 
 
130 TIIEOLO&Y 
 
 (mu'min), he taught, was a term of praise, and an evil- 
 doer was not worthy of praise, and could not have that 
 name applied to him. But he was not an unbeliever, 
 either, for he assented to the faith. If he, then, died 
 unrepentant, he must abide forever in the Fire — for 
 there are only two divisions in the n£;xt world, 
 heaven and hell — but his torments would be miti- 
 gated on account of his faith. The position to 
 which orthodox Islam eventually came was that a 
 believer could commit a great sin. If he did so, and 
 died unrepentant, he went to hell ; but after a time 
 would be permitted to enter heaven. Thus, hell be- 
 came for believers a sort of purgatory. On this 
 secession, al-Hasan only said " I'tazala anna" — 
 He has seceded from us. 80 the new party was 
 called the Mu'tazila, the Secession. That, at least, is 
 the story, which may be taken for what it is worth. 
 The fixed facts are the rise at the beginning of tlic 
 second century after the Hijra of a tolerably definite 
 school of dissenters from the traditional ideas, and 
 their application of reason to the dogmas of the 
 Qur'an. 
 
 We have noted already the influence of Christian- 
 ity on Muhammad through the hermits of the des- 
 ert. From it sprang the asceticism of Islam and 
 that asceticism grew and developed into quietism 
 and thence into mysticism. The last step was still 
 in the future, but already at this time there were 
 wandering monks who imitated their Christian breth- 
 ren in the wearing of a coarse woollen frock and were 
 thence called Sufis, from suf, wool. It was not long 
 before Sufi came to mean mystic, and the third of the 
 
INFLUENCE OF JOHN OF DAMASCUS 131 
 
 tkree gi-eat thi-eads was definitely -woven into the 
 fabric of Muslim thought. But that was not the 
 limit of Christian influence. Those anchorites in 
 their caves and huts had little training in the theol- 
 ogy of the schools ; the dogmas of their faith were of 
 a practical simplicity. But in the development of the 
 Muiji'ites and Qadaiites it is impossible to mistake 
 the workings of the dialectic refinements of Greek 
 theology as developed in the Byzantine and Spian 
 schools. It is worth notice, too, that, while the 
 political heresies of the Shi'ites and Kharijites held 
 sway mostly in Ai-abia, Mesopotamia, and Pereia, 
 these more religious heresies seem to have arisen in 
 Syria first and especially at Damascus, the seat of 
 the Umayyads. 
 
 The Umayyad dynasty, we should remember, was 
 in many ways a return to pre-Muslim times and to 
 an easy enjoyment of worldly things ; it was a rejec- 
 tion of the yoke of Muhammad in all but form and 
 name. The fear of the wrath of God had small part 
 with the most of them ; sometimes it appeared in the 
 form of an insane rebellion and defiance. Fm'ther, 
 as Muslim governments always have done, they 
 sought aid in theii- task of governing from their non- 
 Muslim subjects. So it came about that Sergius, 
 the father of Johannes Damascenus, was treasurer 
 rmder them and that after his death, this John of 
 Damascus himself, the last great doctor of the Greek 
 Church and the man under whose hands its theology 
 assumed final form, became wazu- and held that post 
 until he withdi-ew from the world and turned to the 
 contemplative life. In his writings and in those of 
 
132 THEOLOGY 
 
 his pupil, Theodoras Abucara (d. a.d. 826), there ai-e 
 polemic treatises on Islam, cast in the form of dis- 
 cussions between Christians and Muslims. These 
 represent, there can be little doubt, a characteristic^ 
 of the time. The close agreement of Murji'ito and 
 Qadarite ideas with those formulated and defended 
 by John of Damascus and by the Greek Church gen- 
 erally can only be so explained. The Miirji'ite re- 
 jection of eternal punishment and emphasis on the 
 goodness of God and His love for His creatures, the 
 Qadarite doctrine of freewill and responsibility, are 
 to be explained in the same way as we have already 
 explained the presence of sentences in the Muslim 
 fiqh which seem to be taken bodily from the Roman 
 codes. In this case, also, we are not to think of the 
 Muslim divines as studying the writings of the Greek 
 fathers, but as picking up ideas from them in practi- 
 cal intercourse and controversy. The very form of 
 the tract of John of Damascus is significant, " When 
 the Saracen says to you such and such, then you will 
 reply. . . ." This, as a whole, is a subject 
 which calls for investigation, but so far it is clear 
 that the influence of Greek theology on Islam can 
 hardly be overestimated. The one outstanding fact 
 of the enormous emphasis laid by both on the doc- 
 trine of the nature of God and His attributes is 
 enough. It may even be conjectured that the harsher 
 views developed by western Muslims, and especially 
 by the theologians of Spain, were due, on the other 
 hand, to Augustinian and Roman influence. It is, 
 to say the least, a curious coincidence that Spanish 
 Islam never took kindly to metaphysical or scholas- 
 
INFLUENCES AT BAGHDAD 133 
 
 tic theology, in tlie exact sense, but gaye almost all 
 its energy to canon law. 
 
 But there were other influences to come. With 
 the fall of the Umayyads and the rise of the Abba- 
 sids, the intellectual centre of the empire moved to 
 the basin of the Euphrates and the Tigris. The story 
 of the founding of Baghdad there, in 145, we have 
 already heard. We have seen, too, that the victory 
 of the Abbasids was, in a sense, a conquest of the 
 Arabs by the Persians. Gnvcia capfa and the rest 
 came true here ; the battles of al-Qadisiya and Naha- 
 wand were avenged ; Persian ideas and Persian re- 
 ligion began slowly to work on the faith of Muham- 
 mad. At the court of the earliest Abbasids it was 
 fashionable to affect a little free thought. People 
 were becoming enlightened and played with philoso- 
 phy and science. Greek philosophy, Zoroastrian- 
 ism, Manichseism, the old heathenism of Harran, 
 Judaism, Christianity — all were in the air and mak- 
 ing themselves felt. So long as the adherents and 
 teachers of these took them in a purely academic 
 waj', were good subjects and made no trouble, the 
 earlier Abbasids encouraged their efforts, gathered in 
 the scientific harvest, paid well for translations, in- 
 struments, and investigations, and generally posed as 
 patrons of progress. 
 
 But a line had to be drawn somewhere and drawn 
 tightly. The victory of the Abbasids had raised 
 high hopes among the Persian nationalists. They 
 had thought that they were rallying to the overthrow 
 of the Arabs, and found, when all was done, that 
 they had got only another Arab dynasty. So revolts 
 
134 THEOLOGY 
 
 had begun to break out afresh, and now, curiously 
 enough, they were of a marked religious character. 
 They were an expression of religious sects. Buddh- 
 istic, Zoroastrian, Manichsean, and parties with pro- 
 phetic leaders of their own ; all are swept together 
 by Muslim writers as Zindiqs, probably literally, 
 " initiates," originally Manichoeans, thereafter, prac- 
 tically non-Muslims concealing their unbelief. For 
 when not in open revolt they must needs profess 
 Islam. In 167, we find al-Mahdi, who was also, it 
 is true, much more strict than his father, al-Mansur, 
 appointing a grand inquisitor to deal with such here- 
 tics. Al-Mansur, however, had contented himself 
 with crushing actual rebellion ; and Christian, Jew, 
 Zoroastrian, and heathen of Harran were tolerated 
 so long as they brought to him the fruits of Greek 
 science and philosophy. 
 
 That they did willingly, and so, through three in- 
 termediaries, science came to the Arabs. There was 
 a heathen Syrian source with its centre at Harran, of 
 which we know comparatively little. There was a 
 Christian Syrian source working from the multitudi- 
 nous monasteries scattered over the country. There 
 was a Persian source by which natural science, and 
 medicine especially, were passed on. Already in the 
 fifth century a.d. an academy of medicine and phi- 
 losophy had been founded at Gondeshapur in Khuzi- 
 stan. One of the directors of this institution was 
 summoned, in 148, to prescribe for al-Mansur, and 
 from that time on it furnished court physicians to 
 the Abbasids. On these three paths, then, Aristotle 
 and Plato, Euclid and Ptolemy, Galen and Hippocra- 
 tes reached the Muslim peoples. 
 
GOLDEN AGE OF ilTJSLIM SCIENCE 135 
 
 The first hundred years of the Abbasid Khalifate 
 was the golden age of Muslim science, the period of 
 growth and development for the People of Muham- 
 mad fairly as a whole. Intellectual life did not cease 
 with the close of that period, but the Khalifate ceased 
 to aid in carrying the torch. Thereafter, learning was 
 protected and fostered by individual rulers here and 
 there, and individual investigators and scholars still 
 went on their own quiet paths. But free intellectual 
 life among the people was checked, and such learn- 
 ing as still generally flourished fell more and more 
 between fixed bounds. Scholasticism, with its formal 
 methods and systems, its subtle deductions and end- 
 less ramifications of proof and cormter-proof, drew 
 away attention from the facts of nature. The ori- 
 ental brain studied itself and its own workings to the 
 point of dizziness, and then turned and clung fast to 
 the certainties of revelation. Under this spell heresy 
 and orthodoxy proved alike sterile. 
 
 We return, now, to the beginnings of the Mu'tazi- 
 lites. These served themselves heii-s upon the Qad- 
 arites and denied that God predestined the actions 
 of men. Death and life, sickness, health, and exter- 
 nal vicissitudes came, they admitted, by God's qadar, 
 but it was imthinkable that man should be punished 
 for actions not in his control. The freedom of the 
 will is an a priori certainty, and man possesses qadar 
 over his own actions. This was the position of 
 TVasil ibn Ata, of whom we have already heard. But 
 to it he added a second doctriue, the origin of which 
 is obscure, although suggestive of discussions with 
 Greek theologians. The Qui-'an describes God as 
 
136 THEOLOGY 
 
 ■willing, knowing, decreeing, etc. — strictly as the Will- 
 ing One, the Knowing One, the Decreeing One, etc. — 
 and the orthodox hold that such expressions could 
 only mean that God possesses as Qualities {■'lifaf) 
 Will, Knowledge, Power, Life, etc. To this Wasil 
 raised objections. God was One, and such Qualities 
 would be separate Beings. Thus, his party and the 
 Mu'tazilites always called themselves the People of 
 Unity and Justice {AJd-at-tawhid wal'adi) ; the Unity 
 being of the divine nature, the Justice consisting in 
 that they opposed God's qadar over men and held 
 that He must do for the creature that which was best 
 for it. Orthodox Islam held and holds that there 
 can be no necessity upon God, even to do justice ; 
 He is absolutely free, and what He does man must 
 accept. It flatly opposes the position held by the 
 Mu'tazilites in general, that good and evil can be 
 perceived and distinguished by the intellect (aql). 
 Good and evil have their nature by God's will, and 
 man can learn to know them only by God's teachings 
 and commands. Thus, except through revelation, 
 there can be neither theology nor ethics. 
 
 The next great advance was made by Abu Hudhayl 
 Muhammad al-AUaf (d. circa 226), a disciple of the 
 second generation from Wasil. At his hands the 
 doctrine of God's qualities assumed a more definite 
 form. Wasil had reduced God to a vague unity, a 
 kind of eternal oneness. Abu Hudhayl taught that 
 the qualities were not in His essence, and thus sepa- 
 rable from it, thinkable apart from it, but that they 
 luere His essence. Thus, God was omnipotent by 
 His omnipotence, but it ivas His essence and not in 
 
ABU HTJDHATL 137 
 
 His essence. He was omniscient by His omnis- 
 cience and it luas His essence. Further, lie held that 
 these qualities must be either negations or relations. 
 Nothing positive can be asserted of them, for that 
 would mean that there was in God the complexity of 
 subject and predicate, being and quality ; and God is 
 absolute Unity. This view the Muslim theologians 
 regard as a close approximation to the Christian 
 Trinity ; for them, the persons of the Trinity have 
 always been personified quahties, and such seems 
 really to have been the view of John of Damascus. 
 Further, God's Will, according to Abu Hudhayl, as 
 expressed in His Creative Word, did not necessarily 
 exist in a subject {fi maJiall, in subiecto). When God 
 said, " Be ! " creatively, there was no subject. Again, 
 he endeavored — and in this he was followed by most 
 of the Mu'tazilites — to cut down the number of God's 
 attributes. His will, he said, was a form of His 
 knowledge ; He knew that there was good in an 
 action, and that knowledge was His will. 
 
 His position on the qadar question was peculiar. 
 With regard to this world, he was a Qadarite ; but 
 in the next world, both in heaven and in hell, he 
 thought that aU changes were by divine necessity. 
 Otherwise, that is, if men were free, there would be 
 obligation to observe a law {tahlif) ; but there is no 
 such obligation iu the other world. Thus, whatever 
 happened there happened by God's decree. Further, 
 he taught that, eventually, nothing would happen 
 there ; that there would be no changes, but only an 
 endless stillness in which those in heaven had all its 
 joys and those in hell all its pains. This is a close 
 
138 THKOLOGT 
 
 approximation to the view of Jahm ibn Saf wan, who 
 held that after the judgment both heaven and hell 
 would pass away and God remain alone as He was 
 in the beginning. To these doctrines Abu Hudhayl 
 seems to have been led by two considerations, both 
 significant for the drift of the Mu'tazilites. First, 
 there was about their reasonings a grimness of logic 
 touched with utilitarianism. Thus, from their posi- 
 tion that man could come by the light of his reason 
 to the knowledge of God and of virtue, they drew the 
 conclusion that it was man's duty so to attain, and 
 that God would damn eternally every man who did 
 not. Their utilitarianism, again, comes out strik- 
 ingly in their view of heaven and hell. These, at 
 present, were serving no useful purpose because they 
 had no inhabitants ; therefore, at present, they did 
 not exist. But this made difficulties for Abu Hud- 
 hayl. What has a beginning.must have an end. So 
 he explained the end as the ceasing of all changes. 
 Second, he shows clear evidence of influence from 
 Greek philosophy. The Qur'an teaches that the world 
 has been created in time ; Aristotle, that it is from 
 eternity and to eternity. The creation, Abu Hudhayl 
 applied to changes ; before that, the world ivas, but 
 in eternal rest. Hereafter, all changes will cease ; 
 rest will again enter and endure to all eternity. We 
 shall see how largely this doctrine was advanced and 
 developed by his successors. 
 
 But there were further complications in the doc- 
 trine of man's actions and into some of these we must 
 enter, on account of their later importance. Not 
 p- crything that comes from the action of a man is by 
 
ABU HUDHAYL 139 
 
 his action. God has a creative part in it, apparently 
 as regards the effects. Especially, knowledge in the 
 mind of a pupil does not come from the teacher, but 
 from God. The idea seems to be that the teacher 
 may teach, but that the being taught in the pupil is 
 a divine working. Similarly, he distinguished motions 
 in the mind, which he held were not altogether due 
 to the man, and external motions which were. There 
 is given, too, to a man at the time of his performing 
 an action an ability to perform the action, which is a 
 special accident in him apart from any mere sound- 
 ness of health or limb. 
 
 In these ways, Abu Hudhayl recognized God's 
 working through man. Another of his positions had 
 a similar basis and was a curious combination of his- 
 torical criticism and mysticism, a combination which 
 we shall find later in al-Ghazzali, a much greater man. 
 The evidence of tradition for things dealing with the 
 Unseen World (al-ghayb) he rejected. Twenty wit- 
 nesses might hand on the tradition in question, but 
 it was not to be received unless among them there 
 was one, at least, of the People of Paradise. At all 
 times, he taught, there were in the world these Friends 
 of God {aivliya Allah, sing, wali), who were protected 
 against all greater sins and could not lie. It is the 
 word of these that is the basis for belief, and the tra- 
 dition is merely a statement of what they have said. 
 This shows clearly how far the doctrine of the ecstatic 
 life and of knowledge gained through direct inter- 
 course between the believer and God had already ad- 
 vanced. 
 
 But Abu Hudhayl was only one in a group of dar- 
 
140 THEOLOGY 
 
 ing and absolutely free-minded speculators. They 
 were applying to the ideas of the Qur'an the keen 
 solvent of Greek dialectic, and the results which they 
 obtained were of the most fantastically original char- 
 acter. Thrown into the wide sea and utter freedom 
 of Greek thought, their ideas had expanded to the 
 bursting point and, more than even a German meta- 
 physician, they had lost touch of the ground of or- 
 dinary life, with its reasonable probabilities, and 
 were swinging loose on a wild hunt after ultimate 
 truth, wielding as their weapons definitions and syl- 
 logisms. The lyric fervors of Muhammad in the 
 Qur'an gave scope enough of strange ideas from which 
 to start, or which had to be explained away. Their 
 belief in the powers of the science of logic was un- 
 failing, and, armed with Aristotle's "Analytics," they 
 felt sure that certainty was within their reach. It 
 was at the court and under the protection of al- 
 Ma'mun that they especially flourished, and some 
 account of the leading spirits among them will be 
 necessary before we describe how they reached their 
 utmost pride of power and how they fell. 
 
 An-Nazzam (d. 231) has the credit among later 
 historians of having made' use, to a high degree, of 
 the doctrines of the Greek philosophers. He was 
 one of the Satans of the Qadarites, say they ; he read 
 the books of the philosophers and mingled their 
 teachings with the doctrines of the Mu'tazilites. He 
 taught, in the most absolute way, that God could do 
 nothing to a creature, either in this world or in the 
 next, that was not for the creature's good and in ac- 
 cordance with strict justice. It was not only that 
 
AN-XAZZAM 141 
 
 God tcouM not do it; He had not the power to do 
 anything evil. Evidently the personality of God was 
 fast vanishing behind an absolute law of right. To 
 this, orthodox Islam opposed the doctrine that God 
 could do anything ; He could forgive whom He willed, 
 and punish whom He willed. Further, he taught 
 that God's willing a thing meant only that He did it 
 in accordance with His knowledge ; and when He 
 willed the action of a creature that meant only that 
 He commanded it. This is evidently to evade phrases 
 in the Qur'an. Man, again, he taught, was spirit (niJi), 
 and the body (badan) was only an instrument. But 
 this spirit was a fine substance which flowed in the 
 body like the essential oil in a rose, or butter in milk. 
 In a universe determined by strict law, man alone 
 was undetermined. He could throw a stone into the 
 air, and by his action the stone went up ; but when 
 the force of his throw was exhausted it came again 
 under law and fell. If he had only asked himself 
 how it came to fall, strange things might have hap- 
 pened. But he, and all his fellows, were only play- 
 ing with words like counters. Further, he taught 
 that God had created aU created things at once, but 
 that He kept them in concealment until it was time 
 for them to enter on the stage of visible being and do 
 their part. All things that ever will exist are thus 
 existing now, but, in a sense, in reteniis. This seems 
 to be another attempt to solve the problem of crea- 
 tion in time, and it had important consequences. 
 Fui-ther, the Qur'an was no miracle (mu'jiz) to him. 
 The only miraculous elements in it are the naixatives 
 about the Unseen World, and past things and things 
 
142 THEOLOGY 
 
 to come, and the fact that God deprived the Arabs of 
 the power of writing anything like it. But for that, they 
 could easily have surpassed it as literature. As a 
 high Imamite he rejected utterly agreement and 
 analogy. Only the divinely appointed Imam had 
 the right to supplement the teaching of Muhammad. 
 We pass over some of his metaphysical views, odd 
 as they are. The Muslim writers on theological his- 
 tory have classified him rightly as more of a physicist 
 than a metaphysician. He had a concrete mind and 
 that fondness for playing with metaphysical para- 
 doxes which often goes with it. 
 
 Another of the group was Bishr ibn al-Mu'tamir. 
 His principal contribution was the doctrine of tawlid 
 and iawallvd, begetting and deriving. It is the trans- 
 mission of a single action through a series of objects ; 
 the agent meant to affect the first object only ; the 
 effect on the others followed. Thus, he moves his 
 hand, and the ring on his finger is moved. What re- 
 lation of responsibility, then, does he bear to these 
 derived effects? Generally, how are we to view a 
 complex of causes acting together and across one 
 another? The answer of later orthodox Islam is 
 worth giving at this point. God creates in the man 
 the will to move his hand ; He creates the movement 
 of the hand and also the movement of the ring. All 
 is by God's direct creation at the time. Further, 
 could God punish an infant or one who had no 
 knowledge of the faith ? Bishr's reply on the first 
 point was simply a bit of logical jugglery to avoid 
 saying frankly that there was anything that God 
 could not do. His answer on the second was that 
 
BISHR ; MA 'mar 143 
 
 God could have made a different and mucli better 
 world than this, a world in which all men might have 
 been saved. But He was not bound to make a bet- 
 ter world — in this Bishr separates from the other 
 Mu'tazilites — He was only bound to give man free- 
 will and, then, either revelation to guide him to sal- 
 vation or reason to show him natural law. 
 
 With Ma'mar ibn Abbad, the philosophies wax 
 faster and more furious. He succeeded in reducing 
 the conception of God to a bare, indefinable some- 
 thing. We could not say that God had knowledge. 
 For it must be of something in Himself or outside of 
 Himself. If the first, then there was a union of 
 knower and known, and that is impossible; or a dual- 
 ity in the divine nature, and that was equally impos- 
 sible. Here Ma'mar was evidently on the road to 
 Hegel. If the second, then His knowledge depended 
 on the existence of something other than Himself, and 
 that did away with His absoluteness. Similarly, he 
 dealt with God's Will. Nor could He be described 
 as qadim, prior to all things, for that word, in Arabic, 
 suggested sequence and time. By all this, he evi- 
 dently meant that our conceptions cannot be applied 
 to God ; that God is unthinkable by us. On creation, 
 he developed the ideas of an-Nazzam. Substances 
 (jisms) only were created by God, and by " sub- 
 stances " he seems to mean matter as a whole ; all 
 changes in them, or it, come either of necessity from 
 its nature, as when fire bums, the sun warms ; or of 
 free-will, as always in the animal world. God has no 
 part in these things. He has given the material and 
 has nothing to do with the coming and going of 
 
144 THEOLOGY 
 
 separate bodies ; such are simple changes, forms of 
 existence, and proceed from the matter itself. Man 
 is an incorporeal substance. The soul is the man 
 and his body is but a cover. This true man can only 
 know and will ; the body perceives and does. 
 
 The last of this group whose views we need con- 
 sider, is Thumama ibn Ashras. He was of very du- 
 bious morals ; was imprisoned as a heretic by Harun 
 ar-Eashid, but highly favored by al-Ma'mun, in whose 
 Khalifate he died, a.h. 213. He held that actions 
 produced through tawallud had no agent, either God 
 or man. That knowledge of good and evil could be 
 produced by tawallud through speculation, and is, 
 therefore, an action without an agent, and required 
 even before revelation. That Jews, Christians, Magi- 
 ans will be turned into dust in the next world and 
 will not enter either Paradise or Hell ; the same will 
 be the fate of cattle and children. That any one of 
 the unbelievers who does not know his Creator is ex- 
 cusable. That all knowledge is a priori. That the 
 only action which men possess is will; everything 
 besides that is a production without a producer. 
 That the world is the act of God by His nature, i.e., 
 it is an act which His nature compels Him to pro- 
 duce ; is, therefore, from eternity and to eternity with 
 Him. It may be doubted how far Thumama was a 
 professional theologian and how far he was a free- 
 thinking, easy-living man of letters. 
 
 In all this, the influence of Greek theology and of 
 Aristotle can be clearly traced. With Aristotle had 
 come to them the idea of the world as law, an eternal 
 construction subsisting and developing on fixed prin- 
 
THE VISION OF GOD 145 
 
 ciples. This conception of law shows itself in their 
 thought frankly at strife with Muhammad's concep- 
 tion of God as will, as the sovereign over all. Hence, 
 the crudities and devices by which they strove to 
 make good their footing on strange ground and keep 
 a right to the name of Muslim, while changing the 
 essence of their faith. The anthropomorphic God of 
 Muhammad, who has face and hands, is seen in Para- 
 dise by the believer and settles Himself firmly upon 
 His throne, becomes a spirit, and a spirit, too, of the 
 vaguest kind. 
 
 It remains now only to touch upon one or two 
 points common to all the Mu'tazilites. First, the 
 Beatific Vision of God in Paradise. It was a fixed 
 agreement of the early Muslim Church, based on 
 texts of the Qur'an and on tradition, that some be- 
 lievers, at least, would see and gaze upon God in the 
 other world ; this was the highest delight held out to 
 them. But the Mu'tazilites perceived that vision in- 
 volved a directing of the eyes on the part of the seer 
 and position on the part of the seen. God must, 
 therefore, be in a place and thus limited. So they 
 were compelled to reject the agreement and the tra- 
 ditions in question and to explain away the passages 
 in the Qur'an. Similarly, in Qur'an vii. 52, we read 
 that God settled Himself firmly upon His throne. 
 This, with other anthropomorphisms of hands and 
 feet and eyes, the Mu'tazilites had to explain away 
 in a more or less cumbrous fashion. 
 
 With one other detail of this class we must deal 
 at greater length. It was destined to be the vital 
 point of the whole Mu'tazilite controversy and the test 
 
146 THEOLOGY 
 
 by which theologians were tried and had their places 
 assigned. It had a weighty part also in bringing 
 about the fall of the Mu'tazilites. There had grown 
 up very early in the Muslim community an un- 
 bounded reverence and awe in the presence of the 
 Qur'an. In it God speaks, addressing His servant, 
 the Prophet ; the words, with few exceptions, are 
 direct words of God. It is, therefore, easily intelli- 
 gible that it came to be called the word of God {halam 
 Allah). But Muslim piety went further and held that 
 it was uncreated and had existed from all eternity 
 with God. Whatever proofs of this doctrine may 
 have been brought forward later from the Qur'an it- 
 self, we can have no difficulty in recognizing that it 
 is plainly derived from the Christian Logos and that 
 the Greek Church, perhaps through John of Damas- 
 cus, has again played a formative part. So, in cor- 
 respondence with the heavenly and uncreated Logos 
 in the bosom of the Father, there stands this uncre- 
 ated and eternal Word of God ; to the earthly mani- 
 festation in Jesus corresponds the Qur'an, the Word 
 of God which we read and recite. The one is not the 
 same as the other,but the idea to be gained from the 
 expressions of the one is equivalent to the idea which 
 we would gain from the other, if the veil of the flesh 
 were removed from us and the spiritual world re- 
 vealed. 
 
 That this view grew up very early among the 
 Muslims is evident from the fact that it is opposed 
 by Jahm ibn Safwan, who was killed toward the 
 end of the Umayyad period. It seems to have 
 originated by a kind of transfusion of ideas from 
 
THE "WOED OF GuD 147 
 
 Christianity and not as a result of controversy or 
 dialectic about the teachings of the Qur'an. We find 
 the orthodox party vehemently opposing discussion 
 on the subject, as indeed they did on all theological 
 subjects. " Our fathers have told us ; it is the faith 
 received from the Companions ; " was their argument 
 from the earliest time we can trace. Malik ibn Anas 
 used to cut off all discussions with " Bila kayfa" 
 (Believe without asking how) ; and he held strongly 
 that the Qur'an was uncreated. The same word kalam 
 which we have found applied to the Word of God — 
 both the eternal, uncreated Logos and its manifesta- 
 tion in the Qur'an — was used by them most confusing- 
 ly for " disputation ;" "he disputed " was takallam 
 and " one who disputed " was mutakallim. All that 
 was anathema to the pious, and it is amusing to see 
 the origin of what became later the technical terms 
 for scholastic theology and its students in their 
 shuddering repulsion to all " talking about " the sacred 
 mysteries. 
 
 This opposition appeared in two forms. First, 
 they refused to go an inch beyond the statements in 
 the Qur'an and tradition and to draw consequences, 
 however near the surface these consequences might 
 seem to lie. A story is told of al-Bukhari, (d. 257), 
 late as he is, which shows how far this went and how 
 long it lasted. An inquisition was got up against 
 him out of envy by one of his fellow-teachers. The 
 point of attack was the orthodoxy of his position on 
 the lafz (utterance) of the Qur'an ; was it created or 
 uncreated ? He said readily that the Qur'an was un- 
 created and was obstinately silent as to the utterance 
 
148 THEOLOGY 
 
 of it by men. At last, persistent questioning drove 
 him to an outburst. "The Qur'an is the Word of 
 God and is uncreated. The speech of man is created 
 and inquisition {imtihan) is an innovation {bid'a)." 
 But beyond that he would not go, even to draw the 
 conclusion of the syllogism which he had indicated. 
 Some, as we may gather from this story, had felt 
 themselves driven to hold that not only the Qur'an 
 in itself but also the utterance of it by the lips of 
 men and the writing of it by men's hands — all be- 
 tween the boards, as they said — was uncreated. 
 Others were coming to deny absolutely the existence 
 of the eternal Logos and that this revealed Qur'an 
 was uncreated in any sense. But others, as al-Bu- 
 khari, while holding tenaciously that the Qur'an was 
 uncreated, refused to make any statement as to its 
 utterance by men. There was nothing said about 
 that in Qur'an or tradition. 
 
 The second form of opposition was to any uphold- 
 ing of their belief by arguments, except of the sim- 
 plest and most apparent. That was an invasion by 
 reason (aql) of the realm of traditional faith (naqV). 
 When the pious were eventually driven to dialectic 
 weapons, their arguments show that these were 
 snatched up to defend already occupied positions. 
 They ring artificial and forced. Thus, in the Qur'an 
 itself, the Qur'an is called " knowledge from God." 
 It is, then, inseparable from God's quality of knowl- 
 edge. But that is eternal and uncreated ; therefore, 
 so too, the Qur'an. Again, God created everything 
 by the word, " Be." But this word cannot have been 
 created, otherwise a created word would be a creator. 
 
THE WORD OF GOP 149 
 
 Therefore, God's word is Tmcieated. Again, thei^ 
 sr;i::ds in the Qrjr'an iTii, 5"2', ''Aie not the citation 
 and tiie command His ? " The command here is exi- 
 dentlv diffeivjnt froij the orearion. i.r., not createvi. 
 Further, God's command creates ; therefore it o;vanot 
 Iv created. Ev.t it is Gtxi s word in command. It 
 ■wrill be noticed here how completelv G^xl"s word is 
 hTpostati?ed. Tnis appears still more strongly in 
 the following M^.tment. Gvxi said to Moses. ^Qur. 
 rii, lil\ "I have cnosen thee over mankind with 
 mv aposToh^te and my word. " God, therefore, has a 
 word. Bnt. airain Q.ir. ir, 1^^"2'', He addresses 
 Moses with this word {^:.\'ama-llaAu I/:.-,'; icV.in.x 
 evidentlv resraxded as meiininc that Crod's word ad- 
 dresse i Moses and said. " Lo. I ;vm thy Lard." This 
 arsrament is supposed to put the opponent in a di- 
 lemma. Ihrher he rejects the fact of Moses being so 
 addressed, which is rejecting what God has schd. and 
 is. therefore, rui belief ; or he holds that the •.^:r-,v < 
 which so ad.lnesses Moses is a create^l thing. Then. 
 a created thing asseits that it is Moses' Lord. There- 
 fore, Go is .(limn ^th which He ad^hresses the proph- 
 ets, or which addresses the prophets, is eternal, nn- 
 created. 
 
 But if this doctrine grew up early in Islam, op- 
 position to it was not slow in aptvaring. and that on 
 direrenr sides. Liter.uy vanity, national pride, and 
 -o"::i":osov"nic.J scruples all made themselves felt. Exen 
 in Mnl-,.-.ni:nad''s lifetime. ace."^rding t ? the legend of 
 t"ae poet L^l id and the vet-ses which he put up in 
 challenge on the Ka"l>a, the Qnr'an had tahen rank as 
 inimitable poetry. At all points it w;i5 the Word of 
 
150 THEOLOGY 
 
 God and perfect in every detail. But, among the 
 Arabs, a jealous and vain people, if there was one 
 thing on which each was more jealous and vain than 
 another, it was skill in working with words. The 
 superiority of Muhammad as a Prophet of God they 
 might endure, though often with a bad grace ; but 
 Muhammad as a rival and vmapproachable literary 
 artist they could not away with. So we find satire of 
 the weaknesses of the Qur'an appearing here and 
 there, and it came to be a sign of emancipation and 
 freedom from prejudice to examine it in detail and 
 balance it against other products of the Arab genius. 
 The rival productions of Musaylima, the False Proph- 
 et, long enjoyed a semi-contraband existence, and 
 Abu Ubayda (d. 208) found it necessary to write a 
 treatise in defence of the metaphors of the Qur'an. 
 Among the Persians this was still more the case. To 
 them, Muhammad might be a prophet, but he was also 
 an Arab ; and while they accepted his mission, ac- 
 cepting his books in a literary way was too much for 
 them. As a prophet, he was a man ; as a literary 
 artist, he was an Arab. So Jahm ibn Safwan may 
 have felt; so, certainly, others felt later. The poet 
 Bashshar ibn Burd (killed for satire, in 167), a com- 
 panion of Wasil ibn Ata and a Persian of very dubi- 
 ous orthodoxy, used to amuse himself by comparing 
 poems by himself and others with passages in the 
 Qur'an, to the disadvantage of the latter. And Ibn 
 al-Muqaffa (killed about 140), the translator of " Kalila 
 and Dimna" and many other books into Arabic, and 
 a Persian nationalist, is said to have planned an im- 
 itation of the Qur'an. 
 
MU'TAZILITE ATTITTJDE 151 
 
 Added to all this came tte influence of the Mu'tazi- 
 lite theologians. They had a double ground for their 
 opposition. The doctrine of an absolutely divine 
 and perfect book limited them too much in their 
 intellectual freedom. They were ■willing to respect 
 and use the Qur'an, but not to accept its ijystssima 
 verba. Eegarded as the production of Muhammad 
 under divine influence, it could have a human and a 
 di-nne side, and things which needed to be dropped 
 or changed in it could be ascribed to the human 
 side. But that was not possible with a miraculous 
 book come down from heaven. In a word, they were 
 meeting the difficulty which has been met by Chris- 
 tianity in the latter half of the nineteenth century. 
 The least they could do was to deny that the Qur'an 
 was uncreated. 
 
 But they had a still more vital, if not more im- 
 portant, philosophical base of objection. We have 
 seen already how they viewed the doctrine of God's 
 qualities (si/at) and tried to limit them in every way. 
 These qualities ran danger, they held, of being hy- 
 postatized into separate persons like those in the 
 Christian Trinity, and we have just seen how near 
 that danger really lay in the case of God's Icalam. In 
 orthodox Islam it has become a plain Logos. 
 
 The position in this of an-Nazzam has been given 
 above. It is interesting as sho^ving that the Qur'an, 
 even then, was given as a probative miracle {mu'jh) 
 because it deprived all men of power (i'jaz) to imitate 
 it. That is, its aesthetic perfection was raised to the 
 miraculous degree and then regarded as a proof of 
 its divine origin. But al-Muzdar, a pupil of Bishr 
 
152 THEOLOGY 
 
 ibn al Mu'tamir and an ascetic of high rank, called 
 the Monk of the Mu'tazilites, went still further than 
 an-Nazzam. He flatly damned as unbehevers all who 
 held the eternity of the Qur'an ; they had taken unto 
 themselves two Gods. Further, he asserted that men 
 were quite capable of producing a work even finer 
 than the Qur'an in point of style. But the force of 
 this opinion is somewhat diminished by the liberality 
 with which he denounced his opponents in general as 
 unbelievers. Stories are told of him very much like 
 those in circulation with us about those who hold 
 that few will be saved, and it is worth noticing that 
 upon this point of salvability the Mu'tazilites were 
 even narrower than the orthodox. 
 
CHAPTEE n 
 
 Al-Ma'mun and the triuinph of the Mu'tazilites ; the Mihna and 
 Ahmad ibn Hanbal ; al-Farabi ; the Fatiniids and the Ikhwau 
 aa-Safa; the early mystics, ascetic and pantheistic; al-Hallaj. 
 
 Such for long was the situation between the Mu'- 
 tazilites and their orthodox opponents. From time 
 to time the Mu'tazilites received more or less protec- 
 tion and state favor ; at other times, they had to 
 seek safety in hiding. Popular favor they seem 
 never to have enjoyed. As the Umayyads grew 
 weak, they became more stiff in their orthodoxy ; 
 but with the Abbasids, and especially with al-Mansur, 
 thought was again free. As has been shown above, 
 encoui-agement of science and research was part of 
 the plan of that great man, and he easily saw that 
 the intellectual hope of the future was with these 
 theological and philosophical questioners. So their 
 work went slowly on, with a break under Hamn ar- 
 Rashid, a magnificent but highly orthodox monarch, 
 who understood no trifling with things of the faith. 
 It is an interesting but useless question whether 
 Islam could ever have been broadened and devel- 
 oped to the point of enduring in its midst free spec- 
 ulation and research. As the case stands in history, 
 it has known periods of intellectual life, but only 
 under the protection of isolated princes here and 
 there. It has had Augustan ages ; it has never had 
 
 153 
 
154 THEOLOGY 
 
 great popular yearnings after wider knowledge. Its 
 intellectual leaders have lived and studied and lect- 
 ured at courts ; they have not gone down and taught 
 the masses of the people. To that the democracy of 
 Islam has never come. Hampered by scholastic 
 snobbishness, it has never learned that the abiding 
 victories of science are won in the village school. 
 
 But most unfortunately for the Mu'tazihtes and for 
 Islam, a Khalifa arose who had a relish for theological 
 discussions and a high opinion of his own infallibil- 
 ity. This was al-Ma'mun. It did not matter that 
 he ranged himself on the progressive side ; his fatal 
 error was that he invoked the authority of the state 
 in matters of the intellectual and religious life. Thus, 
 by enabling the conservative party to pose as mar- 
 tyrs, he brought the prejudices and passions of the 
 populace still more against the new movement. He 
 was that most dangerous of all beings, a doctrinaire 
 despot. He had ideas and tried to make other peo- 
 ple live up to them. Al-Mansur, though a bloody 
 tyrant, had been a great statesman and had known 
 how to bend people and things quietly to his will. 
 He had sketched the firm outlines of a policy for the 
 Abbasids, but had been cautious how he proclaimed 
 his programme to the world. The world would come 
 to him in time, and he could afford to wait and work 
 in the dark. He knew, above all, that no people 
 would submit to be school-mastered into the way in 
 which they should go. Al-Ma'mun, for all his genius, 
 was at heart a school-master. He was an enlight- 
 ened patron of an enlightened Islam. Those who 
 preferred to dwell in the darkness of the obscurant, 
 
Ai,->tA">irs 155 
 
 he £is* scolded smd ihen punislied. Pisseiisacais in 
 theolc^ anvi c>>mparstiTe religioa w^ei^ Ms hobbj". 
 That some saeli inteiv^iiar^ v^i lejteis betwieeji Mus- 
 lims snd Oiristians a*^ list wMoi orrstalliEed in die 
 Epistle >>f sl-Kictii ro«oi plscv at his eomr seems 
 certain. Bisiir al-Marisi. ■srho liad iived in Hding in 
 ar-Bashid"s time en a^voiint of his heietioai Tiew^ 
 disputed, in :i^. belere al-Ma'mnn cvn the Eatme of 
 the Qnran. He feixaded st Baghd.-id .an acssdeniT 
 w^ith libxaiy. laboratojies. and olreexT^srorr. All the 
 "weight oi his injiaence xsTis thrown on the side of the 
 Mntaiilites^ It appealed as theijgh he ^rexe detei- 
 mined tv^ pnE his people rip by foroe fK>ni their sti- 
 peisiiiion and ignorsnee. 
 
 At last, he toei the final and fatal step. In A">^ 
 a decie^e appesuvd piwlaiiaing the doctrine of the 
 creation of the Quran as the only trath. and as bind- 
 ing upon ali MnsKms^ At the same time, as an exi- 
 dent sop to the Persian nationalists and the AHds, 
 Ali "snss pToelaimed the best of erearaies aftei Mu- 
 hammad. The Alids. it should be remembenevi, had 
 dose pcmts of oontaet Trith the Mritasiliteis, Sneh 
 a theolc^ioal donree as this titss a new thing in Islam ; 
 nerer before had the indiTidr.al eonseionsness been 
 threatened by a "srord from the thivme. The Mr.Tasi 
 Mteis ihioiigh it piaetioally be<."anie a state ohnneh 
 under eiastian oontTol. Ent the system of Islam 
 neTer sranted to the Imam, or leadex oi the Mtislim 
 people, any po5iti«:«i bnt thai oi a pTotoctox and lep- 
 i«sentatiT-e, Its theol<-^:y ooT:\i on.y be foTnied. as 
 ^e hare seen in the casie of its law, by the agnee- 
 ment of the -whole oommTinity. The qnestion then 
 
156 THEOLOGY 
 
 naturally was what effect such a new thing as this 
 decree could have except to exasperate the orthodox 
 and the masses. Practically, there was no other 
 effect. Things went on as before. All that it meant 
 was that one very prominent Muslim had stated his 
 opinion and thrown in his lot with heretics. 
 
 For six years this continued, and then a method 
 was devised of bringing the will of the Khalifa home 
 upon the people. In 217 a distinguished Mu'tazilite, 
 Ahmad ibn Abi Duwad, was appointed chief qadi, 
 and in 218 the decree was renewed. But this time 
 it was accompanied by what we would call a test- 
 act, and an inquisition {mihna) was instituted. The 
 letter of directions for the conduct of this matter, 
 written by al-Ma'mun to his lieutenant at Baghdad, 
 is decisive as to the character of the man and the 
 nature of the movement. It is full of railings against 
 the common people who know not the law and are 
 accursed. They are too stupid to understand phi- 
 losophy or argument. It is the duty of the Khalifa 
 to guide them and especially to show them the dis- 
 tinction between God and His book. He who holds 
 otherwise than the Khalifa is either too blind or too 
 lying and deceitful to be trusted in any other thing. 
 Therefore, the qadis must be tested as to their 
 views. If they hold that the Qur'an is uncreated, 
 they have abandoned tawhid, the doctrine of God's 
 Unity, and can no longer hold office in a Muslim 
 land. Also, the qadis must apply the same test to 
 all the witnesses in cases before them. If these do 
 not hold that the Qur'an is created, they cannot be 
 legal witnesses. Other letters followed ; the Mihna 
 
AHMAD IBN HANBAL 157 
 
 was extended through the Abbasid empire and ap- 
 plied to other doctrines, e.g., that of free-will and of 
 the Tision of God. The Khalifa also commanded 
 that the death penalty for unbelief {Jmfr) shoidd be 
 inflicted on those who refused to take the test. They 
 were to be regarded as idolaters and polytheists. 
 The death of al-Ma'mun in the same year relieved 
 the pressui-e. It is true that the Mihna was contin- 
 ued by his successor, al-Mu'tasim, and by his succes- 
 sor, al-Wathiq, but without energy; it was more a 
 handy political weapon than anything else. In 234, 
 the second year of al-Mutawakkil, it was abolished 
 and the Qur'an decreed uncreated. At the same time 
 the Alids and all Persian nationalism came under 
 a ban. Practically, the status quo ante was restored 
 and Mu'tazilism was again left a struggling heresy. 
 The Arab party and the pure faith of Muhammad 
 had re-asserted themselves. 
 
 In this long conflict, the most prominent figure was 
 certainly that of Ahmad ibn Hanbal. He was the 
 trust and strength of the orthodox; that he stood 
 fast through imprisonment and scourging defeated 
 the plans of the Mu'tazilites. In dealing with the 
 development of law, we have seen what his legal po- 
 sition was. The same held in theology. Scholastic 
 theology (halam) was his abomination. Those who 
 disputed over doctrines he cast out. That their dog- 
 matic position was the same as his made no differ- 
 ence. For him, theological truth could not be reached 
 by reasoning (aql) ; tradition {naqi) from the fathers 
 (as-salaf) was the only ground on which the dubious 
 words of the Qur'an could be explained. So, in his 
 
158 THEOLOGY 
 
 long examinations before the officials of al-Ma'mun 
 and al-Mu'tasim, he contented himself with repeating 
 either the words of the Qur'an which for him were 
 proofs or such traditions as he accepted. Any ap- 
 proach to drawing a consequence he utterly rejected. 
 When they argued before him, he kept silence. 
 
 What, then, we may ask, was the net result of this 
 incident ? for it was nothing more. The Mu'tazilites 
 dropped back into their former position, but under 
 changed conditions. The sympathy of the populace 
 was further from them than ever. Ahmad ibn Han- 
 bal, saint and ascetic, was the idol of the masses ; 
 and he, in their eyes, had maintained single-handed 
 the honor of the Word of God. For his persecutors 
 there was nothing but hatred. And after he had 
 passed away, the conflict was taken up with still 
 fiercer bitterness by the school of law founded by his 
 pupils. They continued to maintain his principles 
 of Qur'an and tradition long after the Mu'tazilites 
 themselves had practically vanished from the scene, 
 and all that was left for them to contend against was 
 the modified system of scholastic theology which is 
 now the orthodox theology of Islam. With these re- 
 actionary Hanbalites we shall have to deal later. 
 
 The Mu'tazilites, on their side, having seen the 
 shipwreck of their hopes and the growing storm of 
 popular disfavor, seem to have turned again to their 
 scholastic studies. They became more and more the- 
 ologians afi"ecting a narrower circle, and less and less 
 educators of the world at large. Their system be- 
 came more metaphysical and their conclusions more 
 unintelligible to the plain man. The fate which has 
 
SCHOOLS OF HU'TAZlUirS 159 
 
 fallen on aU continued efforts of tlie MusHm mind 
 vas coming npon them. Beggarly speenlations and 
 barren hypotheses, combats of words over names, 
 sapped them of life and reaHtv. "What the iU-faited 
 friendship of al-Ma'mun haJ begun was carried on 
 and out bv the closed eii-cle of Muslim thought. 
 They separated into schools, one at al-Basra and an- 
 other at Baghdad. At Baghdad the point especially 
 developed was the old question, TVhat is a thing 
 (^^■■.7^/!? They defined a thing, practically, as a con- 
 cept that could be known and of which something 
 coTild be said. Existence {iruj'ud) did not matter. 
 It was onlj a quality which could be there or not. 
 With it, the thing was an entity (mairjud) ; without it, 
 a non-entity {ma'ditm), but still a thing with all equip- 
 ment of substance (^jawhar) and accident {anvD, 
 genus and species. The bearing of this was especially 
 upon the doctrine of creation. Practically, by God's 
 adding a single quality, things entered the sphere of 
 existence and ictre for us. Here, then, is evidently 
 an approach to a doctrine of pre-existent matter. At 
 al-Basra the relation of God to His qualities was es- 
 pecially iliscttssed. and there it came to be pretty 
 neai-ly a family dispute between al-Jubba"i (d. 303) 
 and his son Abu Hashim. Orthodox Islam held that 
 Orod has qualities, existent, etemid, added to His es- 
 sence ; thus. He knows, for example, by such a qualitr 
 of knowleilge. The students of Greek philosophy and 
 the Shiites denied this and said that God knew by 
 His essence. We have seen already Mutazilite views 
 as to this point. AbuHadhayl held that these quali- 
 ties '.cere God s essence and not in it. Thus, He knew 
 
160 THEOLOGY 
 
 by a quality of knowledge, but that quality was His 
 essence. Al-Jubba'i contented himself with safe- 
 guarding this statement. God knew in accordance 
 with His essence, but it was neither a quality nor a 
 state {hal) which required that He should be a 
 knower. The orthodox had said the first ; his son, 
 Abu Hashim, said the second. He held that we know 
 an essence and know it under different conditions. 
 The conditions varied but the essence remained. 
 These conditions are not thinkable by themselves, 
 for we know them only in connection with the es- 
 sence. These are states ; they are different from the 
 essence, but do not exist apart from it. Al-Jubba'i 
 opposed to this a doctrine that these states were 
 really subjective in the mind of the perceiver, either 
 generalizations or relationships existing mentally but 
 not externally. This controversy spun itself out at 
 great length through centuries. It eventually re- 
 solved .itself into the fundamental metaphysical in- 
 quiry, What is a thing ? A powerful school came to 
 a conclusion that would have delighted the soul of 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer. Things are four, they said, 
 entities, non-entities, states and relationships. As 
 we have seen above, al-Jubba'i denied the reality of 
 both states and relationships. Orthodox Islam has 
 been of a divided opinion. 
 
 But all this time, other movements had been in 
 progress, some of which were to be of larger future 
 importance than this fossilizing intellectualism. In 
 255 al-Jahiz died. Though commonly reckoned a 
 Mu'tazilite he was really a man of letters, free in 
 life and thought. He was a maker of books, learned 
 
AL-KINDI 161 
 
 in the -writings of the philosophers and rather in- 
 clined to the doctrines of the Tabi'iyun, deistic natu- 
 ralists. His confession of faith was of the utmost 
 simplicity. He taught that whoever held that God 
 had neither body nor form, could not be seen with 
 the eyes, was just and willed no evil deeds, such was 
 a Muslim in truth. And, further, if anyone was not 
 capable of philosophical reflection, but held that 
 Allah was his Lord and that Muhammad was the 
 Apostle of Allah, he was blameless and nothing more 
 should be required of him. Here we have evidently 
 in part a reaction from the subtilties of controversy, 
 and in part an attempt to broaden theology enough 
 to give even the unsettled a chance to remain in the 
 Muslim Church. Something of the same kind we 
 shall find, later, in the case of Ibn Bushd. Finally, 
 we have probably to see in his remark that the 
 Qur'an was a body, turned at one time into a man 
 and at another into a beast, a satirical comment on 
 the great controversy of his time. 
 
 Al-Jahiz may be for us a link with the philosophers 
 proper, the students of the wisdom of the Greeks. 
 He represents the stand-point of the educated man 
 of the time, and was no specialist in anything but 
 a general scepticism. In the first generation of the 
 philosophers of Islam, in the narrower sense, stands 
 conspicuously al-Kindi, commonly called the Philos- 
 opher of the Arabs. The name belongs to him of 
 right, for he is almost the only example of a student 
 of Aristotle, sprung from the blood of the desert. 
 But he was hardly a philosopher in any independent 
 sense. His role was translating, and during the 
 
162 THEOLOGY 
 
 reigns of al-Ma'mun and al-Mu'tasim a multitude of 
 translations and original works de omni scibili came 
 from his hands ; the names of 265 of these have come 
 down to us. In the orthodox reaction under al-Mu- 
 tawakkil he fared ill ; his library was confiscated but 
 afterward restored. He died about 260, and with 
 him dies the brief, golden century of eager acquisi- 
 tion, and the scholastic period enters in philosophy 
 as in theology. 
 
 That the glory was departing from Baghdad and 
 the Khalif ate is shown by the second important name 
 in philosophy. It is that of al-Farabi, who was bom 
 at Farab in Turkestan, lived and worked in the brill- 
 iant circle which gathered round Sayf ad-Dawla, the 
 Hamdanid, at his court at Aleppo. In music, in 
 science, in philology, and in philosophy, he was alike 
 master. Aristotle was his passion, and his Arabic 
 contemporaries and successors united in calling him 
 the second teacher, on account of his success in un- 
 knotting the tangles of the Greek system. It was in 
 truth a tangled system which came to him, and a 
 tangled system which he left. The Muslim phi- 
 losophers began, in their innocence, with the follow- 
 ing positions : The Qur'an is truth and philosophy is 
 truth ; but truth can only be one ; therefore, the 
 Qur'an and philosophy must agree. Philosophy they 
 accepted in whole-hearted faith, as it came to them 
 from the Greeks through Egypt and Syria. They 
 took it, not as a mass of more or less contradictory 
 speculation, but as a form of truth. They, in fact, 
 never lost a certain theological attitude. Under such 
 conditions, then, Plato came to them; but it was 
 
ARISTOTLE 163 
 
 mostly Plato as interpreted by Porphyrhis, that is, 
 as neo-Platonism. Aristotle, too, came to them in 
 the gnise of the later Peripatetic schools. But in 
 Ai-istotle, especially, there entered a perfect knot of 
 entanglement and coufusion. During the reign of 
 al-Mu'tasim, a Chi-istian of Emessa in the Lebanon 
 — the history in details is obscure — translated parts 
 of the " Enneads " of Plotinus into Ai-abic and en- 
 titled his work "The Theology of Aristotle." A 
 more unlucky bit of literary mischief and one more 
 far-reaching in its consequences has never been. The 
 Muslims took it all as solemnly as they took the text 
 of the Quran. These two great masters, Plato and 
 Aristotle, they said, had expoimded the truth, which 
 is one. Therefore, there must be some way of bring- 
 ing them into agreement. So generations of toUers 
 labored Taliantly with the welter of translations and 
 pseudographs to get out of them and into them the 
 one truth. The more pious added the third element 
 of the Qur'an, and it must remain a marvel and a 
 magnificent testimonial to their skill and patience 
 that they got even so far as they diei and that the 
 whole movement did not end in simple lunacy. That 
 al-Fai-abi should have been so incisive a writer, so 
 wide a thinker and student ; that Ibn Sina should 
 have been so keen and clear a scientist and logician ; 
 that Ibn Etishd shoidd have known — really known — 
 and commented his Aristotle as he did, shows that 
 the human brain, after all, is a sane bi-ain and has the 
 power of imconsciously rejecting and throwing out 
 nonsense and falsehood. 
 
 But it is not wonderful that, dealing with such ma- 
 
164 THEOLOGY 
 
 terials and contradictions, they developed a tendency 
 to mysticism. There were many things which they 
 felt compelled to hold which could only be defended 
 and rationalized in that cloudy air and slanting light. 
 Especially, no one but a mystic could bring together 
 the emanations of Plotinus, the ideas of Plato, the 
 spheres of Aristotle and the seven-storied heaven of 
 Muhammad. With this matter of mysticism we shall 
 have to deal immediately. Of al-Farabi it is enough 
 to say that he was one of the most patient of the 
 laborers at that impossible problem.. It seems never 
 to have occurred to him, or to any of the others, that 
 the first and great imperative was to verify his refer- 
 ences and sources. The oriental, like the mediaeval 
 scholastic, tests minutely the form of his syllogism, 
 but takes little thought whether his premises state 
 facts or not. With a scrupulous scepticism in deduc- 
 tion, he combines a childlike acceptance on tradition 
 or on the narrowest of inductions. 
 
 But there are other and more ominous signs in 
 al-Farabi of the scholastic decline. There appears 
 first in him that tendency toward the writing of 
 encyclopaedic compends, which always means super- 
 ficiality and the commonplace. Al-Farabi himself 
 could not be accused of either, but that he thus 
 claimed all knowledge for his portion showed the 
 risk of the premature circle and the small gain. An- 
 other is mysticism. He is a neo-Platonist, more ex- 
 actly a Plotinian ; although he himself would not have 
 recognized this title. He held, as we have seen, that 
 he was simply retelling the doctrines of Plato and 
 Aristotle. But he was also a devout Muslim. He 
 
AL-FARABI 165 
 
 seems to have taken in earnest all the bizarre details 
 of Muslim cosmography and eschatology; the Pen, 
 the Tablet, the Throne, the Angels in aU their ranks 
 and functions mingle picturesquely with the system 
 of Plotinus, his ev, his ■^vx^, his vov'i, his receptive 
 and active intellects. But to make tenable this posi- 
 tion he had to take the great leap of the mystic. 
 Unto us these things are impossible ; with God, i.e., 
 on another plane of existence, they are the simplest 
 realities. If the veil were taken from our eyes we 
 would see them. This has always been the refuge of 
 the devout Muslim who has tampered with science. 
 We shall look for it more in detail when we come to 
 al-Ghazzali, who has put it into classical form. 
 
 Again, he was, in modern terms, a monarchist and 
 a clericalist. His conception of the model state is a 
 strange compound of the republic of Plato and Shi- 
 'ite dreams of an infallible Imam. Its roots lie, of 
 course, in the theocratic idea of the Muslim state ; 
 but his city, which is to take in all mankind, a Holy 
 Eoman Empire and a Holy Catholic Church at once, 
 a community of saints ruled by sages, shows a later 
 influence than that of the mother city of Islam, al- 
 Madina, under Abu Bakr and Umar. The influence 
 is that of the Fatimids with their capital, al-Mahdiya, 
 near Tunis. The Hamdanids were Shi'ites and Sayf 
 ad-Da wla, under whom al-Farabi enjoyed peace and 
 protection, was a vassal of the Fatimid Khalifas. 
 
 This brings us again to the great mystery of Mus- 
 lim history. What was the truth of the Fatimid 
 movement? Was the family of the Prophet the 
 fosterer of science from the earliest times? What 
 
166 THEOLOGY 
 
 degree of contact had they with the Mu'tazilites ? 
 With the founders of grammar, of alchemy, of law ? 
 That they were themselves the actual beginners of 
 everything — ^and everything has been claimed for 
 them — we may put down to legend. But one thing 
 does stand fast. Just as al-Ma'mun combined the 
 establishment of a great university at Baghdad with 
 a favoring of the Alids, so the Fatimids in Cairo 
 erected a great hall of science and threw all their in- 
 fluence and authority into the spreading and extend- 
 ing of knowledge. This institution seems to have 
 been a combination of free public library and uni- 
 versity, and was probably the gateway connecting 
 between the inner circle of initiated Fatimid leaders 
 and the outside, uninitiated world. We have already 
 seen how unhappy were the external effects of the 
 Shi'ite, and especially of the Fatimid, propaganda 
 on the Muslim world. But from time to time we be- 
 come aware of a deep undercurrent of scientific and 
 philosophical labor and investigation accompanying 
 that propaganda, and striving after knowledge and 
 truth. It belongs to the life below the surface, which 
 we can know only through its occasional outbursts. 
 Some of these are given above ; others will follow. 
 The whole matter is obscure to the last degree, and 
 dogmatic statements and explanations are not in 
 place. It may be that it was only a natural draw- 
 ing together on the part of all the different forces 
 and movements that were under a ban and had to 
 live in secrecy and stillness. It may be that the 
 students of the new sciences passed over, simply 
 through their studies and political despair — as has 
 
IKHWAN-AS-SAFA 167 
 
 often happened in our clay — into different degrees of 
 nihilism, or, at the other extreme, into a passionate 
 searching for, and dependence on, some absolute 
 guide, an infallible Imam. It may be that we have 
 read wrongly the whole history of the Fatimid move- 
 ment ; that it was in reality a deeply laid and slowly 
 ripened plan to bring the rule of the world into the 
 control of a band of philosophers, whose task it was 
 to be to rule the human race and gradually to educate 
 it into self-rule ; that they saw — these unknown dev- 
 otees of science and truth — no other way of break- 
 ing down the barriers of Islam and setting free the 
 spirits of men. A wild hypothesis ! But in face of 
 the real mystery no hypothesis can seem wild. 
 
 Closely allied with both al-Farabi and the Fati- 
 mids is the association known as the Sincere Breth- 
 ren {Ikhwan as-safa). It existed at al-Basra in the 
 middle of the fourth century of the Hijra during 
 the breathing space which the free intellectual life 
 enjoyed after the capture of Baghdad by the Buway- 
 hids in 334. It will be remembered how that Per- 
 sian dynasty was Shi'ite by creed and how it, for the 
 time, completely clipped the claws of the orthodox 
 and Sunnite Abbasid Khalifas. The only thing, 
 thereafter, which heretics and philosophers had to 
 fear was the enmity of the populace, but that seems 
 to have been great enough. The Hanbalite mob of 
 Baghdad had grown to be a thing of terror. It was, 
 then, an educational campaign on which this new 
 philosophy had to enter. Their programme was by 
 means of clubs, propagating themselves and spread- 
 ing over the country from al-Basra and Baghdad, to 
 
168 THEOLOGY 
 
 reach all educated people and introduce among them 
 gradually a complete change in their religious and 
 scientific ideas. Their teaching was the same combi- 
 nation of neo-Platonic speculation and mysticism 
 with Aristotelian natural science, wrapped in Mu'taz- 
 ilite theology, that we have already known. Only 
 there was added to it a Pythagorean reverence for 
 numbers, and everything, besides, was treated in an 
 eminently superficial and popularized manner. Our 
 knowledge of the Fraternity and its objects is based 
 on its publication, " The Epistles of the Sincere 
 Brethren " {Basa'il ihhwan as-safa) and upon scanty 
 historical notices. The Epistles are fifty of fifty-one 
 in number and cover the field of human knowledge as 
 then conceived. They form, in fact, an Arabic En- 
 cyclopedie. The founders of the Fraternity, and 
 authors, presumably, of the Epistles, were at most 
 ten. We have no certain knowledge that the Fra- 
 ternity ever took even its first step and spread to 
 Baghdad. Beyond that almost certainly the develop- 
 ment did not pass. The division of members into 
 four — learners, teachers, guides, and drawers near to 
 God in supernatural vision — and the plan of regular 
 meetings of each circle for study and mutual edifica- 
 tion remained in its paper form. The society was 
 half a secret one and lacked, apparently, vitality and 
 energy. There was among its founders no man of 
 weight and character. So it passed away and has 
 left only these Epistles which have come down to us 
 in numerous MSS., showing how eagerly they have 
 been read and copied and how much influence they 
 at least must have exercised- That influence must 
 
THE IKHWAN AND THE EATIMIDS 169 
 
 have been very mixed. It was, it is true, for intel- 
 lectual Kfe, yet it carried with it in a still higher de- 
 gree the defects we have already noticed in al-Farabi. 
 To them must be added the most simple skimming 
 of all real philosophical problems and a treatment of 
 nature and natural science which had lost all con- 
 nection with facts. 
 
 It has been suggested, and the suggestion seems 
 luminous and fertile, that this Fraternity was simply 
 a part of the great Fatimid propaganda which, as we 
 know, honey-combed the ground everywhere under 
 the Sunnite Abbasids. Descriptions which have 
 reached us of the methods followed by the leaders of 
 the Fraternity agree exactly with those of the mis- 
 sionaries of the Isma'ilians. They raised difficulties 
 and suggested serious questionings ; hinted at possi- 
 ble answers but did not give them ; referred to a 
 source where all questions would be answered. 
 Again, their catch-words and fixed phrases are the 
 same as those afterward used by the Assassins, and 
 we have traces of these Epistles forming a part of 
 the sacred library of the Assassins. It is to be re- 
 membered that the Assassins were not simply robber 
 bands who struck terror by their methods. Both the 
 western and the eastern branches were devoted to 
 science, and it may be that in their mountain for- 
 tresses there was the most absolute devotion to true 
 learning that then existed. When the Mongols capt- 
 ured Alamut, they found it rich in MSS. and in 
 instruments and apparatus of every kind. It is then 
 possible that the elevated eclecticism of the llchwan 
 as-safa was the real doctrine of the Fatimids, the 
 
170 THEOLOGY 
 
 Assassins, the Qarmatians and the Druses ; certainly, 
 wherever we can test them there is the most singu- 
 lar agreement. It is a mechanical and aesthetic pan- 
 theism, a glorification of Pythagoreanism, with its 
 music and numbers ; idealistic to the last degree ; a 
 worship and pursuit of a conception of a harmony 
 and beauty in all the universe, to find which is to 
 find and know the Creator Himself. It is thus far 
 removed from materialism and atheism, but could 
 easily be misrepresented as both. This, it is true, is 
 a very different explanation from the one given in 
 our first Part ; it can only be put along-side of that 
 and left there. The one expresses the practical 
 effect of the Isma'ilians in Islam ; the other what 
 may have been their ideal. However we judge them, 
 we must always remember that somewhere in their 
 teaching, at its best, there was a strange attraction 
 for thinking and troubled men. Nasir ibn Khusraw, 
 a Persian Faust, found peace at Cairo between 437 
 and 444 in recognizing the divine Imamship of al- 
 Mustansir, and after a life of persecution died in 
 that faith as a hermit in the mountains of Badakh- 
 shan in 481. The great Spanish poet, Ibn Hani, 
 who died in 362, similarly accepted al-Mu'izz as his 
 spiritual chief and guide. 
 
 Another eclectic sect, but on a very different prin- 
 ciple, was that of the Karramites, founded by Abu Abd 
 Allah ibn Karram, who died in 256. Its teachings 
 had the honor to be accepted and protected by 
 no less a man than the celebrated Mahmud of Ghazna 
 (388-421), Mahmud the Idol-breaker, the first in- 
 vader of India and the patron of al-Beruni, Firdawsi, 
 
IBN KAEEAM 171 
 
 Ibn Sina and many another. But that, to which we 
 will retiu-n, belongs to a later date and, probably, to 
 a modified form of Ibn Karram's teaching. For him- 
 self, lie A^as an ascetic of Sijistan and, according to 
 the story, a man of no education. He lost himself 
 in theological subtleties which he seems to have 
 failed to understand. However, out of them all he 
 put together a book which he called "The Punish- 
 ment of the Grave,"' which spread widely in Klnira- 
 san. It was, in part, a frank recoil to the crassest 
 anthropomorphism. Thus, for him, God actually sat 
 upon the throne, was in a place, had dii-ection and 
 so could move from one point to another. He had a 
 body with flesh, blood, and limbs ; He could be em- 
 braced by those who were purified to the requisite 
 point. It was a literal acceptance of the material 
 expressions of the Qur'an along with a consideration 
 of how they could be so, and an explanation by com- 
 parison with men — all opposed to the principle bila 
 iv-i/fa. So, appai-ently, we must understand the 
 curious fact that he was also a Muiji"ite and held 
 faith to be only acknowledgment with the tongue. 
 All men, except professed apostates, are believers, he 
 said, because of that primal covenant, taken by God 
 with the seed of Adam, when He asked, " Am I not 
 your Lord? " {AJasfu hi-rabbikum) and they, brought 
 forth fi'om Adam's loins for the pxu-pose, made an- 
 swer, " Tea, verily, in this covenant we remain until 
 we formally cast it off." This, of course, involved 
 taking God's qiialities in the most literal sense. So, 
 if we are to see in the IMii'tazihtes scholastic com- 
 mentators trying to reduce Muhammad, the poet, to 
 
172 THEOLO&T 
 
 logic and sense, we must see in Ibn Karram one 
 of those wooden-minded literalists, for whom a meta- 
 phor is a ridiculous lie if it cannot be taken in its 
 external meaning. He was part of the great stream 
 of conservative reaction, in which we find also such 
 a man as Ahmad ibn Hanbal. But the saving salt of 
 Ahmad's sense and reverence kept him by the safe 
 proviso " without considering how and without com- 
 parison." All Ahmad's later followers were not so 
 wise. In his doctrine of the state Ibn Karram 
 inclined to the Kharijites. 
 
 Before we return to al-Jubba'i and the fate of the 
 Mu'tazilites, it remains to trace more precisely the 
 thread of mysticism, that Tcaslif, revelation, which we 
 have already mentioned several times. Its funda- 
 mental fact is that it had two sides, an ascetic and a 
 speculative, different in degree, in spirit and in result, 
 and yet so closely entangled that the same mystic 
 has been assigned, in good and in bad faith, as an 
 adherent of both. 
 
 It is to the form of mysticism which sprang from 
 asceticism that we must first turn. Attention has 
 been given above to the wandering monks and her- 
 mits, the sa'ihs (wanderers) and raliibs who caught 
 Muhammad's attention and respect. We have seen, 
 too, how Muslim imitators began in their turn to 
 wander through the land, clad in the coarse woollen 
 robes which gave them the name of Sufis, and liv- 
 ing upon the alms of the pious. How early these 
 appeared in any number and as a fixed profession is 
 uncertain, but we find stories in circulation of meet- 
 ings between such mendicant friars and al-Hasan al- 
 
WOMEN SAINTS 173 
 
 Basri himself. Women, too, were among them, and 
 it is possible that to their influence a development 
 of devotional love-poetry was due. At least, many 
 verses of this kind are ascribed to a certain Rabi'a, 
 an ascetic and ecstatic devotee of the most extreme 
 other- worldliness, who died in 135. Many other wom- 
 en had part in the contemplative life. Among them 
 may be mentioned, to show its gvasp and spread, 
 A'isha, daughter of Ja'far as-Sadiq, who died in 145; 
 Fatima of Naysabui-, who died in 223, and the Lady 
 Nafisa, a contemporary and rival in learning with 
 ash-Shafi'i and the marvel of her time in piety and 
 the ascetic life. Her grave is one of the most vener- 
 ated spots in Cairo, and at it wonders are still worked 
 and prayer is always answered. She was a descend- 
 ant of al-Hasan, the martyred ex-Khalifa, aud an 
 example of how the fated family of the Prophet was 
 an early school for women saints. Even in the 
 Heathenism we have traces of female penitents and 
 hermits, and the tragedy of AH and his sons and de- 
 scendants gave scope for the self-sacrifice, loving ser- 
 vice and religious enthusiasm with which women are 
 dowered. 
 
 All these stood and stand in Islam on exactly 
 the same footing as men. The distinction in Ro- 
 man Christendom that a woman cannot be a priest 
 there falls away, for in Islam is neither priest nor 
 layman. They lived either as solitaries or in conven- 
 tual life exactly as did the ]ueu. They were called 
 by the same terms in feminine form ; they were Sufi- 
 yas beside the Sufis ; Zahidas (ascetics) beside the 
 Zahids ; Waliyas (friends of God) beside the Walls ; 
 
174 THEOLOGY 
 
 Abidas (devotees) beside the Abids. They worked 
 wonders (karamat, closely akin to the x^'P^"'/^'^"^"' °^ 
 1 Cor. xii, 9) by the divine grace, and still, as we 
 have seen, at their own graves such are granted 
 through them to the faithful, and their intercession 
 (shafa'a) is invoked. Their religious exercises were 
 the same; they held dhikrs and women darwishes 
 yet dance to singing and music in order to bring on 
 fits of ecstasy. To state the case generally, whatever 
 is said hereafter of mysticism and its workings 
 among men must be taken as applying to women 
 also. 
 
 To return : one of the earliest male devotees of 
 whom we have distinct note is Ibrahim ibn Adham. 
 He was a wanderer of royal blood, drifted from Balkh 
 in Afghanistan to al-Basra and to Mecca. He died 
 in 161. Contempt for the learning of lawyers and 
 for external forms appears in him ; obedience to God, 
 contemplation of death, death to the world formed 
 his teaching. Another, Da'ud ibn Nusayr, who died 
 in 165, was wont to say, " Flee men as thou fleest a 
 lion. Fast from the world and let the breaking of 
 thy fast be when thou diest." Another, al-Fudayl 
 ibn lyad of Khurasan, who died in 187, was a robber 
 converted by a heavenly voice ; he cast aside the 
 world, and his utterances show that he lapsed into 
 the passivity of quietism. 
 
 Reference has already been made in the chapter 
 on jurisprudence to the development of asceticism 
 which came with the accession of the Abbasids. The 
 disappointed hopes of the old believers found an out- 
 let in the contemplative life. They withdrew from 
 
PASSAGE OF ASCETICISM TO ECSTASY 175 
 
 the world and would have nothing to do with its rul- 
 ers ; their wealth and everything connected with 
 them they regarded as unclean. Almad ibn Hanbal 
 in his later life had to use all his obstinacy and in- 
 genuity to keep free of the court and its contamina- 
 tion. Another was this al-Fudayl. Stories — chrono- 
 logically impossible — are told how he rebuked Harun 
 ar-Bashid for his luxury and tyranny and denounced 
 to his face his manner of life. With such an attitude 
 to those round him he could have had little joy in his 
 devotion. So it was said, "When al-Fudayl died, 
 sadness was removed from the world." 
 
 But soon the recoil came. Under the spur of 
 such exercises and thoughts, the ecstatic oriental 
 temperament began to revel in expressions borrowed 
 from human love and earthly wine. Such we find 
 by Ma'ruf of al-Karkh, a district of Baghdad, who 
 died in 200, and whose tomb, saved by popular 
 reverence, is one of the few ancient sites in modern 
 Baghdad ; and by his greater disciple. Sari as-Saqati, 
 who died in 257. To this last is ascribed, but dubi- 
 ously, the first use of the word tawhid to signify the 
 union of the soul with God. The figure that the 
 heart is a mirror to image back God and that it is 
 darkened by the things of the body appears in Abu 
 Sulayman of Damascus, who died in 215. A more 
 celebrated ascetic, who died in 227, Bishr al-Hafi 
 (bare-foot), speaks of God directly as the Beloved 
 (habib). Al-Harith al-Muhasibi was a contemporary 
 of Ahmad ibn Hanbal and died in 243. The only 
 thing in him to which Ahmad could take exception 
 was that he made use of Icalam in refuting the Mu'ta- 
 
176 THEOLOGY 
 
 zilites ; even this suspicion against him he is said 
 to have abandoned. Sari and Bishr, too, were close 
 friends of Ahmad's. Dhu-n-Nun, the Egyptian Sufi, 
 who died in 245, is in more dubious repiite. He is 
 said to have been the first to formulate the doctrine 
 of ecstatic states (lials, maqamas) ; but if he went no 
 further than this, his orthodoxy, in the broad sense, 
 should be above suspicion. Islam has now come to 
 accept these as right and fitting. Perhaps the great- 
 est name in early Sufiism is that of al- Junayd (d. 297) ; 
 on it no shadow of heresy has ever fallen. He was 
 a master in theology and law, reverenced as one of 
 the greatest of the early doctors. Questions of tawhid 
 he is said to have discussed before his pupils with 
 shut doors. But this was probably taiuhid in the 
 theological and not in the mystical sense — against 
 the Mu'tazilites and not on the union of the soul with 
 God. Yet he, too, knew the ecstatic life and fell 
 fainting at verses which struck into his soul. Ash- 
 Shibli (d. 334) was one of his disciples, but seems to 
 have given himself more completely to the ascetic 
 and contemplative life. In verses by him we find the 
 vocabulary of the amorous intercourse with God fully 
 developed. The last of this group to be mentioned 
 here shall be Abu Talib al-Makki, who died in 386. 
 It is his distinction to have furnished a text-book of 
 Sufiism that is in use to this day. He wrote and 
 spoke openly on taiuliid, now in the Sufi sense, and 
 got into trouble as a heretic, but his memory has 
 been restored to orthodoxy by the general agreement 
 of Islam. When, in 488, al-Ghazzali set himself to 
 seek light in Sufiism, among the treatises he studied 
 
GROWTH OF FRATERNITIES 177 
 
 were the books of four of those mentioned above, 
 Abu Talib, al-Muhasibi, al-Junayd, and ash-Shibli. 
 
 In the case of these and all the others already spoken 
 of there was nothing but a very simple and natural de- 
 velopment such as could easily be paralleled in Europe. 
 The earliest Muslims were burdened, as we have seen, 
 with the fear of the terrors of an avenging God. The 
 world was evil and fleeting ; the only abiding good 
 was in the other world ; so their religion became an 
 ascetic other-worldliness. They fled into the wilder- 
 ness from the wrath to come. Wandering, either 
 solitary or in companies, was the special sign of the 
 true Sufi. The young men gave themselves over to 
 the guidance of the older men ; little circles of dis- 
 ciples gathered round a venerated Shaykh ; fraterni- 
 ties began to form. So we find it in the case of al-Jun- 
 ayd, so in that of Sari as-Saqati. Next would come 
 a monastery, rather a rest-house ; for only in the win- 
 ter and for rest did they remain fixed in a place for 
 any time. Of such a monastery there is a trace at 
 Damascus in 150 and in Khurasan about 200. Then, 
 just as in Europe, begging friars organized them- 
 selves. In faith they were rather conservative than 
 anything else ; touched with a religious passivism 
 which easily developed into quietism. Their ecsta- 
 sies went little beyond those, for instance, of Thomas 
 £t Kempis, though struck with a warmer oriental fer- 
 vor. 
 
 The points on which the doctors of Islam took 
 exception to these earlier Sufis are strikingly differ- 
 ent from what we would expect. They concern the 
 practical life far more than theological speculation. 
 
178 THEOLOGY 
 
 As was natural in the case of professional devotees, a 
 constantly prayerful attitude began to assume impor- 
 tance beside and in contrast to the formal use of the 
 five daily prayers, the salawat. This development 
 was in all probability aided by the existence in Syria 
 of the Christian sect of the Euchites, who exalted 
 the duty of prayer above all other religious obliga- 
 tions. These, also, abandoned property and obliga- 
 tions and wandered as poor brethren over the country. 
 They were a branch of Hesychasts, the quietistic 
 Greek monks who eventually led to the controversy 
 concerning the uncreated light, manifested at the 
 transfiguration on Mount Tabor and added a doctrine 
 to the Eastern Church. Considering these points, it 
 can hardly be doubted that there was some historical 
 connection and relation here, not only with earlier 
 but also with later Sufiism. There is a striking re- 
 semblance between the Sufis seeking by patient intro- 
 spection to see the actual light of God's presence in 
 their hearts, and the Greek monks in Athos, sitting 
 solitarily in their cells and seeking the divine light of 
 Mount Tabor in contemplation of their navels. 
 
 But our immediate point is the matter of constant, 
 free prayer. In the Qur'an (xxxiii, 41) the believers 
 are exhorted to " remember (dhiJcr) God often ; " 
 this command the Sufis obeyed with a correlative de- 
 preciation of the five canonical prayers. Their meet- 
 ings for the purpose, much like our own prayer- 
 meetings, still more like the " class-meetings " of the 
 early Methodists, as opposed to stated public worship, 
 were called dhihrs. These services were fiercely 
 attacked by the orthodox theologians, but survived 
 
TAWAiCiCtfL 179 
 
 and are the darwish functions which tourists still go 
 to see at Constantinople and Cairo. But the more 
 private and personal dhikrs of individual Sufis, each 
 in his house repeating his Qur'anic litanies through 
 the night, until to the passer-by it sounded like the 
 humming of bees or the unceasing drip of roof-gut- 
 ters, these seem, in the course of the third century, to 
 have fallen before ridicule and accusations of heresy. 
 
 Another point against the earlier Sufis was their 
 abuse of the principle of tawakhul, dependence upon 
 God. They gave up their trades and professions; 
 they even gave up the asking for alms. Their 
 ideal was to be absolutely at God's disposal, utterly 
 cast upon His direct sustenance (rizq). No anxiety 
 for their daily bread was permitted to them ; they 
 must go through the world separated from it and its 
 needs and looking up to God. Only one who can do 
 this is properly an acknowledger of God's unity, a 
 true Mmvahhid. To such, God would assuredly 
 open the door of help ; they were at His gate ; and 
 the biographies of the saints are full of tales how His 
 help used to come. 
 
 To this it may be imagined that the more sober, 
 even among Sufis, made vehement objection. It fell 
 under two heads. One was that of Jcasb, the gaining 
 of daily bread by labor. The examples of the hus- 
 bandman who casts his seed iato the ground and then 
 depends upon God, of the merchant who travels with 
 his wares in similar trust, were held up against the 
 wandering but useless monk. As always, traditions 
 were forged on both sides. Said a man — apparently 
 in a spirit of prophecy — one day to the Prophet, 
 
180 THEOLOGY 
 
 " Shall I let my camel run free and trust in God ? " 
 Replied the Prophet, or someone for him with a good 
 imitation of his humorous common-sense, " Tie up 
 your camel and trust in God." The other head was 
 the use of remedies in sickness. The whole contro- 
 versy parallels strikingly the " mental science " and 
 " Christian science " of the present day. Medicine, 
 it was held, destroyed taiuaJcJcul. In the fourth century 
 in Persia this insanity ran high and many books were 
 written for it and against it. The author of one on 
 the first side was consulted in an obstinate case of 
 headache. " Put my book under your pillow," he said, 
 "and trust in God." On both these points the usage 
 of the Prophet and the Companions was in the teeth 
 of the Sufi position. They had notoriously earned 
 their living, honestly or dishonestly, and had pos- 
 sessed all the credulity of semi-civilization toward the 
 most barbaric and multifarious remedies. So the 
 agreement of Islam eventually righted itself, though 
 the question in its intricacies and subtilties remained 
 for centuries a thing of delight for theologians. In 
 the end only the wildest fanatics held by absolute 
 tawahlcul. 
 
 But all this time the second form of Sufiism had 
 been slowly forcing its way. It was essentially spec- 
 ulative and theological rather than ascetic and de- 
 votional. When it gained the upper hand, zaliid 
 (ascetic) was no longer a convertible term with Sufi. 
 We pass over the boundary between Thomas h, Kempis 
 and St. Francis to Eckhart and Suso. The roots of 
 this movement cannot be hard to find in the light of 
 what has preceded. They lie partly in the neo- 
 
SPECTTLATIVE StJPIISM 181 
 
 Platonism whicli is the foundation of the philosophy 
 of Islam. Probably it did not come to the Sufis 
 along the same channels by which it reached al- 
 Farabi. It was rather through the Christian mystics 
 and, perhaps, especially through the Pseudo-Dionys- 
 ius the Areopagite, and his asserted teacher, Stephen 
 bar Sudaili with his Syriac "Book of Hierotheos." 
 We need not here consider whether the Monophysite 
 heresy is to be reckoned in as one of the results of 
 the dying neo-Platonism. It is true that outlying 
 forms of it meant the frank deifying of a man and 
 thus raised the possibility of the equal deifying of 
 any other man and of all men. But there is no cer- 
 tainty that these views had an influence in Islam. It 
 is enough that from a.d. 533 we find the Pseudo- 
 Dionysius quoted and his influence strong with the 
 ultra Monophysites, and still more, thereafter, with 
 the whole mystical movement in Christendom. Ac- 
 cording to it, all is akin in nature to the Absolute, 
 and all this life below is only a reflection of the 
 glories of the upper sphere, where God is. Through 
 the sacraments and a hierarchy of angels man is led 
 back toward Him. Only in ecstasy can man come to 
 a knowledge of Him. The Trinity, sin and the 
 atonement fade out of view. The incarnation is but 
 an example of how the divine and the human can 
 join. All is an emanation or an emission of grace 
 from God ; and the yearnings of man are back to his 
 source. The revolving spheres, the groaning and 
 travailing nature are striving to return to their origin. 
 When this conception had seized the Oriental Church ; 
 when it had passed into Islam and dominated ite 
 
182 THEOLOGY 
 
 emotional and religious life ; when through the trans- 
 lation of the Pseudo-Dionysius by Scotus Erigena in 
 850, it had begun the long contest of idealisni in 
 Europe, the dead school of Plotinus had won the 
 field, and its influence ruled from the Oxus to the 
 Atlantic. 
 
 But the roots of Sufiism struck also in another 
 direction. We have already seen an early tendency 
 to regard Ali and, later, members of his house as in- 
 incamations of divinity. In the East, where God 
 comes near to man, the conception of God in man is 
 not difficult. The Semitic prophet through whom 
 God speaks easily slips over into a divine being in 
 whom God exists and may be worshipped. But if 
 with one, why not with another? May it not be 
 possible by purifying exercises to reach this unity ? 
 If one is a Son of God, may not all become that if 
 they but take the means ? The half -understood pan- 
 theism which always lurks behind oriental fervors 
 claims its due. From his wild whirling dance, the 
 darwish, stung to cataleptic ecstasy by the throbbing 
 of the drums and the lilting chant, sinks back into 
 the unconsciousness of the divine oneness. He has 
 passed temporarily from this scene of multiplicity 
 into the sea of God's unity and, at death, if he but 
 persevere, he will reach that haven where he fain 
 would be and will abide there forever. Here, we have 
 not to do with calm philosophers rearing their sys- 
 tems in labored speculations, but with men, often 
 untaught, seeking the salvation of their souls ear- 
 nestly and with tears. 
 
 One of the earliest of the pantheistic school was 
 
PANTHEISTIC SCHOOL 183 
 
 Abu Tazid al-Bistami (d. 261). He was of Persian 
 parentage, and his father had been a follower of Za- 
 rathustra. As an ascetic he was of the highest re- 
 pute ; he was also an author of eminence on Sufiism 
 (al-Ghazzali used his books) and he joined to his 
 devout learning and self- mortification clear miracu- 
 lous gifts. But equally clear was his pantheistic 
 drift and his name has come down linked to the say- 
 ing, " Beneath my cloak there is naught else than 
 God." It is worth noticing that certain other of his 
 sayings show that, even in his time, there were Siifi 
 saints who boasted that they had reached such per- 
 fection and such miraculous powers that the ordinary 
 moral and ceremonial law no longer applied to them. 
 The antinomianism which haunted the later Sufiism 
 and darwislidom had already appeared. 
 
 But the greatest name of all among these early 
 pantheists was that of al-Hallaj (the cotton carder), 
 a pupil of al- Junayd, who was put to death with great 
 cruelty in 309. It is almost impossible to reach any 
 certaia conclusion as to his real views and aims. In 
 spite of what seem to be utterances of the crassest 
 pantheism, such as, "I am the Truth," there have 
 not been wanting many in later Islam who have 
 reverenced his memory as that of a saint and martyr. 
 To Sufis and darwishes of his time and to this day 
 he has been and is a patron saint. In his life and 
 death he represents for them the spirit of revolt against 
 dogmatic scholasticism and formalism. Further, even 
 such a great doctor of the Muslim Church as al-Ghazzali 
 defended him and, though lamenting some incautious 
 phrases, upheld his orthodoxy. At his trial itself 
 
184 THEOLOGY 
 
 before the theologians of Baghdad, one of them re- 
 fused to sign the fatwa declaring him an unbeliever ; 
 he was not clear, he said, as to the case. And it is 
 true that such records as we have of the time suggest 
 that his condemnation was forced by the government 
 as a matter of state policy. He was a Persian of 
 Magian origin, and evidently an advanced mystic of 
 the speculative type. He carried the theory to its 
 legitimate conclusion, and proclaimed the result pub- 
 licly. He dabbled in scholastic theology ; had evi- 
 dent Mu'tazilite leanings; wrote on alchemy and 
 things esoteric. But with this mystical enthusiasm 
 there seem to have united in him other and more 
 dangerous traits. The stories which have reached 
 us show him of a character fond of excitement and 
 change, surrounding himself with devoted adherents 
 and striving by miracle-working of a commonplace 
 kind to add to his following. His popularity among 
 the people of Baghdad and their reverence for 
 him rose to a perilous degree. He may have had 
 plans of his own as a Persian nationalist; he may 
 have had part in one of the Shi'ite conspiracies ; he 
 may have been nothing but a rather weak-headed 
 devotee, carried off his feet by a sudden tide of public 
 excitement, the greatest trial and danger that a saint 
 has to meet. But the times were not such then in 
 Baghdad that the government could take any risks. 
 Al-Muqtadir was Khalifa and in his weak hands the 
 Khalifate was slipping to ruin. The Fatimids were 
 supreme in North Africa ; the Qarmatians held Syria 
 and Arabia, and were threatening Baghdad itself. In 
 eight years they were to take Mecca. Persia was 
 
AL-HALLA.T 1S5 
 
 seething vrith f;ilse prophets and nationalists of every 
 shade. Thirteen yeai-s later Ibn ash-Slialmaghani 
 was put to death in Baghdad on similar gi-ounds : in 
 his case, Shi'ite conspiraey agiiinst the state was still 
 more clearly involyed. We can only conclude in the 
 words of Ibn KhaUihan (d. t3Sl\ " The history of al- 
 Hallaj is long to relate ; his fate is well known ; and 
 God knoweth aU secret things." With him we must 
 leave, for the present, consideration of the Siifi devel- 
 opment and return to the Mu'tazilites and to the 
 people tiring of their dry subtilties. 
 
CHAPTEE III 
 
 The rise of orthodox kalam; al-Ash'ari; decline of the Mu'tazil- 
 ites ; passing of heresy into unbelief ; development of scho- 
 lastic theology by Ash'arites ; rise of Zahirite kalam ; Ibn 
 Hazm ; persecution of Ash'arites ; final assimilation of kalam. 
 
 As we have already seen, the traditionalist party at 
 first refused to enter upon any discussion of sacred 
 things. Malik ibn Anas used to say, " God's istiwa 
 (settling Himself firmly upon His throne) is known ; 
 how it is done is unknown ; it must be believed ; 
 questions about it are an innovation (bid'a)." But 
 such a position could not be held for any length of 
 time. The world cannot be cut in two and half as- 
 signed to faith and half to reason. So, as time went 
 on, there arose on the orthodox side men who, little 
 by little, were prepared to give a reason for the faith 
 that was in them. They thus came to use kalam in 
 order to meet the Jcala7n of the Mu'tazilites ; they 
 became mutaJcallims, and the scholastic theology of 
 Islam was founded. It is the history of this transfer 
 of method which we have now to consider. 
 
 Its beginnings are wrapped in a natural obscurity. 
 It was at first a gradual, unconscious drift, and peo- 
 ple did not recognize its existence. Afterward, when 
 they looked back upon it, the tendency of the human 
 mind to ascribe broad movements to single men as- 
 serted itself and the whole was put under the name 
 
 186 
 
RISE OF OKTHODOX KALAM 187 
 
 of al-Ash'ari. It is true that with him, in a sense, the 
 change suddenly leaped to self-consciousness, but it 
 had already been long in progress. As we have seen, 
 al-Junaj-d discussed the unity of God, but it was be- 
 hind closed doors. Ash-Shafi'i held that there should 
 be a certain number of men trained thus to defend 
 and purify the faith, but that it would be a great 
 evil if their arguments should become known to the 
 mass of the people. Al-Muhasibi, a contemporary 
 of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, was suspected, and rightly, of 
 defending his faith with argument, and thereby in- 
 curred Ahmad's displeasure. Another contemporary 
 of Ahmad's, al-Karabisi (d. 345), incurred the same 
 displeasure, and the list might easily be extended. 
 But the most significant fact of all is that the move- 
 ment came to the sm'face and showed itself openly at 
 the same time in the most widely separated lands of 
 Islam. In Mesopotamia there was al-Ash'ari, who 
 died after 320 ; in Egypt there was at-TaTiawi, who 
 died in 331; in Samai'qand there was al-Mataridi, 
 who died in 333. Of these at-Tahawi is now little 
 more than a name ; al-Mataridi's star has paled be- 
 fore that of al-Ash'ari ; al-Ash'aii has come in popular 
 view to be the solitary hero before whom the Mu'taz- 
 ilite system went down. It will perhaps be sufficient 
 if we take his life and experiences as our guide in 
 this period of change ; the others must have followed 
 very much in the same path. 
 
 He was born at al-Basra in 260, the year- in which 
 al-Kindi died and Muhammad al-Muntazar vanished 
 from the sight of men. He came into a world full of 
 intellectual ferment; Alids of different camps were 
 
188 THEOLOGY 
 
 active in their claim to be possessors of an infallible 
 Imam ; Zaydites and Qarmatians were in revolt ; tlie 
 decree of 234 that the Qur'an was uncreated had had 
 little effect, so far, in silencing the Mu'tazilites ; in 
 261 the Sufi pantheist, Abu Yazid, died. Al-Ash'ari 
 himself was of the best blood of the desert and of a 
 highly orthodox family which had borne a distin- 
 guished part in Muslim history. Through some ac- 
 cident he came in early youth into the care of al- 
 Jubba'i, the Mu'tazilite, who, according to one story, 
 had married al-Ash'ari's mother ; was brought up by 
 him and remained a stanch Mu'tazilite, writing and 
 speaking on that side, till he was forty years old. 
 
 Then a strange thing happened. One day he mounted 
 the pulpit of the mosque in al-Basra and cried aloud, 
 " He who knows me, knows me ; and he who knows 
 me not, let him know that I am so and so, the son of 
 so and so. I have maintained the creation of the 
 Qur'an and that God will not be seen in the world to 
 come with the eyes, and that the creatures create their 
 actions. Lo, I repent that I have been a Mu'tazilite 
 and turn to opposition to them." It was a voice full 
 of omen. It told that the intellectual supremacy of 
 the Mu'tazilites had publicly passed and that, here- 
 after, they would be met with their own weapons. 
 What led to this change of mind is strictly imknown ; 
 only legends have reached us. One, full of psycho- 
 logical truth, runs that one Ramadan, the fasting 
 month, when he was worn with prayer and hunger, 
 the Prophet appeared to him three times in his sleep, 
 and commanded him to turn from his vain Jcalam and 
 seek certainty in the traditions and the Qur'an. If 
 
EETUEN OF AL-ASH'ABI 189 
 
 he would but give himseli to that study, God would 
 make clear the difficulties and enable him to solve all 
 the puzzles. He did so, and his mind seemed to be 
 opened ; the old contradictions and absurdities had 
 fled, and he cursed the Mu'tazilites and all their 
 works. 
 
 It can easily be seen that in some such way as 
 this the blood of the race may have led him back 
 to the God of his fathers, the God of the desert, 
 whose word must be accepted as its own proof. The 
 gossips of the time told strange tales of rich relatives 
 and family pressure ; we can leave these aside. When 
 he had changed he was terribly in earnest. He met 
 his old teacher, al-Jubba'i, in public discussions again 
 and again till the old man withdrew. One of these 
 discussions legend has handed down in varying forms. 
 None of them may be exactly true, but they are sig- 
 nificant of the change of attitude. He came to al- 
 Jubba'i and said, " Suppose the case of three brothers ; 
 one being God-fearing, another godless and a third 
 dies as a child. What of them in the world to come ? " 
 Al-Jubba'i replied, " The first will be rewarded in 
 Paradise ; the second punished in Hell, and the third 
 will be neither rewarded nor punished." Al-Ash'ari 
 continued, " But if the third said, ' Lord, Thou 
 mightest have granted me life, and then I would have 
 been pious and entered Paradise like my brother,' 
 what then ? " Al-Jubba'i replied, " God would say, 
 'I knew that if thou wert granted life thou wouldst 
 be godless and unbelieving and enter Hell.' " Then 
 al-Ash'ari drew his noose, " But what if the second 
 said, ' Lord, why didst Thou not make me die as a 
 
190 THEOLOGY 
 
 child? Then had I escaped Hell.'" Al-Jubba'i 
 was silenced, and Al-Ash'ari went away in triumph. 
 Three years after his pupil had left him the old man 
 died. The tellers of this story regard it as disproving 
 the Mu'tazilite doctrine of "the best" — al-aslah — 
 namely, that God is constrained to do that which may 
 be best and happiest for His creatures. Orthodox 
 Islam, as we have seen, holds that God is under no 
 such constraint, and is free to do good or evil as He 
 chooses. 
 
 But the story has also another and somewhat 
 broader significance. It is a protest against the 
 religious rationalism of the Mu'tazilites, which held 
 that the mysteries of the universe could be expressed 
 and met in terms of human thought. In this way 
 it represents the essence of al-Ash'ari's position, a 
 recoil from the impossible task of raising a system 
 of purely rationalistic theology to reliance upon the 
 Word of God, and the tradition (hadith) and usage 
 (sumia) of the Prophet and the pattern of the early 
 church (salaf). 
 
 The stories told above represent the change as 
 sudden. According to the evidence of his books 
 that was not so. In his return there were two 
 stages. In the first of these he upheld the seven 
 rational Qualities {si/at aqliya) of God, Life, Knowl- 
 edge, Power, Will, Hearing, Seeing, Speech : but ex- 
 plained away the Qur'anic anthropomorphisms of 
 God's face, hands, feet, etc. In the second stage, 
 which fell, apparently, after he had moved to Bagh- 
 dad and come under the strong Hanbalite influences 
 there, he explained away nothing, but contented him- 
 
SYSTEM OP AL-ASH'aRI 191 
 
 self with the position that the anthropomorphisms 
 were to be taken, bila hayfa ivala tashhih, without ask- 
 ing how and without drawing any comparison. The 
 first phrase is directed against the Mu'tazilites, who 
 inquired persistently into the nature and possibility 
 of such things in God ; the second, against the an- 
 thropomorphists {mushabbihs, comparers; mujassims, 
 corporealizers), mostly ultra Hanbalites and Kar- 
 ramites, who said that these things in God were like 
 the corresponding things in men. At all stages, how- 
 ever, he was prepared to defend his conclusions and 
 assail those of his adversaries by dint of argument. 
 
 The details of his system will be best understood by 
 reading his creed and the creed of al-Fudali, which is 
 essentially Ash'arite. Both are in the Appendix of 
 Translated Creeds. Here, it is necessary to draw 
 attention to two, only, of the obscurer points. On 
 the vexed question, " What is a thing ? " he antici- 
 pated Kant. The early theologians, orthodox and 
 theoretical, and those later ones also who did not fol- 
 low him, regarded, as we have seen, existence {luujvd) 
 as only one of the qualities belonging to an existing 
 thing (mawjud). It was there all the time, but it 
 lacked the quality of " existence " ; then that quality 
 was added to its other qualities and it became exist- 
 ent. But al-Ash'ari and his followers held that ex- 
 istence was the " self " iflyn) of the entity and not a 
 quality or state, however personal or necessary. See, 
 on the whole, Appendix of Creeds. 
 
 On the other vexed question of free-will, or, rather, 
 as the Muslims chose to express it, on the ability of 
 men to produce actions, he took up a mediating po- 
 
192 THEOLOGY 
 
 sition. Tlie old orthodox position was absolutely 
 fatalistic ; the Mu'tazilites, following their principle 
 of Justice, gave to man an initiative power. Al- 
 Ash'ari struck a middle path. Man cannot create 
 anything ; God is the only creator. Nor does man's 
 power produce any effect on his actions at all. God 
 creates in His creature power (qvdra) and choice 
 {ikhtiyw). Then He creates in him his action cor- 
 responding to the power and choice thus created. 
 So the action of the creature is created by God as 
 to initiative and as to production ; but it is acquired 
 by the creature. By acquisition (kasb) is meant that 
 it corresponds to the creature's power and choice, 
 previously created in him, without his having had 
 the slightest effect on the action. He was only the 
 locus or subject of the action. In this way al-Ash'ari 
 is supposed to have accounted for free-will and 
 entailed responsibility upon men. It may be doubted 
 whether the second point occupied him much. It 
 was open to his God to do good or evil as He chose ; 
 the Justice of the Mu'tazilites was left behind. He 
 may have intended only to explain the consciousness 
 of freedom, as some have done more recently. The 
 closeness with which al-Ash'ari in this comes to the 
 pre-established harmony of Leibnitz and to the 
 Kantian conception of existence shows how high a 
 rank he must take as an original thinker. His 
 abandoning of the Mu'tazilites was due to no mere 
 wave of sentiment but to a perception that their spec- 
 ulations were on too narrow a basis and of a too bar- 
 ren scholastic type. He died after 320 with a curse 
 on them and their methods as his last words. 
 
AL-MATARIDI 193 
 
 A few words only need be given to al-Mataridi. 
 The creed of an-Nasafi in the Appendix of Creeds, pp. 
 308-315 belongs to his school. He and at-Tahawi 
 were followers of the broad-minded Abu Hanifa, who 
 was more than suspected of Mu'tazilite and Murji'ite 
 leanings. Muslim theologians usually reckon up 
 some thirteen points of difference between al-Mata- 
 ridi and al-Ash'ari and admit that seven of these are 
 not much more than combats of words. Those 
 which occur in an-Nasafi's creed are marked with a 
 star. 
 
 We are now in a position to finish shortly with the 
 Mu'tazilites. Their work, as a constructive force, is 
 done. From this time on there is halam among the 
 orthodox, and the term mutakallim denotes nothing 
 but a scholastic theologian, whether of one wing or 
 another. And so, like any other organ which has done 
 its part and for the existence of which there is no 
 longer any object, they gradually and quietly dropped 
 into the background. They had still, sometimes, to 
 suffer persecution, and for hundreds of years there 
 were men who continued to call themselves Mu'tazil- 
 ites ; but their heresies came to be heresies of the 
 schools and not burning questions in the eyes of 
 the masses. We need now draw attention to only a 
 few incidents and figures in this dying movement. 
 The Muslim historians lay much stress on the ortho- 
 dox zeal of the Khalifa al-Qadir, who reigned 381- 
 422, and narrate how he persecuted the Mu'tazilites, 
 Shi'ites and other heretics and compelled them, under 
 oath, to conform. 
 
 But there are several difficulties in the way of this 
 
194 THEOLOGY 
 
 persecution, which make it probable that it was more 
 nominal than otherwise. Al-Qadir was bitterly or- 
 thodox ; he had written a treatise on theology and 
 compelled his unhappy courtiers to listen to a public 
 reading of it every week. But he enjoyed, outside 
 of his palace, next to no power. He was in the con- 
 trol of the Shi'ite Buwayhids, who, as we have seen, 
 ruled Baghdad and the Khalifate from 320 to 447. 
 These dubious persecutions are said to have fallen in 
 408 and 420. Again, a Muslim pilgrim from Spain 
 visited Baghdad about 390 and has left us a record 
 of the state of religious things there. He found in 
 session what may perhaps best be described as a 
 Parliament of Religions. It seems to have been a 
 free debate between Muslims of all sects, orthodox 
 and heretical, Parsees and atheists, Jews and Chris- 
 tians — unbelievers of every kind. Each party had a 
 spokesman, and at the beginning of the proceedings 
 the rule was rehearsed that no one might appeal to 
 the sacred books of his creed but might only adduce 
 arguments founded upon reason. The pious Spanish 
 Muslim went to two meetings but did not peril his 
 soul by any further visits. In his narrative we rec- 
 ognize the horror with which the orthodox of Spain 
 viewed such proceedings — Spain, Muslim and Chris- 
 tian, has always favored the straitest sect; but when 
 such a thing was permitted in Baghdad, religious lib- 
 erty there at least must have been tolerably broad. 
 Possibly it was sittings of the Ilchiuan as-safa upon 
 which this scandalized Spaniard stumbled. He him- 
 self speaks of them as meetings of mutakallims. 
 But if the mixture of Sunnite and Shi'ite authority 
 
MAHMUD OF GHAZNA 195 
 
 in Baghdad gave all the miscellaneous heretics a 
 chance for life, it was different in the growing domin- 
 ions of Mahmud of Ghazma. That iconoclastic mon- 
 arch had embraced the anthropomorphic faith of the 
 Karramites, the most literal-minded of all the Mus- 
 lim sects. In consequence, all forms of Mu'taziHsm 
 and all kinds of mutakallims were an abomination 
 to him, and it was a very real persecution which they 
 met at his hands. That al-Qadir, his spiritual suze- 
 rain, urged him on is very probable ; it is also possi- 
 ble that respect for the growing power of Mahmud 
 may have protected al-Qadir to some extent from the 
 Buwayhids. In 420 Mahmud took from them Ispa- 
 han and held there a grand inquisition on Shi'ites and 
 heretics of all kinds. 
 
 To proceed with the Mu'tazilites ; when we come 
 to al-Ghazzali and his times we shall find that they 
 have ceased to be a crying danger to the faith. 
 Though their views might, that doctor held, be er- 
 roneous in some respects, they were not to be con- 
 sidered as damnable. Again, in 538, there died az- 
 Zamakhshari, the great grammarian, who is often 
 called the last of the Mu'tazihtes. He was not that 
 by any means, but his heresies were either mild or 
 were regarded mildly. A single point will show this, 
 His commentary on the Qur'an, the Kaslishaf, was re- 
 vised and expurgated in the orthodox interest by 
 al-Baydawi (d. 688) and in that form is now the 
 most popular and respected of all expositions. The 
 Kashshaf itself, in its original, unmodified form, has 
 been printed several times at Cairo. Again, Ibn 
 Eushd, the Aristotelian, who died in 595, when he is 
 
196 THEOLOGY 
 
 combating the arguments of the mutakallims, makes 
 little difference between the Mu'tazilites and the 
 others. They are only, to him, another variety of 
 scholastic theologian, with a rather better idea, per- 
 haps, of logic and argument. He considered, as we 
 shall find later, all the mutakallims as sadly to seek 
 in such matters. Since then, and into quite modern 
 times, there have been sporadic cases of theologians 
 called Mu'tazilites by themselves or others. Practi- 
 cally, they have been scholastics of eccentric views. 
 Finally, the use of this name for themselves by the 
 present-day broad school Muslims of India is abso- 
 lutely unhistorical and highly misleading. 
 
 We turn now to suggest, rather than to trace, some 
 of the non-theological consequences of the preceding 
 theology. 
 
 Increasingly, from this time on, it is not heresy 
 which has to be met so much as simple unbelief, more 
 or less frank. It is evident that the heretics of the 
 earlier period are now dividing in two directions, 
 one part inclining toward milder forms of heresy and 
 the other toward doubt in the largest sense, passing 
 over to Aristotelian + neo-Platonic philosophy, and 
 thence dividing into materialists, deists, and theists. 
 Thus we have seen earlier the workings of al-Farabi 
 and of the Ikhwan as-safa. The teachings of the 
 latter pass on to the Isma'ilians who developed them 
 in the mountain fortresses, the centres of their power, 
 scattered from Persia to Syria. These were other- 
 wise called Assassins ; otherwise Batinites in the 
 narrower sense — in the broader that term meant only 
 those who found under the letter of the Qur'an a 
 
AL-BEEUNI ; IBN SINA 197 
 
 hidden, esoteric meaning; otherwise Ta'limites or 
 claimers of a ta'lim, a secret teaching by a divinely 
 instructed Imam, and with them we shall have much 
 to do later. It is sufficient here to notice how the 
 peaceful and rather watery philosophy of the "Sin- 
 cere Brethren" was transmuted through ambition 
 and fanaticism into belligerent politics at the hands 
 and daggers of these fierce sectaries. Into this period, 
 too, fall some well-known names of dubious and more 
 than dubious orthodoxy. Al-Beruni (d. 440) even 
 at the court of Mahmud of Ghazna managed to keep 
 his footing and his head. Yet it may be doubted how 
 far he was a Karramite or even a Muslim. He was 
 certainly the first scientific student of India and In- 
 dica and of chronology and calendars, a man whose 
 attainments and results show that our so-called 
 modern methods are as old as genius. On religion, 
 he maintained a prudent silence, but earned the favor 
 of Mahmud by an unsparing exposure of the weak- 
 ness in the Fatimid genealogy. In this sketch he 
 has a place as a man of science who went his own way 
 without treading on the religious toes of other people. 
 His contemporary Ibn Sina (d. 428), for us Avi- 
 cenna, was of a different nature, and his lines were 
 cast in different places. He was a wanderer through 
 the courts of northern Persia. The orthodox and 
 stringent Mahmud he carefully avoided; the Buway- 
 hids and those of their ilk took such heresies as his 
 more easily. Endowed with a gigantic memory and 
 an insatiable intellectual appetite, he was the ency- 
 clopaedist of his age, and his scientific work, and 
 especially that in medicine, went further than any- 
 
198 THEOLOGY 
 
 thing else to put the Muslim Bast and medisDval 
 Europe in the strait waistcoat from which the first 
 has not yet emerged and the second only shook itself 
 free in the seventeenth century. He was a student 
 of Aristotle and a mystic, as all Muslim students of 
 Aristotle have been. How far his mysticism enabled 
 him to square the Qur'an with his philosophy is not 
 clear ; such men seldom said exactly what they meant 
 and all that they thought. He was also a diligent 
 student and reader of the Qur'an and faithful in his 
 public religious duties. Yet the Muslim world asserts 
 that he left behind him a testamentary tractate (loas- 
 iya) defending dissimulation as to the religion of the 
 country in which we might be ; that it was not wrong 
 for the philosopher to go through religious rites 
 which for him had no meaning. He, too, is signifi- 
 cant for his time, and, if our interest were philosophy, 
 would call for lengthened treatment. As it is, he 
 marks for us the accomplished separation between 
 students of theology and students of philosophy. 
 
 An equally well known and by us much better loved 
 name is that of Umar al-Khayyam, who died later, 
 about 515, but who may fitly be grouped with Ibn 
 Sina. He, too, was a bon vivant, but of a deeper, 
 more melancholy strain. His wine meant more than 
 friendly cups ; it was a way of escape from the world 
 and its burden. His science, too, went deeper. He 
 was not a gatherer and arranger of the wisdom of the 
 past; his reformed calendar is more perfect than that 
 which we even now use. His faith is a riddle to lis, 
 as it was to his comrades. But it was because he 
 had no certain truth to proclaim that Umar did not 
 
ABTJ-L-ALA AL-MA'AERI 199 
 
 speak out clearly. His last -words were almost those 
 of Eabelais, "I go to meet the great Perhaps." 
 Anecdotage connects his name with that of al-Ghaz- 
 zali. Neither had escaped the pall of universal 
 scepticism which must have descended upon their 
 time. But al-Ghazzali, by God's grace, as he himself 
 reverently says, was enabled to escape. Umar died 
 under it. 
 
 A very different man was Abu-1-Ala al-Ma'arri, 
 the blind poet and singer of intellectual freedom. 
 In Arabic literature there is no other voice like 
 his, clear and confident. He was a man of letters ; 
 no philosopher nor theologian nor scientist, though 
 at one time he seems to have come in contact with a 
 circle like that of Ikhwan as-safa, perhaps the same ; 
 and his spirit was like that of one of the heroic poets 
 of the old desert life, whose hand was taught to keep 
 his head, whose tongue spared nothing from heaven 
 to earth, and who lived his own life out in his own 
 way, undaunted. In his darkness he nourished great 
 thoughts and flung out a scsva indignatio on hypocrisy 
 and subservience which reminds of Lessing. But 
 Abu-1-Ala was a great poet, and his scorn of 
 priests and courtiers and their lies, his pity for suf- 
 fering humanity and his confidence in the light of 
 reason are thrown into scraps of burning, echoing 
 verse without their like in Arabic. He died at the 
 town of his birth, Ma'arrat an-Nu'man, in northern 
 Syria, in 449. The problem is how he was suffered 
 to live out his long life of eighty-six years. 
 
 We can now rettirn to the development of scholas- 
 tic theology in the orthodox church at the hands of 
 
200 THEOLOGY 
 
 the followers of al-Ash'ari. They had to fight their 
 ■way against many and most differing opponents. At 
 the one extreme were the dwindling Mu'tazilites, 
 passing slowly into comparatively innocuous heretics, 
 and the growing party of unbelievers, philosophical 
 and otherwise, open and secret. At the other ex- 
 treme was the mob of Hanbalites, belonging to the 
 only legal school which laid theological burdens on 
 its adherents. The theologians, in this case, cer- 
 tainly varied as to the weight of their own anathemas 
 against all kalam, but were at one in that they carried 
 the bulk of the multitude with them and could en- 
 force their conclusions with the cudgels of rioters. 
 In the midst were the rival orthodox {pace the Han- 
 balites) developers of kalam, among whom the Ma- 
 taridites probably held the most important place. 
 Thus, the Ash'arite school was the nursling as well as 
 the child of controversy. 
 
 It was, then, fitting that the name joined, at least 
 in tradition, with the final form of that system, should 
 be that of a controversialist. But this man, Abu 
 Bakr al-Baqilani the Qadi, was more than a mere con- 
 troversialist. It is his glory to have contributed most 
 important elements to and put into fixed form what 
 is, perhaps, the most fantastic and daring meta- 
 physical scheme, and almost certainly the most thor- 
 ough theological scheme, ever thought out. On the 
 one hand, the Lucretian atoms raining down through 
 the empty void, the self- developing monads of Leib- 
 nitz, pre-established harmony and all, the Kantian 
 " things in themselves " are lame and impotent in 
 their consistency beside the parallel Ash'arite doc- 
 
201 
 
 trines ; and, on the other, not even the rigors of Cal- 
 vin, as developed in the Dutch confessions, can com- 
 pete with the unflinching exactitude of the Muslim 
 conclusions. 
 
 First, as to ontology. The object of the Ash'arites 
 was that of Kant, to fix the relation of knowledge to 
 the thing in itself. Thus, al-Baqilani defined knowl- 
 edge {ihii) as cognition {ma'ri/a) of a thing as it is in 
 itself. But in reaching that " thing in itself " they 
 were much more thorough than Kant. Only two of 
 the Ai-istotelian categories survived their attack, sub- 
 stance and quality. The others, quantity, place, time 
 and the rest, were only relationships (i'tibars) exist- 
 ing subjectively in the mind of the knower, and not 
 things. But a relationship, they argued, if real, must 
 exist in something, and a quality cannot exist in 
 another quality, only in a substance. Yet it could 
 not exist in either of the two things which it brought 
 together ; for example, in the cause or the effect. It 
 must be in a third thing. But to bring this third 
 thing and the first two together, other relationships 
 would be needed and other things for these relation- 
 ships to exist in. Thus we would be led back in an 
 infinite sequence, and they had taken over from Aris- 
 totle the position that such an infinite series backward 
 (tasalsal) is inadmissible. Relationships, then, had 
 no real existence but were mere phantoms, subjective 
 nonentities. Further, the Aristotelian view of matter 
 was now impossible for them. All the categories 
 had gone except substance and quality ; and among 
 them, passion. Matter, then, could not have the pos- 
 sibility of sufi'ering the impress of form. A possibil- 
 
202 THEOLOGY 
 
 ity is neither an entity nor a non-entity, but a sub- 
 jectivity purely. But with the suffering matter, the 
 active form and all causes must also go. They, too, 
 are mere subjectivities. Again, qualities, for these 
 thinkers, became mere accidents. The fleeting char- 
 acter of appearances drove them to the conclusion 
 that there was no such thing as a quality planted in 
 the nature of a thing ; that the idea "nature " did not 
 exist. Then this drove them further. Substances ex- 
 ist only with qualities, i.e., accidents. These quali- 
 ties may be positive or they may be negative ; the 
 ascription to things of negative qualities is one of 
 their most fruitful conceptions. When, then, the 
 qualities fall out of existence, the substances them- 
 selves must also cease to exist. Substance as well as 
 quality is fleeting, has only a moment's duration. 
 
 But when they rejected the Aristotelian view of 
 matter as the possibility of receiving form, their path 
 of necessity led them straight to the atomists. So 
 atomists they became, and, as always, after their own 
 fashion. Their atoms are not of spxce only, but also 
 of time. The basis of all the manifestation, mental 
 and physical, of the world in place and time, is a 
 multitude of monads. Bach has certain qualities but 
 has extension neither in space nor time. They have 
 simply position, not bulk, and do not touch one 
 another. Between them is absolute void. Similarly 
 as to time. The time-atoms, if the expression may 
 be permitted, are equally unextended and have also 
 absolute void — of time — between them. Just as 
 space is only in a series of atoms, so time is only in 
 a succession of untouching moments and leaps across 
 
ASH'ARITE THEOLOGY 203 
 
 the void from one to the other with the jerk of the 
 hand of a clock. Time, in this view, is in grains and 
 can exist only in connection with change. The mon- 
 ads differ from those of Leibnitz in having no nature 
 in themselves, no possibility of development along 
 certain lines. The Muslim monads are, and again 
 are not, all change and action in the world are pro- 
 duced by their entering into existence and dropping 
 out again, not by any change in themselves. 
 
 But this most simple view of the world left its 
 holders in precisely the same difficulty, only in a far 
 higher degree, as that of Leibnitz. He was com- 
 pelled to fall back on a pre-established harmony to 
 bring his monads into orderly relations with one 
 another; the Muslim theologians, on their side, fell 
 back upon God and found in His will the ground of 
 all things. 
 
 We here pass from their ontology to their theology, 
 and as they were thorough-going metaphysicians, so 
 now they are thorough-going theologians. Being 
 was all in the one case ; now it is God that is all. In 
 truth, their philosophy is in its essence a scepticism 
 which destroys the possibility of a philosophy in 
 order to drive men back to God and His revelations 
 and compel them to see in Him the one grand fact 
 of the universe. So, when a darwish shouts in his 
 ecstasy, " Huwa-l-haqq," he does not mean, " He is the 
 Truth," in our Western sense of Verity, or our New 
 Testament sense of " The Way, the Truth, and the 
 Life," but simply, " He is the Fact "—the one Ke- 
 ality. 
 
 To return : from their ontology they derived an 
 
204 THEOLOGY 
 
 argument for the necessity of a God. That their 
 monads came so and not otherwise must have a cause ; 
 without it there could be no harmony or connec- 
 tion between them. And this cause must be one 
 with no cause behind it ; otherwise we would have 
 the endless chain. This cause, then, they found in 
 the absolutely free will of God, working without any 
 matter beside it and unaffected by any laws or neces- 
 sities. It creates and annihilates the atoms and their 
 qualities and, by that means, brings to pass all the 
 motion and change of the world. These, in our sense, 
 do not exist. When a thing seems to us to be moved, 
 that really means that God has annihilated — or per- 
 mitted to drop out of existence, by not continuing to 
 uphold, as another view held — the atoms making up 
 that thing in its original position, and has created 
 them again and again along the line over which it 
 moves. Similarly of what we regard as cause and 
 effect. A man writes with a pen and a piece of paper. 
 God creates in his mind the will to write ; at the same 
 moment he gives him the power to write and brings 
 about the apparent motion of the hand, of the pen 
 and the appearance on the paper. No one of these 
 is the cause of the other. God has brought about by 
 creation and annihilation of atoms the requisite com- 
 bination to produce these appearances. Thus we see 
 that free-will for the Muslim scholastics is simply the 
 presence, in the mind of the man, of this choice cre- 
 ated there by God. This may not seem to us to be 
 very real, but it has, certainly, as much reality as 
 anything else in their world. Further, it will be ob- 
 served how completely this annihilates the machinery 
 
ETHICAL COKSEQITENCBS 205 
 
 of the universe. There is no such thing as law, and 
 the world is sustained by a constant, ever-repeated 
 miracle. Miracles and what we regard as the ordi- 
 nary operations of nature are on the same level. 
 The world and the things in it could have been quite 
 different. The only limitation upon God is that He 
 cannot produce a contradiction. A thing cannot be 
 and not be at the same time. There is no such thing 
 as a secondary cause ; when there is the appearance 
 of such, it is only illusional. God is producing it as 
 well as the ultimate appearance of effect. There is 
 no nature belonging to things. Fire does not bum 
 and a knife does not cut. God creates in a substance 
 a being burned when the fire touches it and a being 
 cut when the knife approaches it. 
 
 In this scheme there are certainly grave diflBcul- 
 ties, philosophical and ethical. It establishes a rela- 
 tionship between God and the atoms ; but we have 
 already seen that relationships are subjective illu- 
 sions. That, however, was in the case of the things 
 of the world, perceived by the senses — contingent 
 being, as they would put it. It does not hold of 
 necessary being. God possesses a quality called 
 Difference from originated things {al-mukhalafa lil- 
 hawadith). He is not a natural cause, but a free 
 cause ; and the existence of a free cause they were 
 compelled by their principles to admit. The ethical 
 difficulty is perhaps greater. If there is no order of 
 nature and no certainty, or nexus, as to causes and 
 effects; if there is no regular development in the 
 life, mental, moral, and physical of a man — only a 
 series of isolated moments ; how can there be any 
 
206 THEOLOGT 
 
 responsibility, any moral claim or duty ? This diffi- 
 culty seems to have been recognized more clearly 
 than the philosophical one. It was met formally by 
 the assertion of a certain order and regularity in the 
 will of God. He sees to it that a man's life is a 
 unity, and, for details, that the will to eat and the 
 action always coincide. But such an answer must 
 have been felt to be inadequate and to involve 
 grave moral dangers for the common mind. There- 
 fore, as we have seen, the study of kalam was hedged 
 about with difficulties and restrictions. Theologians 
 recognized its trap-falls and doubts, even for them- 
 selves, and lamented that they were compelled by 
 their profession to study it. The public discussion 
 of its questions was regarded as a breach of profes- 
 sional etiquette. Theologians and philosophers alike 
 strove to keep these deeper mysteries hidden from 
 the multitude. The gap between the highly edu- 
 cated and the great mass — that fundamental error and 
 greatest danger in Muslim society — comes here again 
 to view. Further, even among theologians, there 
 was some difference in degree of insight, and books 
 and phrases could be read by different men in very 
 different ways. To one, they would suggest ordinary, 
 Qur'anic doctrines ; another would see under and be- 
 hind them a trail of metaphysical consequences 
 bristling with blasphemous possibilities. Thus, 
 Muslim science has been always of the school ; it has 
 never learned the vitaKzing and disinfecting value 
 of the fresh air of the market-place. This applies 
 to philosophers even more than to theologians. 
 The crowning accusation which Ibn Eushd, the great 
 
SPEEAD OF ASH'AKISil 207 
 
 Ai-istotelian commentator, brought against al-Ghaz- 
 zali was that he discussed such subtilties in popular 
 books. 
 
 This, then, was the system which seems to have 
 reached tolerably complete form at the hands of al- 
 Baqilani, who died in 403. But with the comple- 
 tion of the system there went by no means its uni- 
 versal or even wide-spread acceptance in the Mus- 
 lim world. That of al-Mataridi held its own for long, 
 and, even yet, the Mataridite creed of an-Nasafi is 
 used largely in the Turkish schools. In the fifth 
 century it was considered remarkable that Abu Dharr 
 (d. 434), a theologian of Herat, should be an Ash- 
 'arite rather than, apparently, a Mataridite. It was 
 not till al-Ghazzali (d. 505) that the Ash'arite sys- 
 tem came to the orthodox hegemony in the East, and 
 it was only as the result of the work of Ibn Tumart, 
 the Mahdi of the Muwahhids (d. 524), that it con- 
 quered the West. For long its path was darkened by 
 suspicion and persecution. This came almost en- 
 tirely from the Hanbalites. The Mu'tazilites had no 
 force behind them, and while the views of deists and 
 materialists were steadily making way in secret, their 
 public efforts appeared only in very occasional dis- 
 putes between theologians and philosophers. As we 
 have seen, Muslim philosophy has always practised 
 an economy of teaching. 
 
 The Hanbalite crisis seems to have come to a head 
 toward the close of the reign of Tughril Beg, the first 
 Great Saljuq. In 429, as we have seen, the Saljuqs 
 had taken Merv and Samarqand, and in 447 Tughril 
 Beg had entered Baghdad and freed the Khalifa from 
 
208 THEOLOGY 
 
 the Slii'ite domination of the Buwayhids who had so 
 long enforced toleration. It was natural that he, a 
 theologically unschooled Turk, should be captured 
 by the simplicity and concreteness of the Hanbalite 
 doctrines. 
 
 Added to this political factor there was a theologi- 
 cal moTement at work which was deeply hostile to 
 the Ash'arites as they had developed. An important 
 point in the method of al-Ash'ari himself, and, after 
 him, of his followers, was to put forth a creed, ex- 
 pressed in the old-fashioned terms and containing the 
 old-fashioned doctrines as nearly as was at all possible, 
 and to accompany it with a spiritualizing interpreta- 
 tion which was, naturally, accessible to the professional 
 student only. Accordingly what had at first seemed a 
 weapon against the Mu'tazilites came to be "viewed with 
 more and more suspicion by the holders to the old, 
 unquestioning orthodoxy. The duty also of religious 
 investigation and speculation (nazr) came to have 
 more and more stress laid upon it. The bila hayfa 
 dropped into the background. A Muslim must have a 
 reason for the faith that was in him, they said ; other- 
 wise, he was no true Muslim, was in fact an unbeliever. 
 Of course, they limited carefully the extent to which 
 he should go. For the ordinary man a series of very 
 simple proofs would be prepared ; the student, on 
 the other hand, when carefully led, could work his 
 way through the system sketched above. All this, 
 naturally, was anathema to the party of tradition. 
 
 It is significant that at this time the Zahirite school 
 of law (^fiqli) developed into a school of kalam and 
 applied its literal principles unflinchingly to its new 
 
IBN HAZM 209 
 
 victim. The leader in this was Ibn Hazm, a theo- 
 logian of Spain. He died in 456, after a stormy 
 life filled with controversy. The remorseless sting of 
 his vituperative style coupled him, in popular prov- 
 erb, with al-Hajjaj, the blood-thirsty lieutenant of 
 the Umayyads in al-Iraq. " The sword of al-Hajjaj 
 and the tongue of Ibn Hazm," they said. But for 
 all his violence of language and real weight of char- 
 acter and brain, he made little way for his views in 
 his lifetime. It was almost one hundred years after 
 his death before they came into any prominence. 
 The theologians and lawyers around him in the West 
 were devoted to the study of Jiqii in the narrowest 
 and most technical sense. They labored over the 
 systems and treatises of their predecessors and 
 neglected the great original sources of the Qur'an 
 and the traditions. The immediate study of tradi- 
 tion (hadith) had died out. Ibn Hazm, on the other 
 hand, went straight back to hadith. Taqlid he abso- 
 lutely rejected, each man must draw from the sacred 
 texts his own views. So the whole system of the 
 canon lawyers came down with a crash and they, nat- 
 urally, did not like it. Analogy {qiyas), their princi- 
 pal instrument, he swept away. It had no place 
 either in law or theology. Even on the principle of 
 agreement {ijma) he threw a shadow of doubt. 
 
 But it was in theology rather than in law that Ibn 
 Hazm's originality lay. Strictly, his Zahirite prin- 
 ciples when applied there should have led him to 
 anthropomorphism (taj'sim). The literal meaning of 
 the Qur'an, as we have seen, assigns to God hands and 
 feet, sitting on and descending from His throne. But 
 
210 THEOLOGY 
 
 to Ibn Hazm, anthropomorphism was an abomination 
 only less than the speculative arguments with which 
 the Ash'arites tried to avoid it. His own method was 
 purely grammatical and lexicographical. He hunted 
 in his dictionary until he found some other meaning 
 for "hand" or "foot," or whatever the stumbling- 
 block might be. 
 
 But the most original point in his system is his 
 doctrine of the names of God, and his basing of 
 that doctrine upon God's qualities. The Ash'arites, 
 he contended with justice, had been guilty of a grave 
 inconsistency in saying that God was different in 
 nature, qualities, and actions from all created things, 
 and yet that the human qualities could be predicated 
 of God, and that men could reason about God's 
 nature. He accepted the doctrine of God's dif- 
 ference (muhlialafa) on highly logical, but, for us, 
 rather startling grounds. The Qur'an applies to 
 Him the words, " The Most Merciful of those that 
 show mercy," but God, evidently, is not merciful. 
 He tortures children with all manner of painful dis- 
 eases, with hunger and terror. Mercy, in our human 
 sense, which is high praise applied to a man, cannot 
 be predicated of God. "What then does the Qur'an 
 mean by those words ? Simply that they — arhamu-r- 
 rahimin — are one of God's names, applied to Him by 
 Himself and that we have no right to take them as 
 descriptive of a quality, mercy, and to use them to 
 throw light on God's nature. They form one of 
 the Ninety-nine Most Beautiful Names (al-asma al- 
 husna) of which the Prophet has spoken in a tradi- 
 tion. Similarly, we may call God the Living One 
 
IBN HAZM 211 
 
 {al hayy), because He has given us that as one of 
 His names, not because of "any reasoning on our part. 
 Do we not say that His life is different from that of 
 all other living beings ? These names then, are limited 
 to ninety-nine and no more should be formed, however 
 full of praise such might be for God, or however di- 
 rectly based on His actions. He has called Himself 
 al-Wahib, the Giver, and so we may use that term 
 of Him. But He has not called Himself al-Wahhah 
 the Bountiful Giver, so we may not use that term of 
 Him, though it is one of praise. Of course, you may 
 describe His action and say that He is the guider 
 of His saints. But you must not make from that a 
 name, and call Him simply the Guider. Further, if 
 we regard these names as expressing qualities in 
 God, we involve multiplicity in God's nature ; there 
 is the quality and the thing qualified. Here we are 
 back at the old Mu'tazilite difficulty and it is intelli- 
 gible that Ibn Hazm dealt more gently with the Mu'- 
 tazilites than with the Ash'arites. The one party were 
 Muslims and sinned in ignorance — invincible igno- 
 rance, a Eoman Catholic would call it; the others 
 were unbelievers. They had turned wilfully from 
 the way. The Mu'tazilites had tried to limit the 
 qualities as much as possible. At the best they had 
 said that they ivere God's essence and not in His es- 
 sence. Al-Ash'ari and his school had fairly revelled 
 in qualities and had mapped out the nature of God 
 with the detail — and daring — of a phrenological chart. 
 Naturally, Ibn Hazm made his ethical basis the 
 will of God only. God has willed that this should 
 be a sin and that a good deed. Lying, he concedes. 
 
212 THEOLOGY 
 
 is always saying what does not agree with the truth. 
 But, still, God may pronounce that one lie is a sin, 
 and one not. Muslim ethics, it is true, have never 
 branded lying as sinful in itself. 
 
 For the Shi'ites and their doctrine of an infallible 
 Imam, Ibn Hazm cannot find strong enough expres- 
 sions of contempt. 
 
 In Ibn Hazm's time, and he praises God for it, 
 there were but few Ash'arites in the West. Theology 
 generally did not find many students. So things 
 went on tiU long after his death. To this fiery con- 
 troversialist the worst blow of all would have been if 
 he could have known that the men who were at last 
 to bring his system, in part and for a time, into 
 public acceptance and repute, were also to complete 
 the conqiiest of Islam for the Ash'arite school. That 
 was stiU far in the future, and we must return to the 
 persecution. 
 
 The accounts of the persecution which set in are 
 singularly conflicting. Some assign it to Hanbalite 
 influence ; others tell of a Mu'tazilite wazir of Tughril 
 Beg. That the traditionalist party was the main 
 force in it seems certain. In all probability, how- 
 ever, all the other anti-Ash'arite sects, from the 
 Mu'tazilites on, took their own parts. The Ash'arite 
 party represented a via media and would be set upon 
 with zest by all the extremes. They were solemnly 
 cursed from the pulpits and, what added peculiar 
 insult to it, the Eafidites, an extreme Kharijite sect, 
 were joined in the same anathema. Al-Juwayni, the 
 greatest theologian of the time, fled to the Hijaz 
 and gained the title of Imam of the two Harams 
 
TEITJMPH OF ASH'AEISM 213 
 
 {Imam al-Haramayn), by living for four years be- 
 tween Mecca and al-Madina. Al-Qushayri, the author 
 of a celebrated treatise on Sufiism, was thrown into 
 prison. The Ash'arite doctors generally were scat- 
 tered to the winds. Only with the death of Tughril 
 Beg in 455 did the cloud pass. His successor, Alp- 
 Arslan, and especially the great wazir, Nizam al-Mulk, 
 favored the Ash'arites. In 459 the latter founded 
 the Nizamite Academy at Baghdad to be a defence of 
 Ash'arite doctrines. This may fairly be regarded as 
 the turning-point of the whole controversy. The 
 Hanbalite mob of Baghdad still continued to make 
 itself felt, but its excesses were promptly suppressed. 
 In 510 ash-Shahrastani was well received there by 
 the people, and in 516 the Khalifa himself attended 
 Ash'arite lectures. 
 
 It is needless to spend more time over the other 
 theologians who were links in the chain between al- 
 Ash'ari and the Imam al-Haramayn. Their views 
 wavered, this way and that, only the rationalizing 
 tendency became stronger and stronger. There was 
 danger that the orthodox system would fossilize and 
 lose touch with life as that of the Mu'tazilites had 
 done. It is true that Sufiism still held its ground. 
 All theologians practically were touched by it in its 
 simpler form ; and the cause of the higher Sufiism 
 of ecstasy, wonders by saints (karamat) and commun- 
 ion of the individual soul with God had been elo- 
 quently and effectively urged by al-Qushayri (d. 465) 
 in his Risala. But in spite of the labors of so many 
 men of high ability, the religious outlook was grow- 
 ing ever darker. Keen observers recognized that 
 
214 THEOLOGY 
 
 some change was bound to come. That it might be 
 an inflowing of new life by a new al-Ash'ari was their 
 prayer. It is more than dubious whether even the 
 keenest mind of the time could have recognized what 
 form the new life must take. They had not the 
 perspective and could only feel a vague need. But 
 from what has gone before it will be plain that Islam 
 had again to assimilate to itself something from with- 
 out or perish. Such had been its manner of progress 
 up till now. New opinions had arisen ; had become 
 heresies; conflict had followed; part of the new 
 thought had been absorbed into the orthodox church ; 
 part had been rejected ; through it all the life of the 
 church had gone on in fuller and richer measure, 
 being always, in spite of everything, the main stream ; 
 the heresy itself had slowly dwindled out of sight. 
 So it had been with Murji'ism ; so with Mu'tazilism. 
 With the orthodox, tradition (naql) still stood fast, 
 but reason {aql) had taken a place beside it. Kalam, 
 in spite of Hanbalite clamors, had become fairly a 
 part of their system. What was to be the new ele- 
 ment, and who was to be its champion ? 
 
CHAPTER lY 
 
 Al-Ghazzali, his life, times, and work; Sufiism formally accepted 
 into Islam. 
 
 With the time came the man. He -nas al-Ghazzali, 
 the gi'eatest. certainly the most sympathetic dgme in 
 the history of Islam, and the only teacher of the after 
 generations ever put by a Muslim on a level with the 
 foui- gxeat Imams. The equal of Angustiue in philo- 
 sophical and theological import^ance, by his side the 
 Aristotelian philosophers of Islam, Ibn Eushd and 
 all the rest, seem beggarly compilers and scholiasts. 
 Only al-Farabi, and that in virtue of his mysticism, 
 approaches him. In his own person he took up the 
 life of his time on all its sides and with it all its prob- 
 lems. He lived through them all and diew his the- 
 ology from his experience. Systems and classifica- 
 tions, words and arguments about words, he swept 
 away ; the facts of life as he had known them ia his 
 own soul he gi'asped. When his work was done the 
 revelation of the mystic (Lia-fhf) was not only a full 
 part but the basal part in the stnictm-e of Muslim 
 theology. That basis, in spite, or rather on account 
 of the work of the mutakaUims had previously been 
 lacking. Such a scepticism as their atomic system 
 had practically amoimted to, could disprove much but 
 could prove little. If all the catagories but substance 
 and quality are mere subjectivities, existing in the 
 
 315 
 
216 THEOLOGY 
 
 mind only, what can we know of things ? An ultra- 
 rational basis had to be found and it was found in 
 the ecstasy of the Sufis. But al-Ghazzali brought 
 another element into fuller and more effective work- 
 ing. With him passes away the old-fashioned kalam, 
 a thing of shreds and patches, scraps of metaphysics 
 and logic snatched up for a moment of need, without 
 grasp of the full sweep of philosophy, and incapable, 
 in the long run, of meeting it. Even its atomic sys- 
 tem is a philosophy of amateurs, with all their fan- 
 tastic one-sidedness, their vigor and rigor^^ But al- 
 Ghazzali was no amateur. His knowledge and grasp 
 of the problems and objects of philosophy were truer 
 and more vital than in any other Muslim up to his 
 time — perhaps after it, too. Islam has not fully un- 
 derstood him any more than Christendom fully under- 
 stood Augustine, but until long after him the horizon 
 of Muslims was wider and their air clearer for his 
 work. Then came a new scholasticism, reigning to 
 this day. 
 
 So much by way of preface. We must now give 
 some accoimt of the life and experiences, the ideas 
 and sensations, of this great leader and reformer. 
 For his life and his work were one. Everything that 
 he thought and wrote came with the weight and real- 
 ity of personal experience. He recognized this con- 
 nection himself, and has left us a book — the Mun- 
 qidh min ad-dalal, " Rescuer from Error " — almost 
 unique in Islam, which, in the form of an apology for 
 the faith, is really an Apologia pro vita sua. This 
 book is our main source for what foUows. 
 
 Al-Ghazzali was born at Tus iu 450. He lost his 
 
EAKIY CAEZEK ; KEXUXCIATIOX 317 
 
 father when To-.T::i: and ^vas ednoaicd and brought np 
 bv a r:u5::a Sid friend. He early turned to the 
 5:adT of tiieo-o^ ;\rd >.\\i:oii law, bur. as he Liniself 
 oonre^e*. it was oiiiv bec4iU.se thev proniisei Trealth 
 and repuration. Very eaxly he broke away from 
 iaqlid, siu:ple aoeeptanoe of relic: -^us truth on author- 
 ity, and he begazi to investigate tteoic^cal .liiter- 
 enees before iie wa< twemy. His sruoaes were of 
 tile broaaest, euibraeing canon law, theology, diaievnic, 
 science, ybiioso-ohy, logic and the a^ctrires ;\i>d prac- 
 tices of the Suds. It was a S.t£ atraosphere in wHoh 
 he moved, bv.t their religiotis fervors da not se-em to 
 have laid hold of him. Pride in nis own inteUeetual 
 p_ vei-s. ambition and contempt for others of less abil- 
 ity niasteivd him The latter part of his life as a 
 sradei^t was srent at Xaysabtu- as pupil and assistant 
 of the Im:un i^-Haramavn. Thivugh the Imam he 
 SToed in the ap.^stoMc snccession of Ash^imte teach- 
 ers, being the fotirth from :\1-Ashari himself. There 
 he remained tUl the death of the Imam in 4:7^ when 
 he went out t.^ seeh his fortune and found it with the 
 great w:\zir. IS izani al-^Mulk. Br him al-Ghazzali w;is 
 appointed, in i>4. to teach in the yiiiniite Ac:. demy 
 at Bachlai. There he had the createst success as a 
 teacher and consultin? lawyer, au.l his worldly hopes 
 seemed safe. But suddenly he was struch down by a 
 mysterious ddsease. His speech became hampered; 
 his a'opetite and dicestien inled. His physicians 
 gave him up: his malady, they said, was mental and 
 could only be mentally treated. His only hope iay in 
 jvace of mind. Then he suadeuly athtted Baghdad. 
 in Jrt-f. ostensiblv on pilcrimace to ilecca. This 
 
218 THEOLOGY 
 
 flight, for it was so in effect, of al-Ghazzali was unin- 
 telligible to the theologians of the time ; since that 
 time it has marked the greatest epoch in the church 
 of Islam after the return of al-Ash'ari. 
 
 That it should be unintelligible was natural. No 
 cause could be seen on the surface, except some pos- 
 sible political complications ; the cause in reality lay 
 in al-Ghazzali's mind and conscience. He was wan- 
 dering in the labyrinth of his time. From his youth 
 he had been a sceptical, ambitious student, playing 
 with religious influences yet unaffected by them. 
 But the hollowness of his life was ever present with 
 him and pressing upon him. Like some with us, he 
 sought to be converted and could not bring it to pass. 
 His religious beliefs gradually gave way and fell from 
 him, piece by piece. 
 
 At last, the strain became too great and at the 
 court of Nizam al-Mulk he touched for two months 
 the depths of absolute scepticism. He doubted the 
 evidence of the senses ; he could see plainly that they 
 often deceived. No eye could perceive the move- 
 ment of a shadow, but still the shadow moved ; a gold 
 piece would cover any star, but a star was a world 
 larger than the earth. He doubted even the primary 
 ideas of the mind. Is ten more than three ? Can a 
 thing be and not be ? Perhaps ; he could not tell. 
 His senses deceived him, why not his mind? May 
 there not be something behind the mind and tran- 
 scending it, which would show the falsity of its con- 
 victions even as the mind showed the falsity of the in- 
 formation given by the senses ? May not the dreams 
 of the Sufis be true, and their revelations in ecstasy 
 
THE j-EiiXf.s or h:> xim:;: 219 
 
 i3ie only re r,l gT.ic!:?"? TTnen 'sve a-'Vivke i:i ieati. may 
 
 IT not be i:at.> ;-. rrr.c but differeiit esisrciij-e : All tliis 
 — ^perb;r ?. A, ,1 so be iraiideried for :^o — -iiilis. 
 He sciw oii?.".r'_v rl:;!: no i::is:nli:i could help hi'in 
 here; lie had no il; .s on xrMoli he could depend. 
 from which he eould be^:.i. Eu: ihe meivy of Gxxl 
 i5 great ; H; ^cr,l^ Hi# hih: :o whcan He w£l?, 
 a light Ti:u do^s in. and 1* glvr:i bv no rcv^oning. 
 By it al-Ghiarzali w;\i. is^vei : he rec-h"-:- d the poirer 
 r -^ thihk. aiii the ta*h wMeh lie now <; t before Mm 
 ■n-;i:f to tt>6 this power to srside hluis-; J to tr.tth. 
 
 Wlien he looke.l around, he saw that tho>e who gr^Te 
 tiieni^f .Tc? TO the >ecirch f.^r ti-tth :rij_t be l/bhle.i 
 iiiTo four grottps. There weTe the i-j-hel/.stlv? theolo- 
 gircis , who were :nr.:-h like the theoio^iaiis of rhl times 
 and i.hths- Seoni there were The T, h.:ilt;>. who 
 beli that to reach truth one i^tTst have an Itifalllble 
 liTing teacher, ani that there ^as fa:h a teacher. 
 Third, there were the ich.-^et-s of rhhsophv. bas- 
 ing on logical and raticjnai rroofs. Fe>iirTh. thei\e 
 wei>!? the Sahs. who heli that they, :he ^h:se-a of 
 LTod. oonld reach knowledge c^f Him directly in 
 ecstasy. With all these he hai of cotn^e. been 
 acqr.aiinted TO a greater or less degtee; bat now he 
 settled dawn to examine them one by one. and nnd 
 Trhieh wo add lead him to a eextainty to which he 
 eonld holi wmitever might come. He fe.t that he 
 eotild not go Iwh to Tne rmconselons faith of his 
 childhood : ikai nothing canld rest are. Ah his mental 
 bein.; mnst be made over before he conld find rest. 
 He began with Scholastic theology, bnt fotmd no 
 heho there. Gr^int ihe theoIoch.vns then: oremlses 
 
220 THEOLOGY 
 
 and they could argue ; deny them and there was no 
 common ground on which to meet. Their science 
 had been founded by al-Ash'ari to meet the Mu'ta- 
 zilites ; it had done that victoriously, but could do 
 no more. They could hold the faith against here- 
 tics, expose their inconsistencies ; against the sceptic 
 they availed nothing. It is true that they had at- 
 tempted to go further back and meet the students 
 of philosophy on their own ground ; to deal with 
 substances and attributes and first principles gen- 
 erally; but their efforts had been fruitless. They 
 lacked the necessary knowledge of the subject, had 
 no scientific basis, and were constrained eventually 
 to fall back on authority. After study of them and 
 their methods it became clear to al-Ghazzali that 
 the remedy for his ailment was not in scholastic 
 theology. 
 
 Then he turned to philosophy. He had seen al- 
 ready that the weakness of the theologians lay in 
 their not having made a sufficient study of primary 
 ideas and the laws of thought. Three years he gave 
 up to this. He was at Baghdad at the time, teach- 
 ing law and writing legal treatises, and probably 
 the three years extended from the beginning of 484 
 to the beginning of 487. Two years he gave, without 
 a teacher, to the study of the writings of the different 
 schools of philosophy, and almost another to medi- 
 tating and working over his results. He felt that 
 he was the first Muslim doctor to do this with the 
 requisite thoroughness. And it is noteworthy that at 
 this stage he seems to have again felt himself to be a 
 Muslim, and in an enemy's country when he was 
 
MATERIALISTS ; DEISTS ; THEISTS 221 
 
 studying philosophy. He speaks of the necessity of 
 understanding what is to be refuted ; but this may 
 be only a confusion between his attitude when writing 
 after 500, and his attitude when investigating and 
 seeking truth, fifteen years earlier. He divides the 
 followers of philosophy in his time into three : Mate- 
 rialists, Deists {Tabi'is, i.e. Naturalists), and Theists. 
 The materialists reject a creator ; the world exists 
 from all eternity ; the animal comes from the egg 
 and the egg from the animal. The wonder of cre- 
 ation compels the deists to admit a creator, but the 
 creature is a machine, has a certain poise (i'tidal) in 
 itself which keeps it running ; its thought is a part 
 of its nature and ends with death. They thus re- 
 ject a future life, though admitting God and His 
 attributes. 
 
 He deals at much greater length with the teach- 
 ings of those whom he calls theists, but through 
 all his statements of their views his tone is not 
 that of a seeker but that of a partisan; he turns 
 his own experiences into a warning to others, and 
 makes of their record a little guide to apologetics. 
 Aristotle he regards as the final master of the Greek 
 school ; his doctrines are best represented for Arabic 
 readers in the books of Ibn Sina and al-Farabi ; the 
 works of their predecessors on this subject are a mass 
 of confusion. Part of these doctrines must be 
 stamped as unbelief, part as heresy, and part as 
 theologically indifferent. He then divides the philo- 
 sophical sciences into six, mathematics, logic, phys- 
 ics, metaphysics, political economy, ethics ; and dis- 
 cusses these in detail, showing what must be rejected, 
 
222 THEOLOGY 
 
 what is indiiferent, what dangers arise from each to 
 him wlio studies or to him who rejects without study. 
 Throughout, he is very cautious to mark nothing as 
 unbelief that is not really so ; to admit always those 
 truths of mathematics, logic, and physics that cannot 
 intellectually be rejected ; and only to warn against 
 an attitude of intellectualism and a belief that math- 
 ematicians, with their success in their own depart- 
 ment, are to be followed in other departments, or 
 that all subjects are susceptible of the exactness and 
 certainty of a syllogism in logic. The damnable 
 errors of the theists are almost entirely in their 
 metaphysical views. Three of their propositions 
 mark them as unbelievers. First, they reject the 
 resurrection of the body and physical punishment 
 hereafter ; the punishments of the next world will 
 be spiritual only. That there will be spiritual pun- 
 ishments, al-Ghazzali admits, but there will be phys- 
 ical as well. Second, they hold that God knows 
 universals only, not particulars. Third, they hold 
 that the world exists from all eternity and to all 
 eternity. When they reject the attributes of God 
 and hold that He knows by His essence and not 
 by something added to His essence, they are only 
 heretics and not unbelievers. In physics he accepts 
 the constitution of the world as developed and ex- 
 plained by them ; only all is to be regarded as en- 
 tirely submitted to God, incapable of self-move- 
 ment, a tool of which the Creator makes use. 
 Finally, he considers that their system of ethics is 
 derived from the Sufis. At all times there have 
 been such saints, retired from the world — God has 
 
FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHY 223 
 
 never left himself without a witness ; and from their 
 ecstasies and revelations our knowledge of the hu- 
 man heart, for good and for evil, is derived. 
 
 Thus in philosophy he found httle hght. It did 
 not correspond entirely to his needs, for reason can- 
 not answer all questions nor unveil all the enigmas 
 of life. He would probably have admitted that he 
 had learned much in his philosophical studies — so at 
 least we may gather from his tone ; he never speaks 
 disrespectfully of philosophy and science in their 
 sphere ; his continual exhortation is that he who 
 would understand them and refute them must first 
 study them ; that to do otherwise, to abuse what we 
 do not know, brings only contempt on ourselves and 
 on the cause which we champion. But with his 
 temperament he could not found his religion on intel- 
 lect. As a lawyer he could split hairs and define 
 issues ; but once the religious instinct was aroused, 
 nothing could satisfy him but what he eventually 
 found. And so, two possibilities and two only were 
 before him, though one was hai\lly a real possibility, 
 if we consider his training and mental powers. He 
 might fall back on authority. It could not be the 
 authority of his childish faith, " Om- fathers have told 
 us," he himself confesses, could never again have 
 weight with him. But it might be some claimer of 
 authority in a new form, some infallible teacher with 
 a doctrine which he could accept for the authority 
 behind it. As the Church of Home from time to 
 time gathers into its fold men of keen intellect who 
 seek rest in submission, and the world marvels, so it 
 might have been with him. Or again, he might turn 
 
224 TJIKOLOGY 
 
 directly to God and to personal intercourse with 
 Him ; he might seek to know Him and to be taught 
 of Him without any intermediary, in a word to enter 
 on the path of the mystic. 
 
 He came next to examine the doctrine of the Ta'- 
 limites. They, a somewhat outlying wing of the 
 Fatimid propaganda, had come at this time into 
 alarming prominence. In 483 Hasan ibn as-Sabbah 
 had seized Alamut and entered on open rebellion. 
 The sect of the Assassins was applying its principles. 
 But the poison of their teaching was also spreading 
 among the people. The principle of authority in re- 
 ligion, that only by an infallible teacher could truth 
 be reached and that such an infallible teacher existed 
 if he could only be found, was in the air. For him- 
 self, al-Ghazzali found the Ta'limites and their teach- 
 ing eminently unsatisfactory : They had a lesson 
 which they went over parrot-fashion, but beyond it 
 they were in dense ignorance. The trained theolo- 
 gian and scholar had no patience with their slack- 
 ness and shallowness of thought. He labored long, 
 as ash-Shahrastani later confesses that he, too, did, to 
 penetrate their mystery and learn something from 
 them ; but beyond the accustomed formulas there 
 was nothing to be found. He even admitted their 
 contention of the necessity of a living, infallil)le 
 teacher, to see what would follow — but nothing fol- 
 lowed. " You admit the necessity of an Imam," they 
 would say. " It is your business now to seek him ; 
 we have nothing to do with it." But though neither 
 al-Ghazzali nor ash-Shahrastani, who died 43 (lunar) 
 years after him, could be satisfied with the Ta'lim- 
 
STUDY OF SDFIISM 225 
 
 ites, many others were. The conflict was hot, and al- 
 Ghazzali himself wrote several books against them. 
 
 The other possibility, the path of the mystic, 
 now lay straight before him. In the Munqidh he 
 tells us how, when he had made an end of the Ta'- 
 limites, he began to study the books of the Sufis, 
 without any suggestion that he had had a previous 
 acquaintance with them and their practices. But 
 probably this means nothing more than it does when 
 he speaks in a similar way of studying the scholastic 
 theologians ; namely, that he now took up the study 
 in earnest and with a new and definite purpose. He 
 therefore read carefully the works of al-Harith al- 
 Muhasibi, the fragments of al-Junayd, ash-Shibli, 
 and Abu Tazid al-Bistami. He had also the benefit 
 of oral teaching ; but it became plain to him that 
 only through ecstasy and the complete transforma- 
 tion of the moral being could he really understand 
 Sufiism. He saw that it consisted in feelings more 
 than in knowledge, that he must be initiated as a 
 Sufi himself ; live their life and practise their exer- 
 cises, to attain his goal. 
 
 On the way upon which he had gone up to this 
 time, he had gained three fixed points of faith. 
 He now believed firmly in God, in prophecy, and 
 in the last judgment. He had also gained the be- 
 lief that only by detaching himself from this world, 
 its life, enjoyments, honors, and turning to God 
 could he be saved in the world to come. He looked 
 on his present life, his writing and his teaching, 
 and saw of how little value it was in the face of the 
 great fact of heaven and hell. All he did now was for 
 
226 THEOLOGY 
 
 the sake of vainglory and had in it no consecration to 
 the service of God. He felt on the edge of an abyss. 
 The world held him back ; his fears urged him away. 
 He was in the throes of a conversion wrought by ter- 
 ror ; his religion, now and always, in common with 
 all Islam, was other-worldly. So he remained in 
 conflict with himself for six months from the middle 
 of 488. Finally, his health broke down under the 
 strain. In his feebleness and overthrow he took refuge 
 with God, as a man at the end of his resources. God 
 heard him and enabled him to make the needed sac- 
 rifices. He abandoned all and wandered forth from 
 Baghdad as a Sufi. He had put his brilHant pres- 
 ent and brilliant future absolutely behind him ; had 
 given up everything for the peace of his soul. This 
 date, the end of 488, was the great era in his life ; 
 but it marked an era, too, in the history of Islam. 
 Since al-Ash'ari went back to the faith of his fathers 
 in 300, and cursed the Mu'tazilites and all their 
 works, there had been no such epoch as this flight of 
 al-Ghazzali. It meant that the reign of mere scho- 
 lasticism was over ; that another element was to 
 work openly in the future Church of Islam, the ele- 
 ment of the mystical life in God, of the attainment of 
 truth by the soul in direct vision. 
 
 He went to Syria and gave himself up for two yearr 
 to the religious exercises of the Sufis. Then he went 
 on pilgrimage, first to Jerusalem ; then to the tomb of 
 Abraham at Hebron ; finally to Mecca and al-Madina. 
 "With this religious duty his life of strict retirement 
 ended. It is evident that he now felt that he was again 
 within the fold of Islam. In spite of his former reso- 
 
ON THE PATH OF THE SUFIS 227 
 
 lution to retire from the world, he was drawn back. 
 The prayers of his children and his own aspirations 
 broke in upon him, and though he resolved again 
 and again to return to the contemplative life, and 
 did often actually do so, yet events, family affairs, 
 and the anxieties of life, kept continually disturbing 
 him. 
 
 This went on, he tells us, for almost ten years, and 
 in that time there were revealed to him things that 
 could not be reckoned and the discussion of which 
 could not be exhausted. He learned that the Sufis 
 were on the true and only path to the knowledge 
 of God ; that neither iatelligence nor wisdom nor 
 science could change or improve their doctriae or 
 their ethics. The light in which they walk is es- 
 sentially the same as the light of prophecy ; Muham- 
 mad was a Sufi when on his way to be a prophet. 
 There is none other light to light any man in this 
 world. A complete purifying of the heart from all 
 but God is their Path ; a seeking to plunge the 
 heart completely in the thought of God, is its be- 
 ginning, and its end is complete passing away in 
 God. This last is only its end in relation to what 
 can be entered upon and grasped by a voluntary ef- 
 fort ; in truth, it is only the first step in the Path, 
 the vestibule to the contemplative life. Revelations 
 {mukashafas, unveilings) came to the disciples from 
 the very beginning ; while awake they see angels 
 and souls of prophets, hear their voices and gain 
 from them guidance. Then their State {hal, a Sufi 
 technicality for a state of ecstasy) passes from the 
 beholding of forms to stages where language fails and 
 
228 THEOLOGY 
 
 any attempt to express wliat is experienced must 
 involve some error. They reach a nearjiosw to God 
 which some have fancied to be a hulul, fusion of being, 
 others an ittihad, identification, and others a iminul, 
 union; but these aiu all erroneous ways of iudicat- 
 ing the thing. Al-Ghazzali notes one of his books in 
 which he has explained wherein the error lies. But 
 the thing itself is the true basis of all faith and the 
 beginning of prophecy ; the harwnuU of the saints 
 lead to the miracles of the prophets. By this means 
 the possibility and the existence of prophecy can be 
 proved, and then the life itself of Muhammad proves 
 that he was a prophet. Al-Ghazzali goes on to deal 
 with the nature of prophecy, and how the life of Mu- 
 hammad shows the truth of his mission ; but enough 
 has been given to indicate his attitude and the stage 
 at which he had himself arrived. 
 
 During this ten years ho had returned to his native 
 country and to his children, but had not undertaken 
 public duty as a teacher. Now that was forced upon 
 him. The century was drawing to a close. Every- 
 where there was evident a slackening of religious 
 fervor and faith. A mere external compliance with the 
 rules of Islam was observed, men even openly defended 
 such a course. He adduces as an example of this 
 the Wasiya of Ibn Siua. The students of philosophy 
 went their way, and their conduct shook the minds of 
 the people ; false Sufis abounded, who taught anti- 
 nomianism ; the lives of many theologians excited 
 scandal ; the Ta'limites were still spreading. A re- 
 ligious leader to turn the current was absolutely 
 needed, and his friends looked to al-Ghazzali to take 
 
THE TAHAFUT 229 
 
 up that duty ; some distinguislied saints had dreams 
 of his success ; God had promised a reformer every 
 hundred years and the time was up. Finally, the 
 Sultan laid a command upon him to go and teach in 
 the academy at Naysabur, and he was forced to con- 
 sent. His departure for Naysabur fell at the end of 
 499, exactly eleven years after his flight from Bagh- 
 dad. But he did not teach there long. Before the 
 end of his life we find him back at Tus, his native place, 
 living in retirement among his disciples, in a Ma- 
 drasa or academy for students and a Khanqah or 
 monastery for Sufis. 
 
 There he settled down to study and contemplation. 
 We have already seen what theological position he had 
 reached. Philosophy had been tried and found want- 
 ing. In a book of his called Taliafut, or "Destruction," 
 he had smitten the philosophers hip and thigh ; he 
 had turned, as in earlier times al-Ash'ari, their own 
 weapons against them, and had shown that with 
 their premises and methods no certainty could be 
 reached. In that book he goes to the extreme of in- 
 tellectual scepticism, and, seven hundred years be- 
 fore Hume, he cuts the bond of causality with the 
 edge of his dialectic and proclaims that we can know 
 nothing of cause or effect, but simply that one thing 
 follows another. He combats their proof of the 
 eternity of the world, and exposes their assertion that 
 God is its creator. He demonstrates that they can- 
 not prove the existence of the creator or that that 
 creator is one ; that they cannot prove that He is 
 incorporeal, or that the world has any creator or 
 cause at all; that they cannot prove the nature of 
 
230 THEOLOGY 
 
 God or that the human soul is a spiritual essence. 
 When he has finished there is no intellectual basis 
 left for life ; he stands beside the Greek sceptics and 
 beside Hume. We are thrown back on revelation, 
 that given immediately by God to the individual 
 soul or that given through prophets. All our real 
 knowledge is derived from these sources. So it was 
 natural that in the latter part of his life he should 
 turn to the traditions of the Prophet. The science of 
 tradition must certainly have formed part of his early 
 studies, as of those of all Muslim theologians, but he 
 had not specialized in it ; his bent had lain in quite 
 other directions. His master, the Imam al-Hara- 
 mayn, had, been no student of tradition ; among his 
 many works is not one dealing with that subject. 
 Now he saw that the truth and the knowledge of the 
 truth lay there, and he gave himself, with all the 
 energy of his nature, to the new pursuit. 
 
 The end of his wanderings came at Tus, in 505. 
 There he died while seeking truth in the traditions of 
 Muhammad, as al-Ash'ari, his predecessor, had done. 
 The stamp of his personality is ineffaceably impressed 
 on Islam. The people of his time reverenced him 
 as a saint and wonder-worker. He himself never 
 claimed to work karamat and always spoke modestly 
 of the light which he had reached in ecstasy. After 
 his death legends early began to gather round him, 
 and the current biographies of him are untrustworthy 
 to a degree. It says much for the solidity of his 
 work that he did not pass into a misty figure of pop- 
 ular superstition. But that work remained and re- 
 mains among his disciples and in his books. We 
 
VOLITION AS A BASIS 231 
 
 must now attempt to estimate its bearing and 
 scope. 
 
 For him, as for the mutakallims in general, the 
 fundamental thing in the world and the starting-point 
 of all speculation is will. The philosophers in their 
 intellectualism might picture God as thought — 
 thought thinking itself and evolving all things 
 thereby. Their source was Plotinus ; that of the 
 Muslims was the terrific " Be ! " of creation. But 
 how can we know this will of God if we are simply 
 part of what it has produced ? In answering this, 
 al-Ghazzali and his followers have diverged from the 
 rest of Islam, but not into heresy. Their view is 
 admitted to be a possible interpretation of Qur'anic 
 passages, if not that commonly held. The soul of 
 man, al-Ghazzali taught, is essentially different from 
 the rest of the created things. We read in the Qur'an 
 (xv, 29 ; xxxviii, 72) that God breathed into man of 
 His spirit {ruh). This is compared with the rays of 
 the sun reaching a thing on the earth and warming it. 
 In virtue of this, the soul of man is different from 
 everything else in the world. It is a spiritual sub- 
 stance (j'awhar ruhani), has no corporeality, and is 
 not subject to dimension, position or locality. It is 
 not in the body or outside of the body; to apply 
 such categories to it is as absurd as to speak of the 
 knowledge or ignorance of a stone. Though created, 
 it is not shaped ; it belongs to the spiritual world 
 and not to this world of sensible things. It contains 
 some spark of the divine and it is restless till it rests 
 again in that primal fire ; but, again, it is recorded in 
 tradition that the Prophet said, " God Most High 
 
232 THEOLOGY 
 
 created Adam in His own form (sura)." Al-Ghazzali 
 takes that to mean that there is a likeness between 
 the spirit of man and God in essence, quality, and 
 actions. Further, the spirit of man rules the body 
 as God rules the world. Man's body is a microcosm 
 beside the macrocosm of this world, and they cor- 
 respond, part by part. Is, then, God simply the 
 anima mundi ? No, because He is the creator of all 
 by His will, the sustainer and destroyer by His will. 
 Al-Ghazzali comes to this by a study of himself. His 
 primary conception is, volo ergo sum. It is not 
 thought which impresses him, but volition. From 
 thought he can develop nothing ; from will can come 
 the whole round universe. But if God, the Creator, 
 is a "Wilier, so, too, is the soul of man. They are kin, 
 and, therefore, man can know and recognize God. 
 " He who knows his own soul, knows his Lord," said 
 another tradition. 
 
 This view of the nature of the soul is essential to 
 the Sufi position and is probably borrowed from it. 
 But there are in it two possibilities of heresy, if the 
 view be pushed any further. It tends (1) to destroy 
 the important Muslim dogma of God's Difference 
 (muJchalafa) from all created things, and (2) to main- 
 tain that the souls of men are partakers of the divine 
 nature and will return to it at death. Al-Ghazzali 
 labored to safeguard both dangers, but they were 
 there and showed themselves in time. Just as the 
 Aristotelian -hneo-Platonic philosophers reached the 
 position that the universe with all its spheres was 
 God, so, later, Sufis came to the other pantheistic 
 position that God was the world. Before the atomic 
 
DIVINE ORIGIN OF SCIENCES 233 
 
 scholastics the same danger also lay. It is part of 
 the irony of the history of Muslim theology that the 
 very emphasis on the transcendental unity should 
 lead thus to pantheism. Al-Ghazzali's endeavor was 
 to strike the via media. The Hegelian Trinity might 
 have appealed to him. 
 
 To return, his views on science, as we have already 
 seen, were the same as those of the contemporary 
 students of natural philosophy. Their teachings he 
 accepted, and, so far, he can be compared to a theo- 
 logian of the present day, who accepts evolution and 
 explains it to suit himself. His world was framed oil 
 what is commonly called the Ptolemaic system. He 
 was no flat-earth man like the present Ulama of 
 Islam ; God had " spread out the earth like a carpet," 
 but that did not hinder him from regarding it as a 
 globe. Around it revolve the spheres of the seven 
 planets and that of the fixed stars; Alphonso the 
 Wise had not yet added the crystalline sphere and 
 the primum mobile. All that astronomers and mathe- 
 maticians teach us of the laws under which these 
 bodies move is to be accepted. Their theory of 
 eclipses and of other phenomena of the heavens is 
 true, whatever the ignorant and superstitious may 
 clamor. Yet it is to be remembered that the most 
 important facts and laws have been divinely revealed. 
 As the weightiest truths of medicine are to be traced 
 back to the teaching of the prophets, so there are con- 
 junctions in the heavens which occur only once in a 
 thousand years and which man can yet calculate be- 
 cause God has taught him their laws. And all this 
 structure of the heavens and the earth is the direct 
 
234 THEOLOGY 
 
 work of God, produced out of nothing by His will, 
 guided by His will, ever dependent for existence on 
 His will, and one day to pass away at His command. 
 So al-Ghazzali joins science and revelation. Behind 
 the order of nature lies the personal, omnipotent God 
 who says, "Be! " and it is. The things of existence 
 do not proceed from Him by any emanation or evolu- 
 tion, but are produced directly by Him. 
 
 Further, there is another side of al-Ghazzali's atti- 
 tude toward the physical universe that deserves atten- 
 tion, but which is very difficult to grasp or express. 
 Perhaps it may be stated thus : Existence has three 
 modes ; there is existence in the alam al-mulk, in the 
 alai m al-jahar ut, and in the alam al-malahut. The first 
 is this world of ours which is apparent to the senses ; 
 it exists by the power (qtidra) of God, one part pro- 
 ceeding from another in constant change. The alam 
 al-malakut exists by God's eternal decree, without 
 development, remaining in one state without addition 
 or diminution. The alam al-jaharut comes between 
 these two ; it seems externally to belong to the first, 
 but in respect of the power of God which is from all 
 eternity {al-qudra al-azaliya) it is included in the 
 second. The soul (nafs) belongs to the alam al- 
 malahut, is taken from it and returns to it. In sleep 
 and in ecstasy, even in this world, it can come into 
 contact with the world from which it is derived. This 
 is what happens in dreams — " sleep is the brother of 
 death," says al-Ghazzali ; and thus, too, the saints 
 and the prophets attain divine knowledge. Some 
 angels belong to the world of malahut ; some to that 
 of jabarut, apparently those who have shown them- 
 
THE THREE WOKLDS 235 
 
 selves here as messengers of God. The things in the 
 heavens, the preserved tablet, the pen, the balance, 
 etc., belong to the world of malakut. On the one 
 hand, these are not sensible, corporeal things, and, 
 on the other, these terms for them are not metaphors. 
 Thus al-Ghazzali avoids the difficulty of Muslim 
 eschatology with its bizarre concreteness. He rejects 
 the right to allegorize — these things are real, actual ; 
 but he relegates them to this world of malaJcut. 
 Again, the Qur'an, Islam, and Friday (the day of pub- 
 lic worship) are personalities in the world of malakut 
 SLJidjabarut. So, too, the world of mulk must appear 
 as a personality at the bar of these other worlds at 
 the last day. It wiU come as an ugly old woman, but 
 Friday as a beautiful young bride. This personal 
 Qur'an belongs to the world oijabarut, but Islam to 
 that of malakut. 
 
 But just as those three worlds are not thought of 
 as separate in time, so they are not separate in space. 
 They are not like the seven heavens and seven earths 
 of Muslim literaUsts, which stand, story-fashion, one 
 above the other. Kather they are, as expressed above, 
 modes of existence, and might be compared to the 
 speculations on another life in space of m dimensions, 
 framed, from a very different starting-point and on a 
 basis of piire physics, by Balfour Stewart and Tait 
 in their " Unseen Universe." On another side they 
 stand in close kinship to the Platonic world of ideas, 
 whether through neo-Platonism or more immediately. 
 Sufiism at its best, and when stripped of the trap- 
 pings of Muslim tradition and Qur'anic exegesis, has 
 no reason to shrink from the investigation either of 
 
236 THEOLO&T 
 
 the physicist or of the metaphysician. And so it is 
 not strange to find that all Muslim thinkers have been 
 tinged with mysticism to a greater or less degree, 
 though they may not all have embraced formal 
 Sufiism and accepted its vocabulary and system. 
 This is true of al-Farabi, who was avowedly a Sufi ; 
 true also of Ibn Sina, who, though nominally an 
 AristoteKan, was essentially a neo-Platonist, and ad- 
 mitted the possibility of intercourse with superior 
 beings and with the Active Intellect, of miracles and 
 revelations ; true even of Ibn Rushd, who does not 
 venture to deny the immediate knowledge of the Sufi 
 saints, but only argues that experience of it is not 
 sufficiently general to be made a basis for theological 
 science. 
 
 In ethics, as we have already seen, the position of 
 al-Ghazzali is a simple one. All our laws and theories 
 upon the subject, the analysis of the qualities of the 
 mind, good and bad, the tracing of hidden defects to 
 their causes — all these things we owe to the saints of 
 God to whom God Himself has revealed them. Of 
 these there have been many at all times and in all 
 countries, and without them and their labors and the 
 light which God has vouchsafed to them, we could 
 never know ourselves. Here, as everywhere, comes 
 out al-Ghazzali's fundamental position that the ulti- 
 mate source of all knowledge is revelation from God. 
 It may be major revelation, through accredited proph- 
 ets %vho come forward as teachers, divinely sent 
 and supported by miracles and by the evident truth 
 of their message appealing to the human heart, or it 
 may be minor revelation — subsidiary and explanatory 
 
AGNOSTIC ATTITUDE 237 
 
 — through the vast body of saints of different grades, 
 to whom God has granted immediate knowledge of 
 Himself. Where the saints leave off, the prophets 
 begin ; and, apart from such teaching, man, even 
 in physical science, would be groping in the 
 dark. 
 
 This position becomes still more prominent in his 
 philosophical system. His agnostic attitude toward 
 the results of pure thought has been already sketched. 
 It is essentially the same as that taken xip by Mansell 
 in his Bampton lectures on " The Limits of Religious 
 Thought." Mansell, a pupil and continuator of Ham- 
 ilton, developed and emphasized Hamilton's doctrine 
 of the relativity of knowledge, and applied it to the- 
 ology, maintaining that we cannot know or think of 
 the absolute and infinite, but only of the relative and 
 finite. Hence, he went on to argue, we can have no 
 positive knowledge of the attributes of God. This, 
 though disguised by the methods and language of 
 scholastic philosophy, is al-Ghazzali's attitude in the 
 Tahafuf. Mansell's opponents said that he was hke 
 a man sitting on the branch of a tree and sawing off 
 his seat. Al-Ghazzali, for the support of his seat, 
 went back to revelation, either major, in the books 
 sent down to the prophets, or minor, in the personal 
 revelations of God's saints. Further, it was not only 
 in the Muslim schools that this attitude toward phi- 
 losophy prevailed. Yehuda Halevi (d. a.d. 1145 ; al- 
 Ghazzali, d. 1111) also maintains in his Kusari the 
 insufficiency of philosophy in the highest questions 
 of life, and bases religious truth on the incontrovert- 
 ible historical facts of revelation. And Maimonides 
 
238 THEOLOGY 
 
 (d. A.D. 1204) in his Moreh NehucMm takes essentially 
 the same position. 
 
 Of his "views on dogmatic theology little need be 
 said. Among modern theologians he stands nearest 
 to Ritschl. Like Ritschl, he rejects metaphysics and 
 opposes the influence of any philosophical system on 
 his theology. The basis must be religious phenom- 
 ena, simply accepted and correlated. Like Ritschl, 
 too, he was emphatically ethical in his attitude ; he 
 lays stress on the value for us of a doctrine or a piece 
 of knowledge. Our source of religious knowledge is 
 revelation, and beyond a certain point we must not 
 inquire as to the how and why of that knowledge. 
 To do so would be to enter metaphysics and the 
 danger-zone where we lose touch with vital realities 
 and begin to use mere words. On one point he goes 
 beyond Eitschl, and, on another, Eitschl goes beyond 
 him. In his devotion to the facts of the religious 
 consciousness Ritschl did not go so far as to become 
 a mystic, indeed rejected mysticism with a conscious 
 indignation ; al-Ghazzali did become a mystic. But, 
 on the other hand, Eitschl refused absolutely to enter 
 upon the nature of God or upon the divine attributes 
 — all that was mere metaphysics and heathenism ; 
 al-Ghazzali did not so far emancipate himself, and i 
 his only advance was to keep the doctrine on a strictly 
 Qur'anic basis. So it stands written ; not, so man is 
 compelled by the nature of things to think. 
 
 His work and influence in Islam may be summed 
 up briefly as follows : First, he led men back from 
 scholastic labors upon theological dogmas to living 
 contact with, study and exegesis of, the Word and the 
 
WOEK AND INFLUENCE 239 
 
 traditions. What happened in Europe when the 
 yoke of mediaeval scholasticism was broken, what is 
 happening with us now, happened in Islam under his 
 leadership. He could be a scholastic with scholastics, 
 but to state and develop theological doctrine on a 
 Scriptural basis was emphatically his method. We 
 should now call him a Biblical theologian. 
 
 Second, in his teaching and moral exhortations he 
 reintroduced the element of fear. In the Munqidh 
 and elsewhere he lays stress on the need of such a 
 striking of terror into the minds of the people. His 
 was no time, he held, for smooth, hopeful preaching ; 
 no time for optimism either as to this world or the 
 next. The horrors of hell must be kept before men ; 
 he had felt them himself. We have seen how other- 
 worldly was his own attitude, and how the fear of 
 the Fire had been the supreme motive in his conver- 
 sion ; and so he treated others. 
 
 Third, it was by his influence that Sufiism at- 
 tained a firm and assured position in the Church of 
 Islam. 
 
 Fourth, he brought philosophy and philosophical 
 theology within the range of the ordinary mind. 
 Before his time they had been surrounded, more or 
 less, with mystery. The language used was strange ; 
 its vocabulary and terms of art had to be specially 
 learned. No mere reader of the Arabic of the street 
 or the mosque or the school could understand at 
 once a philosophical tractate. Greek ideas and ex- 
 pressions, passing through a Syriac version into 
 Arabic, had strained to the uttermost the resources of 
 even that most flexible tongue. A long training had 
 
240 THEOLOGY 
 
 been thought necessary before the elaborate and 
 formal method of argumentation could bo followed. 
 All this al-Ghazzali changed, or at least tried to 
 change. His Tain if nl is not addressed to scholars 
 only ; he seeks with it a wider circle of readers, and 
 contends that the views, the arguments, and the falla- 
 cies of the philosophers should be perfectly intelli- 
 gible to the general public. 
 
 Of these four phases of al-Ghazzali's work, the 
 first and the third are undoubtedly the most impor- 
 tant. He made his mark by leading Islam back to 
 its fundamental and historical facts, and by giving a 
 place in its system to the emotional religious life. 
 But it will have been noticed that in none of the four 
 phases was he a pioneer. He was not a scholar who 
 struck out a new path, but a man of intense personal- 
 ity who entered on a path already blazed and made 
 it the common highway. We have here his charac- 
 ter. Other men may have been k<;cij(!r logicians, 
 more learned theologians, more gifted saints ; but he, 
 through his perwonal experiences, had attained so 
 overpowering a sense of the divine realities that the 
 force of his character — once combative and restless, 
 now narrowed and intense — swept all before it, and 
 the Church of Islam entered on a new era of its ex- 
 istence. 
 
 So much space it has been necessary to give to 
 this great man. Islam has never outgrown him, has 
 never fully understood him. In the renaissance of 
 Islam which is now rising to view his time will come 
 and the new life will proceed from a renewed study 
 of his works. 
 
LATER ASH'ARITES 341 
 
 From tliis time on, tlie Ash'arites may be fairly- 
 regarded as the dominant school so far as the East 
 is concerned. Saladin (d. 589) did much to aid in 
 the establishment of this hegemony. He was a de- 
 Tout MusHm with the taste of an amateur for theolog- 
 ical literature. Anecdotes tell how he had a special 
 little catechism composed, and used himself to in- 
 struct his children in it. He founded theological 
 academies in Egypt at Alexandria and Cairo, the 
 first there except the Fatimid Hall of Science. 
 One of the few blots on his name is the execution 
 of the pantheistic Sufi, Shihab ad-Din as-Suhrawardi, 
 at Aleppo in 587. Meanwhile, in the farther East, 
 Fakhr ad-Din ar-Razi (d. 606) was writing his great 
 commentary on the Qur'an, the Mafatih al-Gliayh, 
 " The Keys of the Unseen," and carrying on the work 
 of al-Ghazzali. The title of his commentary itself 
 shows the dash of mysticism in his teaching, and he 
 was in correspondence with Ibn Arabi, the arch-Sufi 
 of the time. He studied philosophy, too, commented 
 on works of Ibn Sina, and fought the philosophers 
 on their own ground as al-GhazzaH had done. Kalam 
 and philosophy are now, in the eyes of the theolo- 
 gians, a true philosophy and a false. Philosophy 
 has taken the place of Mu'tazilism and the other 
 heresies. The enemies of the faith are outside its 
 pale, and the scholasticizing of philosophy goes on 
 steadily. According to some, a new stage was marked 
 by al-Baydawi (d. 685), who confused inextricably 
 philosophy and kalam, but the newness can have 
 been comparative only. A century later al-Iji (d. 756) 
 writes a book, al-Mawaqif, on kalam, half of which is 
 
242 THEOLOGY 
 
 given to metaphysics and the other half to dogmatics. 
 At-Taftazani is another name worthy of mention. 
 He died in 791, after a laborious life as a controver- 
 sialist and commentator. When we reach Ibn Khal- 
 dmi (d. 808), the first philosophical historian and the 
 greatest until the nineteenth century of our era, we 
 find that kalam has fallen again from its high estate. 
 It has become a scholastic discipline, useful only to 
 repel the attacks of heretics and unbelievers ; and of 
 heretics, says Ibn Khaldim, there are now none left. 
 Reason, he goes on, cannot grasp the nature of God ; 
 cannot weigh His unity nor measure His qualities. 
 God is unknowable and we must accept what we are 
 told about Him by His prophets. Such was the re- 
 sult of the destruction of philosophy in Islam. 
 
CHAPTEE V 
 
 Islam in the West ; Ibn Tumart and the Muwahhids ; philosophy 
 in the West under Muwahhid protection; IbnBajja; Ibn Tu- 
 f ayl ; Ibn Rushd ; Ibn Arabi ; Ibn Sab'in. 
 
 We have now anticipated one of the strangest and 
 most characteristic figures and movements in the 
 history of Islam. The preceding account, except as 
 relates to Ibn Khaldun, has told of the triumphs of 
 the Ash'arites in the East only. In the West the 
 movement was slower, and to it we must now turn. 
 The Maghrib — the Occident, as the Arabs called all 
 North Africa beyond Egypt — had been slow from the 
 first to take on the Muslim impress. The invading 
 army had fought its way painfully through, but the 
 Berber tribes remained only half subdued and one- 
 tenth Islamized. Egypt was conquered in a.h. 20, 
 and Samarqand had been reached in 56 ; but it was 
 not till 74 that the Muslims were at Carthage. And 
 even then and for long after there arose insurrection 
 after insurrection, and the national spirit of the Ber- 
 bers remained unbroken. Broadly, but correctly, 
 Islam in North Africa for more than three centuries 
 was a failure. The tribal constitutions of the Berbers 
 were unaffected by the conception of the Khalifate 
 and their primitive religious aspirations by the Faith 
 of Muhammad. Not till the possibility came to them 
 to construct Muslim states out of their own tribes 
 
 243 
 
244 THEOLOGY 
 
 did their opposition begin to weaken. And then it 
 was rather political Islam that had weakened. When 
 the Fatimids conquered Egypt in 356 and moved the 
 seat of their empire from al-Mahdiya to the newly 
 founded Cairo, Islam assumed a new meaning for 
 North Africa. The Fatimid empire there quickly 
 melted away, and in its place arose several inde- 
 pendent states, Berber in blood though claiming 
 Arab descent and bearing Arab names. Islam no 
 longer meant foreign oppression, and it began at last 
 to make its way. Again, in the preceding period of 
 insurrection the Berber leaders had frequently ap- 
 peared in the guise and with the claim of prophets, 
 men miraculously gifted and with a message from 
 God. These wild tribesmen, with all their fanati- 
 cism for their own tribal liberties, have always been 
 peculiarly accessible to the genius which claims its 
 mission from heaven. So they had taken up the 
 Fatimid cause and worshipped Ubayd Allah the 
 Mahdi. And so they continued thereafter, and still 
 continue to be swayed by saints, darwishes, and 
 prophets of all degrees of insanity and cunning. 
 The latest case in point is that of the Shaykh as- 
 Sanusi, with whom we have already dealt. As time 
 went on, there came a change in these prophet-led 
 risings and saint-foiinded states. They gradually 
 slipped over from being frankly anti-Muhammadan, 
 if also close imitations of Muhammad's life and 
 methods, to being equally frankly Muslim. The the- 
 ology of Islam easily afforded them the necessary 
 point of connection. All that the prophet of the day 
 need do was to claim the position of the Mahdi, that 
 
IBN TUMART 245 
 
 Guided One, who according to the traditions of Mu- 
 hammad was to come before the last day, when the 
 earth shall be filled with violence, and to fill it again 
 with righteousness. It was easy for each new Mahdi 
 to select from the vast and contradictory mass of tra- 
 ditions in Muslim eschatology those which best fitted 
 his person and his time. To the story and the doc- 
 trine of one of these we now come. 
 
 At the beginning of the sixth century a certain 
 Berber student of theology, Ibn Tumart by name, 
 travelled in the Bast in search of knowledge. An 
 early and persistent western tradition asserts that he 
 was a favorite pupil of al-Ghazzali's, and was marked 
 out by him as showing the signs of a future founder 
 of empire. This may be taken for what it is worth. 
 What is certain is that Ibn Tumart went back to the 
 Maghrib and there brought about the triumph of a 
 doctrine which was derived, if modified, from that of 
 the Ash'arites. Previously aU kalam had been under 
 a cloud in the West. Theological studies had been 
 closely limited to fiqh, or canon law, and that of the 
 narrowed school of Malik ibn Anas. Even the Quran 
 and the collections of traditions had come to be neg- 
 lected in favor of systematized law-books. The 
 revolt of Ibn Hazm against this had apparently ac- 
 complished little. It had been too one-sided and 
 negative, and had lacked the weight of personaUty 
 behind it. Ibn Hazm had assailed the views of 
 others with a wealth of vituperative language. But 
 he had been a controversialist only. There is a 
 story, tolerably well authenticated, that the books of 
 al-Ghazzali were solemnly condemned by the Qadis 
 
246 THEOLOGY 
 
 of Cordova, and burnt in public. Yet, against that 
 is to be set that all the Spanish theologians did not 
 approve of this violence. 
 
 Ibn Tumart started in life as a reformer of the cor- 
 ruptions of his day, and seems to have slipped from 
 that into the belief that he had been appointed by 
 God as the great reformer for all time. As happens 
 with reformers, from exhortation it came to force ; 
 from preaching at the abuses of the government to 
 rebellion against the government. That government, 
 the Murabit, went down before Ibn Tumart and his 
 successors, and the pontifical rule of the Muwahhids, 
 the asserters of God's tawJiid or unity, rose in its 
 place. The doctrine which he preached bears evi- 
 dent marks of the influence of al-Ghazzali and of Ibn 
 Hazm. Tawhid, for him, meant a complete spirit- 
 ualizing of the conception of God. Opposed to taiu- 
 hid, he set tajsim, the assigning to God of a jism or 
 body having bulk. Thus, when the theologians of the 
 West took the anthropomorphic passages of the Qur'an 
 literally, he applied to them the method of ta'ivil, or 
 interpretation, which he had learned in the East, and 
 explained away these stumbling-blocks. Ibn Hazm, 
 it will be remembered, resorted to grammatical and 
 lexicographical devices to attain the same end, and 
 had regarded ta'wil with abhorrence. To Ibn Tumart, 
 then, this tajsim was flat unbelief and, as Mahdi, it 
 was his duty to oppose it by force of arms, to lead a 
 jihad against its maintainers. Further, with Ibn 
 Hazm, he agreed in rejecting taqlid. There was only 
 one truth, and it was man's duty to find it for him- 
 self by going to the original sources. 
 
A ZAHIEITE IMAMITE 247 
 
 This is the genuine Zahirite doctrine which utterly 
 rejects all comity with the four other legal rites ; but 
 Ibn Tumart, as Mahdi, added another element. It is 
 based on a very simple Imamite philosophy of his- 
 tory. There has always been an Imam in the world, 
 a divinely appointed leader, guarded by isma, protec- 
 tion against error. The first four Khalifas were of 
 such divine appointment ; thereafter came usurpers 
 and oppressors. Theirs was the reign of wickedness 
 and lies in the earth. Now he, the Mahdi, was come 
 of the blood of the Prophet and bearing plainly all 
 the necessary, accrediting signs to overcome these 
 tyrants and anti-Christs. He thus was an Imamite, 
 but stood quite apart from the welter of conflicting 
 Shi'ite sects — the Seveners, Twelvers, Zaydites and 
 the rest — as far as do the present Sharifs of Morocco 
 with their Alid-Sunnite position. The Mahdi, it is 
 to be remembered, is awaited by Sunnites as by 
 Shi'ites, and is guarded against error as much as an 
 Imam, since he partakes of the general isma which 
 in divine things belongs to prophets. Such a leader, 
 then, could claim from the people absolute obedience 
 and credence. His word must be for them the 
 source of truth. There was, therefore, no longer any 
 need of analogy (qiyas) as a source, and we accord- 
 ingly find that Ibn Tumart rejected it in all but legal 
 matters and there surrounded it with restrictions. 
 Analogical argument in things theological was for- 
 bidden. 
 
 But where he absolutely parted company from 
 the Ash'arites was with regard to the qualities of 
 God. In that, too, he followed the view of Ibn 
 
248 THEOLOGY 
 
 Hazm sketched above. "We must take the Qur'anic 
 expressions as names and not as indicating attributes 
 to us. It is true that his creed shows signs of a phil- 
 osophical width lacking in Ibn Hazm. Like the 
 Mu'tazilites, e.g. Abu Hudhayl, he defines largely by 
 negations. God is not this ; is not affected by that. 
 It is even phrased so as to be capable of a pantheistic 
 explanation, and we find that Ibn Eushd wrote a 
 commentary on it. But it may be doubted whether 
 Ibn Tumart was himself a pantheist. All phases of 
 Islam, as we have seen, ran toward that ; and here 
 there is only a little indiscretion in the wording. 
 But it may easily have been that he had besides, 
 like the Fatimids, a secret teaching or exposition of 
 those simpler declarations which were intended for 
 the mass of the people. Among his successors dis- 
 tinct traces of such a thing appear ; both Aristotelian 
 philosophers and advanced Sufis are connected with 
 the Muwahhid movement. That, however, belongs 
 to the sequel. 
 
 The success of Ibn Tumart, if halting at first, was 
 eventually complete. As a simple lawyer who felt 
 called upon to protest — as, indeed, are all good Mus- 
 hms in virtue of a tradition from Muhammad — 
 against the abuses of the time, he accomplished com- 
 paratively little. As Mahdi, he and his supporter 
 and successor, Abd al-Mu'min, swept the country. 
 For his movement was not merely Imamite and Mus- 
 lim, but an expression as well of Berber nationalism. 
 Here was a man, sprung from their midst, of their 
 own stock and tongue, who, as Prophet of God, called 
 them to arms. They obeyed his call, worshipped 
 
STNCEETISM OF IBfT TUMA.ET 249 
 
 liim and fought for liim. He translated the Qur'an 
 for them into Berber ; the call to prayers was given 
 in Berber ; functionaries of the church had to know 
 Berber; his own theological writings circulated in 
 Berber as well as in Arabic. As Persia took Islam 
 and moulded it to suit herself, so now did the Berber 
 tribes. And a strange jumble they made of it. With 
 them, the Zahirite system of canon law, rejected by 
 all other Muslim peoples, enjoyed its one brief period 
 of power and glory. Shi'ite legends and supersti- 
 tions mingled with philosophical free thought. The 
 book of mystery, al-Jafr, written by Ali, and contain- 
 ing the history of the world to the end of time, was 
 said to have passed from the custody of al-Ghazzali 
 at his death to the hands of the Mahdi and was by 
 him committed to his successors. If only in view of 
 the syncretism practised by both, it was fitting that 
 al-Ghazzali and Ibn Tumart should be brought closely 
 together. Yet it is hard to explain the persistence 
 with which the great Ash'arite is made the teacher 
 and guide of the semi-Zahirite. There must have 
 been something, now obscure to us, in their respective 
 systems which suggested to contemporaries such in- 
 timate connection. 
 
 The rule of the Muwahhids lasted until 667, nearly 
 one hundred years, and involved in its circle of influ- 
 ence many weighty personalities. With some of 
 these we will now deal shortly. 
 
 It has been told above how narrow in general were 
 the intellectual interests of the West. Canon law, 
 poetry, history, geography were eagerly pursued, but 
 little of original value was produced. Originality 
 
250 THEOLOGY 
 
 and the breaking of ground in new fields were under 
 a ban. Subtilty of thought and luxury of life took 
 their place. Above all, and naturally, this applied 
 to philosophy. And so it comes that the first phil- 
 osophic name in the Muslim West is that of Abu 
 Bakr ibn Bajja, for mediseval Europe Avenpaoe, who 
 died comparatively young in 533. For him, as for 
 all, and still more in the West than in the East, the 
 problem of the philosopher was how to gain and 
 maintain a tenable position in a world composed 
 mostly of the philosophically ignorant and the relig- 
 iously fanatical. This problem had two sides, internal 
 and external. The inner and the nobler one was how 
 such a mind could in its loneliness rise to its highest 
 level and purify itself to the point of knowing things 
 as they really are and so reach that eternal life in 
 which the individual spirit loses itself in the Active 
 Intellect (i^oO? iroiririKO^, al-aql al-fa"aT) which is 
 above all and behind all. The other, and baser, was 
 how to so present his views and adapt his life that 
 the life and the views might be possible in a Muslim 
 community. 
 
 Ibn Bajja was a close disciple of al-Farabi, who is 
 to be regarded as the spiritual father of the later 
 Arabic philosophy; Ibn Sin a practically falls out. 
 In logic, physics, and metaphysics he followed al- 
 Farabi closely. But we can see how the times have 
 moved and the philosophies with them. The essen- 
 tial differences have appeared and Ibn Bajja can no 
 longer, with a good conscience, appear as a pious 
 Muslim. The Sufi strain also is much weaker. The 
 greatest joy and the closest truth are to be found in 
 
IBN BAJJA 251 
 
 thought, and not in the sensuous ecstasies of the 
 mystic. The intellect is the highest element in man's 
 being, but is only immortal as it joins itself to the 
 one Active Intellect, which is all that is left of God. 
 Here we have the beginning of the doctrine which, 
 later, under the name of Averroism and pampsychism 
 ran like wild-fire through the schools of Europe. 
 Further, only by the constant exercise of its own 
 functions can the intellect of man be thus raised. He 
 must live rationally at all points ; be able to give a 
 reason for every action. This may compel him to 
 live in solitude ; the world is so irrational and will 
 not suffer reason. Or some of the disciples of reason 
 may draw together and form a community where they 
 may live the calm life of nature and of the pursuit of 
 knowledge and self-development. So they will be at 
 one with nature and the eternal, and far removed 
 from the frenzied life of the multitude with its lower 
 aims and conceptions. It is easy to see how the iron 
 of a fight against overwhelming odds had entered this 
 soul. Only the friendship of some of the Murabit 
 princes saved him ; but he died in the end, says a 
 story, by poison. 
 
 With the next names we find ourselves at a Mu- 
 wahhid court, and there the atmosphere has changed. 
 It is evident that, whatever might be the temper of 
 the people, the chiefs of the Muwahhids viewed phi- 
 losophy with no disfavor. Their problem, as in the 
 case of the Fatimids, seems rather to have been how 
 much the people might be taught with safety. Their 
 solution of the problem — here we proceed on conject- 
 ure, but the basis is tolerably sound — was that the bulk 
 
252 THEOLOGY 
 
 of the people should be taught nothing but the literal 
 sense of the Qur'an, metaphors, anthropomorphisms 
 and aU ; that the educated lay public, which had al- 
 ready some inkling of the facts, should be assured 
 that there was really no difference between philosophy 
 and theology — that they were two phases of one truth ; 
 and that the philosophers should have a free hand 
 to go on their own way, always provided that their 
 speculations did not spread beyond their own circle 
 and agitate the minds of the commonalty. It was a 
 beautiful scheme, but like all systems of obscurantism 
 it did not work. On the one hand, the people re- 
 fused to be blindfolded, and, on the other, philosophy 
 died out of inanition. 
 
 In accordance with this, we find the Muwahhid 
 chiefs installing the Zahirite ^^gA as the official system 
 and sternly stopping all speculative discussing cither 
 of canon law or of theology. " The Word so stands 
 written ; take it or the sword," is the significant utter- 
 ance which has come to us from Abu Ta'qub (reg. 
 558-580), son of Abd al-Mu'min. The same continued 
 imder his son Abu Yusuf al-Mansur (reg. 580-595), 
 who added a not very carefully concealed contempt 
 for the Mahdiship of Ibn Tumart. All such things 
 were ridiculous in his philosophic eyes. 
 
 Under these men and in adjustment with their 
 system lived and worked Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Eushd, 
 the last of the great Aristotelians. Ibn Tufayl was 
 wazir and physician to Abu Ya'qub and died a year 
 after him, in 531. His was a calm, contemplative 
 life, secluded in princely libraries. But his objects 
 were the same as those of Ibn Bajja. He has evi- 
 
IBN TUFATL 253 
 
 dently no hope that the great body of the people can 
 ever be brought to the truth. A rehgion, sensuous 
 and sensual alike, is needed to restrain the wild beast 
 in man, and the masses should be left to the guidance 
 of that religion. For a philosopher to seek to teach 
 them better is to expose himself to peril and them to 
 the loss of that little which they have. But in his 
 methods, on the other hand,Ibn Tufayl is essentially 
 at one with al-Ghazzali. He is a mystic who seeks 
 in Sufi exercises, in the constant purifying of mind 
 and body and in the unwearying search for the one 
 unity in the indiyidual multiplicity around him, to 
 find a way to lose his self in that eternal and one 
 spirit which for him is the divine. So at last he 
 comes to ecstasy and reaches those things which eye 
 hath not seen nor ear heard. The only difference be- 
 tween him and al-Ghazzali is that al-Ghazzali was a 
 theologian and saw in his ecstasy Allah upon His 
 throne and around Him the things of the heavens, as 
 set forth in the Qur'an, while Ibn Tufayl was a phi- 
 losopher, of neo-Platonic + Aristotelian stamp, and 
 saw in his ecstasy the Active Intellect and Its chain 
 of causes reaching down to man and back to Itself. 
 
 The book by which his name has lived, and which 
 has had strange haps, is the romance of Hayy ibn 
 Taqzan, " The Living One, Son of the Waking One." 
 In it he conceives two islands, the one inhabited and 
 the other not. On the inhabited island we have con- 
 ventional people living conventional lives, and re- 
 strained by a conventional religion of rewards and 
 punishments. Two men there, Salaman and Asal, 
 have raised themselves to a higher level of self-rule. 
 
254 THEOLOGY 
 
 Salaman adapts himself externally to the popular re- 
 ligion and rules the people ; Asal, seeking to perfect 
 himself still further in solitude, goes to the other 
 island. But there he iinds a man, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, 
 who has lived alone from infancy and has gradually, 
 by the innate and uncorrupted powers of the mind, 
 developed himself to the highest philosophic level 
 and reached the Vision of the Divine. He has passed 
 through all the stages of knowledge until the universe 
 lies clear before him, and now he finds that his phi- 
 losophy thus reached, without prophet or revelation, 
 and the purified religion of Asal are one and the 
 same. The story told by Asal of the people of the 
 other island sitting in darkness stirs his soul and he 
 goes forth to them as a missionary. But he soon 
 learns that the method of Muhammad was the true 
 one for the great masses, and that only by sensuous 
 allegory and concrete things could they be reached 
 and held. He retires to his island again to live the 
 solitary life. 
 
 The bearing of this on the system of the Muwah- 
 hids cannot be mistaken. If it is a criticism of the 
 finality of historical revelation, it is also a defence of 
 the attitude of the Muwahhids toward both people 
 and philosophers. By the favor of Abu Ya'qub, Ibn 
 Tufayl had practically been able to live on an island 
 and develop himself by study. So, too, Abu Ya'qub 
 might stand for the enlightened but practical Sala- 
 man. Yet the meaning evidently is that between 
 them they failed and must fail. There could only be a 
 solitary philosopher here and there, and happy for 
 him if he found a princely patron. The people which 
 
IBN RUSHD 255 
 
 knew not the trutli were accursed. Perhaps, rather, 
 they were children and had to be humored and 
 guided as such in an endless childhood. 
 
 It is evident that such a solitary possessor of truth 
 had two cotirses open to him. He could either busy 
 himself in his studies and exercises, as had done Ibn 
 Bajja and Ibn Tufayl, or he could boldly enter public 
 life and trust to his dialectic ingenuity and resource — 
 perhaps, also, to his plasticity of conscience — to 
 carry him past all whispers of heresy and unbelief. 
 The latter course was chosen by Ibn Eushd. He was 
 born at Cordova, in 520, of a family of jurists and 
 there studied law. From his legal studies only a 
 book on the law of inheritance has reached us, and it, 
 though frequently commented on, has never been 
 printed. In 548 he was presented to Abu Ya'qub 
 by Ibn Tufayl and encouraged by him in the study 
 of philosophy. In it his greatest work was done. 
 In spite of the shreds and patches of neo-Platonism 
 which clung to him, he was the greatest mediaeval 
 commentator on Aristotle. It is only part of the 
 eternal puzzle of the Muslim mind that the utility of 
 Greek for a student of Aristotle seems never to have 
 struck him. Thereafter he acted as judge in differ- 
 ent places in Spain and was court physician for a 
 short time in 578 to Abu Ya'qub. In 575 he had 
 written his tractates, to which we shall come imme- 
 diately, mediating between philosophy and theology. 
 Toward the end of his life he was condemned by 
 Abu Yusuf al-Mansur for heresy and banished from 
 Cordova. This was in all likelihood a truckling on the 
 part of al-Mansur to the religious prejudices of the 
 
256 THEOLOGY 
 
 people of Spain, who were probably of stiflfer ortho- 
 doxy than the Berbers. He was in Spain, at Cor- 
 dova, at the time, and was engaged in carrying on a 
 religious war with the Christians. On his return to 
 Morocco the decree of exile was recalled and Ibn 
 Rushd restored to favor. We find him again at the 
 court in Morocco, and he died there in 595. 
 
 This is not the place to enter upon Ibn Rushd's 
 philosophical system. He was a thorough-going Aris- 
 totelian, as he knew Aristotle. That was probably 
 much better than any of his predecessors ; but even 
 he had not got clear from the fatal influence of Plo- 
 tinus. Above all, he is essentially a theologian just 
 as much as they. In Aristotle there had been given 
 what was to all intents a philosophical revelation. 
 Only in the knowledge and acceptance of it could 
 truth and life be found. And some must reach it ; 
 one at least there must always be. If a thing is not 
 seen by someone it has existed in vain ; which is 
 impossible. If someone at least does not know the 
 truth, it also has existed in vain, which is still more 
 impossible. That is Ibn Eushd's way of saying that 
 the esse is the percipi and that there must be a per- 
 ceiver. And he has unlimited faith in his means of 
 reaching that Truth — only by such capitalization can 
 we express his theologic attitude. The logic of Aris- 
 totle is infallible and can break through to the su- 
 preme good itself. Ecstasy and contemplation play 
 no part with him ; there he separates from Ibn Tu- 
 fayl. Such intercourse with the Active Intellect may 
 exist ; but it is too rare to be taken into account. 
 Obviously, Ibn Eushd himself, who to himself was 
 
ATTACK ON AL-GHAZZALI 257 
 
 the percipient of truth for his age, had never reached 
 that perception. Solitary meditation he cannot away 
 with ; for him the market-place and contact with 
 men ; there he parts with Ibn Bajja. In truth, he is 
 nearer to the life in life of Ibn Sina, and that, per- 
 haps, explains his constant attacks on the Persian 
 hon vivant. 
 
 All his predecessors he joys in correcting, but his 
 especial bete noire is al-Ghazzali. With him it is war on 
 life or death. He has two good causes. One is al-Ghaz- 
 zali's " Destruction of the Philosophers ; " of it, Ibn 
 Eushd, in his turn, writes a " Destruction." This is 
 a clever, incisive criticism, luminous with logical ex- 
 actitude, yet missing al-GhazzaU's vital earnestness 
 and incapable of reaching his originality. But al- 
 Ghazzali had not only attacked the philosophers; 
 he had also spread the knowledge of their teachings 
 and reasonings, and had said that there was nothing 
 esoteric and impossible of grasp in them for the 
 ordinary mind. He had thus assailed the funda- 
 mental principles of the Muwahhid system. Against 
 this, Ibn Rushd wrote the tractates spoken of above. 
 They were evidently addressed to the educated laity ; 
 not to the ignorant multitude, but to those who had 
 already read such books as those of al-Ghazzali and 
 been affected by them, yet had not studied philosophy 
 at first hand. That they were not intended for such 
 special students is evident from the elaborate care 
 that is taken in them to conceal, or, if that were not 
 possible, to put a good face upon obnoxious doc- 
 trines. Thus, his philosophy left no place in reality 
 for a system of rewards and punishments or even for 
 
258 THEOLOGY 
 
 any individual existence of the soul after death, for a 
 creation of the material world, or for a providence in 
 the direct working of the supreme being on earth. 
 But all these points are involved or glossed over in 
 these tractates. 
 
 Further, it is plain that their object was to bring 
 about a reform of religion in itself, and also of the 
 attitude of theologians to students of philosophy. In 
 them he sums up his own position under four heads : 
 First, that philosophy agrees with religion and that 
 religion recommends philosophy. Here, he is fight- 
 ing for his life. Religion is true, a revelation from 
 God ; and philosophy is true, the results reached by 
 the human mind; these two truths cannot contradict 
 each other. Again, men are frequoutly exhorted in 
 the Qur'an to reflect, to consider, to speculate about 
 things ; that means the use of the intelligence, which 
 follows certain laws, long ago traced and worked out 
 by the ancients. We must, therefore, study their 
 works and proceed further on the same course our- 
 selves, i.e., we must study philosophy. 
 
 Second, there are two things in religion, literal 
 meaning and interpretation. If we find anything in 
 the Qur'an which seems externally to contradict the 
 results of philosophy, we may be quite sure that 
 there is something under the surface. We must look 
 for some possible interpretation of the passage, some 
 inner meaning ; and we shall certainly find it. 
 
 Third, the literal meaning is the duty of the mul- 
 titude, and inteipretation the duty of scholars. Those 
 who are not capable of philoso])liical n^asotiing must 
 hold the literal truth of the different statements in 
 
THE MULTIFOEM TEUTH 259 
 
 the Qur'an. The imagery must be believed by them 
 exactly as it stands, except where it is absolutely evi- 
 dent that we have only an image. On the other hand, 
 philosophers must be given the liberty of interpret- 
 ing as they choose. If they find it necessary, from 
 some philosophical necessity, to adopt an allegorical 
 interpretation of any passage or to find in it a meta- 
 phor, that liberty must be open to them. There must 
 be no laying down of dogmas by the church as to 
 what may be interpreted and what may not. In Ibn 
 Kushd's opinion, the orthodox theologians sometimes 
 interpreted when they should have kept by the letter, 
 and sometimes took literally passages in which they 
 should have foimd imagery. He did not accuse them 
 of heresy for this, and they should grant him the 
 same liberty. 
 
 Fourth, those who know are not to be allowed to 
 communicate interpretations to the multitude. So 
 Ali said, " Speak to the people of that which they 
 understand ; would ye that they give the lie to God 
 and His messenger ? " Ibn Eushd considered that 
 belief was reached by three different classes of people 
 in three different ways. The many believe because 
 of rhetorical syllogisms {Jehitabiya), i.e., those whose 
 premises consist of the statements of a religious 
 teacher (maqbulat), or are presumptions {maznunat). 
 Others believe because of controversial syllogisms 
 (jadliya), which are based on principles (mashhurat) 
 or admissions (musallamat). All these premises be- 
 long to the class of propositions which are not abso- 
 lutely certain. The third class, and by far the 
 smaller, consists of the people of demonstration {bur- 
 
260 THEOLOGY 
 
 Tian). Their belief is based upon syllogisms com- 
 posed of propositions which are certain. These 
 consist of axioms {awwaliyat) and five other classes 
 of certainties. Each of these three classes of people 
 has to be treated in the way that suits its mental 
 character. It is wrong to put demonstration or con- 
 troversy before those who can understand only rhe- 
 torical reasoning. It destroys their faith and gives 
 them nothing to take its place. The case is similar 
 with those who can only reach controversial reason- 
 ing but cannot attain unto demonstration. Thus Ibn 
 B.u shd_would have the faith of the multitude care- 
 fully screened from all contact with the teachings of 
 philosophers. Such books should not be allowed to 
 go into general circulation, and if necessary, the civil 
 authorities should step in to prevent it. If these 
 principles were accepted and followed, a return 
 might be looked for of the golden age of Islam, when 
 there was no theological controversy and men be- 
 lieved sincerely and earnestly. 
 
 On this last paragraph it is worth noticing that its 
 threefold distinction is "conveyed" by Ibn Eushd 
 from a little book belonging to al-Ghazzali's later 
 life, after he had turned to the study of tradition, 
 Iljam al-Aivamm an Urn al-kalam, " The reining in 
 of the commonalty from the science of kalam." 
 
 Such was, practically, the end of the Muslim Aris- 
 totelians. Some flickers of philosophic study doubt- 
 less remained. So we find a certain Abu-l-Hajjaj ibn 
 Tumlus (d. 620) writing on Aristotle's "Analytics," 
 and the tractates of Ibn Eushd described above were 
 copied at Almeria in 724. But the fate of aU Muslim 
 
IBN ARABI 261 
 
 speculation fell, and this school went out in Sufiism. 
 It was not Ibn Eushd that triumphed but Ibn Tufayl, 
 and that side of Ibn Tufayl which was akin to al- 
 Ghazzali. From this point on, the^hinkers and 
 writers of Islam become mystics more and more over- 
 whelmingly. Dogmatic theology itself falls behind, 
 and of philosophical disciplines only formal logic 
 and a metaphysics of the straitest scholastic type 
 are left. Philosophy becomes the handmaid of the- 
 ology, and a very mechanical handmaid at that. It 
 is only in the schools of the Sufis that we find real 
 development and promise of life. The future lay 
 with them, however dubious it may seem to us that a 
 future in such charge must be. 
 
 The greatest Sufi in the Arabic-speaking world was 
 undoubtedly Muhyi ad-Din ibn Arabi. He was born 
 in Murcia in 560, studied Jiadifh and JiqJi at Seville, 
 and in 598 set out to travel in the East. He wan- 
 dered through the Hijaz, Mesopotamia and Asia 
 Minor, and died at Damascus in 638, leaving behind 
 him an enormous mass of writings, at least 150 of 
 which have come down to us. Why he left Spain is 
 unknown ; it is plain that he was under the influence 
 of the Miiwahhid movement. He was a Zahirite in 
 law ; rejected analogy, opinion, and taqlid, but ad- 
 mitted agreement. His attachment to the opinions 
 of Ibn Hazm especially was very strong. He edited 
 some of that scholar's works, and was only prevented 
 by his objections to taqlid from being a formal Hazm- 
 ite. But with all that literalness in fiqh, his mysti- 
 cism in theology was of the most rampant and luxu- 
 rious description. Between the two sides, it is true, 
 
262 THEOLOGY 
 
 there existed a connection of a kind. He had no 
 need for analogy or opinion or for any of the work- 
 ings of the vain human intelligence so long as the 
 divine light was flooding his soul and he saw the 
 things of the heavens with plain vision. So his 
 books are a strange jumble of theosophy and meta- 
 physical paradoxes, all much like the theosophy of 
 our own day. He evidently took the system of the 
 mutakallims and played with it by means of formal 
 logic and a lively imagination. To what extent he 
 was sincere in his claim of heavenly illuminings and 
 mysterious powers it would be hard to say. The 
 oriental mystic has little difficulty in deceiving him- 
 self. His opinions — so far as we can know them — 
 may be briefly sketched as follows : The being of 
 all things is God : there is nothing except Him. All 
 things are an essential unity ; every part of the world 
 is the whole world. So man is a unity in essence 
 but a multiplicity in individuals. His anthropology 
 was an advance upon that of al-Ghazzali toward a 
 more unflinching pantheism. He has the same view 
 that the soul of man is a spiritual substance different 
 from everything else and proceeding from God. But 
 he obliterates the difference of God and makes souls 
 practically emanations. At death these return into 
 God who sent them forth. All religions to Ibn 
 Arabi were practically indifferent ; in them all the 
 divine was working and was worshipped. Tet Islam 
 is the more advantageous and Sufiism is its true phi- 
 losophy. Further, man has no free-will ; he is con- 
 strained by the will of God, which is really all that 
 exists. Nor is there any real difference between 
 
IBN SAB 'in 263 
 
 good and evil ; the essential unity of all things makes 
 such a division impossible. 
 
 The last of the Muwahhid circle with whom we 
 need deal — and, perhaps, absolutely the last — is Abd 
 al-Haqq ibn Sab'in. He was as much a mystic as 
 Ibn Arabi., but was apparently more deeply read in 
 philosophy and did not cast his conceptions in so 
 theological and Quranic a mould. He, too, was born 
 in Murcia about 613, and must very early have 
 founded a school of his own, gathered disciples 
 round him and established a wide reputation. High 
 skUJ in alchemy, astrology, and magic is ascribed to 
 him, which probably means that he claimed to be a 
 wall, a friend of God, gifted with miraculous powers. 
 He is accused of posing as a prophet, although in 
 orthodox Islam Muhammad is the last and the seal of 
 the prophets But against this, it may be said that 
 he had no need of the actual title, " prophet " ; many 
 mystics held — heretically, it is true — that the luali 
 stood higher than the prophet, nabi or rasul. He 
 had evidently besides this a more solid reputation 
 in philosophy, as is shown by his correspondence 
 with Frederick II, the great Hohenstaufen (d. 1250 
 A.D.). The story is told on the Muslim side only, 
 but has vraisemblance and seems to be tolerably 
 authentic. According to it, Frederick addressed 
 certain questions in philosophy — on the eternity 
 of the world, the nature of the soul, the number 
 and nature of the categories, etc. — to different Muslim 
 princes, begging that they would submit them to 
 their learned men. So the questions came to ar- 
 Eashid, the Muwahhid (reg. 630-640), addressed to 
 
264 THEOLOGY 
 
 Ibn Sab'in as a scholar whose reputation had reached 
 even the Sicilian court. Ar-Eashid passed them on ; 
 Ibn Sab'in accepted the commission with a smile — 
 this is the Muslim account — and triumphantly and 
 contemptuously expounded the difficulties of the 
 Christian monarch and student. In his replies he 
 certainly displays a very complete and exact knowl- 
 edge of the Aristotehan and neo-Platonic systems, 
 and is far less a blind follower of Aristotle than is 
 Ibn Rushd. But his schoolmasterly tone is most 
 unpleasant, and we discover in the end that all this 
 is a mere preHminary discipline, leading in itself to 
 agnosticism and a recognition that there is nothing 
 but vanity in this world, and that only in the Vision 
 of the Sufi can certainty and peace be found. So we 
 have again the circle through which al-Ghazzali went. 
 As distinguished from Ibn Bushd, the prophet, with 
 Ibn Sab'in, takes higher rank than the sage. Be- 
 yond the current division of the soul into the vege- 
 tative, the animal and the reasonable, he adds two 
 others, derived from the reasonable, the soul of wis- 
 dom and the soul of prophecy. The first of these is 
 the soul of the philosopher, and the other of the 
 prophet ; and the last is the highest. Of the reason- 
 able soul upward, he predicates immortality. 
 
 His position otherwise must have been practically 
 the same as that of Ibn Arabi. Like him he was a 
 Zahirite in law and a mystic in theology. " God is 
 the reality of existing things," he taught, and it is 
 evident that he belonged to the school of pantheism 
 in which God is all, and separate things are emana- 
 tions from him. In life we have flashes of recogni- 
 
END OF THE MUWAHHIDS 265 
 
 tion of the heavenly realities, but only at death — 
 which is our true birth — do we reach union with the 
 eternal, or, to speak technically, with the Active Intel- 
 lect. 
 
 Apparently it was quite possible for him to hold 
 these views in public so long as the Muwahhids were 
 strong enough to protect him. But their empire was 
 rapidly falling to pieces and the time of freedom had 
 passed. An attack on him at Tunis, where the Haf- 
 sids now ruled, drove him to the East about 643, and 
 there he took refuge at — of all places — Mecca. The 
 refuge seems to have been secure. He lived there 
 more than twenty years amid a circle of disciples, 
 among whom was the Sharif himself, and died about 
 667. There is a poorly authenticated story that he 
 died by suicide. The man himself, with so many of 
 his time and kind, must remain a puzzle to us. For 
 all his haughty pride of learning, it is noted of him 
 that his first disciples were from among the poor. 
 His contemporaries described him as "a Sufi after 
 the manner of the philosophers." The last vestige 
 of the Muwahhid empire passed away in the year of 
 his death. 
 
CHAPTEE VI 
 
 The rise and spread of darwish Fraternities ; the surviTal and tradi- 
 tion of the Hanbalite doctrine ; Abd ar-Razzaq ; Ibn Taymiya. 
 his attacks on saint-worship and on the mutakallims ; ash- 
 Sha'rani and his times ; the modern movements ; Wahhabism 
 and the influence of al-Ghazzali ; possibilities of the present 
 
 OuK sources now begin to grow more and more 
 scanty, and we must hasten over long intervals of 
 time and pass with little connection from one name 
 to another. Preliminary investigations are also to 
 a great extent lacking, and it is possible that the cen- 
 turies which we shall merely touch may have wit- 
 nessed developments only less important than those 
 with which we have already dealt. But that is not 
 probable ; for when, after a long silence, the curtain 
 rises again for us in the twelfth Muslim century, we 
 shall find at work only those elements and conditions 
 whose inception and growth we have now set forth. 
 
 One name in our rapid flight deserves mention, at 
 least. It is that of Umar ibn al-Farid, the greatest 
 poet that Arabic mysticism has produced. He was 
 born at Cairo in 586, lived for a time at Mecca, and 
 died at Cairo in 632. He led no new movement or 
 advance, but the East still cherishes his memory and 
 his poems. 
 
 We have already noticed (p. 177) the beginnings of 
 darwish Fraternities and the founding of monasteries 
 or khanqaks. During the period over which we have 
 
 260 
 
DAEWISH TEATERNITIES 267 
 
 just passed, these received a great and enduring im- 
 petus. The older ascetics and walls gathered round 
 them groups of personal followers and their pupils 
 carried on their names. But it was long, apparently, 
 before definite corporations were founded of fixed 
 purpose to perpetuate the memory of their masters. 
 One of the earliest of these seems to have been 
 the fraternity of Qadirite darwishes, founded by Abd 
 al-Qadir al-Jilani, who died in 561 at Baghdad, where 
 pilgrimage is still made to his shrine. So, too, the 
 Eifa'ite Fraternity was founded at Baghdad by Ah- 
 mad ar-E-ifa'a in 576. Another s that of the Sha- 
 dhilites, named after their founder, ash-Shadhili, who 
 died in 656. Again another is that of the Badawites, 
 whose founder was Ahmad al-Badawi (d. 675) ; his 
 shrine at Tanta in Lower Egypt is still one of the 
 most popular places of pilgrimage. Again, the order 
 of the Naqshbandite darwishes was foimded by Mu- 
 hammad an-Naqshbandi, who died in 791. Among 
 the Turks by far the most popular religious order is 
 that of the Mawlawites, founded by the great Persian 
 mystical poet, Jalal ad-Din ar-Eumi (d. 672), whose 
 Mesnevi is read over all Islam. These and very many 
 others, especially of later date, are still in existence. 
 Others, once founded, have again become extinct. 
 Thus, Ibn Sab'in, though he was surrounded by dis- 
 ciples who for a time after his death carried on the 
 order of Sab'inites, does not seem now to have any 
 to do him honor. The same holds of a certain Adi 
 al-Haqqari who founded a cloister near Mawsil and 
 died about 558. It is significant that al-Ghazzali, 
 though he founded a cloister for Sufis at Tus and 
 
268 THEOLOGY 
 
 taught and governed there himself, left no order be- 
 hind him. Apparently in his time the movement 
 toward continuous corporations had not yet begun. 
 It is true that there are at present in existence dar- 
 wish Fraternities which claim to be descended from 
 the celebrated ascetics and walls, Ibrahim ibn Adham 
 (d. 161), Sari as-Saqati (d. 257) and Abu Yazid al- 
 Bistami (d. 261), but it may be gravely doubted 
 whether they can show any sound pedigree. The 
 legend of Shaykh Ilwan, who is said to have founded 
 the first order in 49, may be safely rejected. It is 
 significant that the Aiulad Ilivan, sons of Ilwan, as 
 his followers are called, form a sect of the Eifa'ites. 
 Further, just as the Sufis have claimed for themselves 
 all the early pious Muslims, and especially the ten 
 to whom Muhammad made specific promise of Para- 
 dise (al-asJiara al-muhaslishara), so these Fraternities 
 are ascribed in their origin to, and put under the 
 guardianship of the first Khalifas, and, in Egypt at 
 least, a direct descendant of Abu Bakr holds author- 
 ity over all their orders. 
 
 In these orders all are darwishes, but only those 
 gifted by God with miraculous powers are ivalis. 
 Those of them who are begging friars are faqirs. 
 They stand under an elaborate hierarchy grading in 
 dignity and holiness from the Qutb, or Axis, who 
 wanders, often invisible and always unknown to the 
 world, through the lands performing the duties of 
 his office, and who has a favorite station on the 
 roof of the Ka'ba, through his naqihs or assistants, 
 down to the lowest /ag'M-. But the members of these 
 orders are not exclusively faqirs. All classes are 
 
MYSTICS V. TRADITIONALISTS 269 
 
 enrolled as, in a sense, lay adherents. Certain trades 
 affect certain fraternities ; in Egypt, for example, the 
 fishermen are almost all Qadirites and walk in pro- 
 cession on their festival day, carrying colored nets as 
 their banners. Much the same thing held, and holds, 
 of the monastic orders of Europe, but the Muslim 
 does not wait till he is dying to put on the weeds 
 of Ahmad al-Badawi or ash-Shadhili. Finally, ref- 
 erence may be made again to the last and most 
 important of all these orders, the militant Brother- 
 hood of as-Sanusi. 
 
 We have now returned to the period of al-Iji 
 and at-Taftazani, when philosophy definitely de- 
 scended from the throne and became the servant 
 and defender of theology. From this time on, the 
 two independent forces at work are the unveiling of 
 the mystic [Jcashf) and tradition {naql). The only 
 place for reason (oqT) now is to prove the possibility 
 of a given doctrine. That done, its actual truth is 
 proven by tradition. These two then, hashf and 
 naql, hold the field, and the history of Muslim theol- 
 ogy from this point to the present day is the history of 
 their conflicts. The mystics are accused of heresy by 
 the traditionalists. The traditionalists are accused 
 by the mystics of formalism, hypocrisy, and, above 
 all, of flat inability to argue logically. Both accusa- 
 tions are certainly true. No fine fence on person- 
 ality can conceal the fact that Muslim mysticism is 
 simple pantheism of the Plotinian type, the individ- 
 uals are emanations from the One. On the other 
 hand, the formalism of the traditionalists can hardly 
 be exaggerated. They pass over almost entirely into 
 
270 THEOLOGY 
 
 canon lawyers, meriting richly the fine sarcasm ol al- 
 Ghazzali, who asked the faqilis of his day what pos- 
 sible value for the next world could lie in a study of 
 the Qur'anic law of inheritance or the like. Tradi- 
 tion {hadith), in the exact sense of the sayings and 
 doings of Muhammad, falls into the background, 
 and Jiqh, the systems built upon it by the genera- 
 tions of lawyers, from the four masters down, takes 
 its place. Again, the accusation of illogical reason- 
 ing is also thoroughly sound. The habit of unend- 
 ing subdivision deprived the minds of the canonists 
 of all breadth of scope, and their devotion to the 
 principle of acceptance on authority (taqlid) weak- 
 ened their feeling for argument. It is true, further, 
 that the mystics, such as they were, had heired all 
 the philosophy left in Islam, and were thus become 
 the representatives of the intellectual life. They 
 had so much of an advantage over their more or- 
 thodox opponents. But the intellectual life with 
 them, as with the earlier philosophers, remained of 
 a too subjective character. The fatal study of the 
 self, and the self only — that tramping along the high 
 a priori road — -and neglect of the objective study 
 of the outside world which ruined their forerunners, 
 was their ruin as well. Outbursts of intellectual 
 energy and revolt we may meet with again and 
 again ; there will be few signs of that science which 
 seeks facts patiently in the laboratory, the observa- 
 tory, and the dissecting-room. 
 
 Curiously enough, there fall closely together at 
 this time the death dates of two men of the most 
 opposite schools. The one was Ibn Taymiya, the 
 
ABD AR-EAZZAQ 271 
 
 anthropomorphist free lance, who died in 728, and 
 the other was Abd ar-Eazzaq, the pantheistic Sufi, 
 who died in 730. Abd ar-Kazzaq of Samarqand and 
 Kashan was a close student and follower of Ibn 
 Arabi. He commented on his books and defended 
 his orthodoxy. In fact, so closely had Ibn Arabi 
 come to be identified with the Sufi position as a 
 whole that a defence of him was a favorite form in 
 which to cast a defence of Sufiism generally. But 
 Abd ar-Eazzaq did not follow his master absolutely. 
 On the freedom of the will especially he left him. 
 For Ibn Arabi, the doctrine of the oneness of all 
 things had involved fatalism. Whatever happens is 
 determined by the nature of things, that is, by the 
 nature of God. So the individuals are bound by the 
 whole. Abd ar-Razzaq turned this round. His 
 pantheism was of the same type as that of Ibn Arabi ; 
 God, for him, was all. But there is freedom of the 
 divine nature, he went on. It must therefore exist 
 in man also, for he is an emanation from the divine. 
 His every act, it is true, is predetermined, in time, in 
 form, and in place. But his act is brought about by 
 certain causes, themselves predetermined. These 
 are what we would call natural laws in things, natural 
 abilities, aptitudes, etc., in the agent; finally, free 
 choice itself. And that free choice is in man because 
 he is of and from God. Further, it is evident that 
 Abd ar-Razzaq's anxiety is to preserve a basis for 
 morals. Among the predetermining causes he reck- 
 ons the divine commands, warnings, proofs in the 
 Qur'an. The guidance of religion finds thus its place 
 and the prophets their work. But what of the exist- 
 
272 THEOLOGY 
 
 ence of evil and the necessity of restraint in a world 
 that has emanated from the divine? This problem 
 he faces bravely. Our world must be the best of all 
 possible worlds ; otherwise God would have made it 
 better. Difference, then, among men and things be- 
 longs to its essence and necessity. Next, justice must 
 consist in accepting these different things and adapt- 
 ing them to their situations. To try to make all 
 things and men alike would be to leave some out of 
 existence altogether. That would be a great injus- 
 tice. Here, again, religion enters. Its object is to 
 rectify this difference in qualities and gifts. Men 
 are not responsible for these, but they are responsible 
 if they do not labor to correct them. In the hereafter 
 all will be reabsorbed into the divine being and taste 
 such bliss as the rank of each deserves. For those 
 who need it there will be a period of purgatorial 
 chastisement, but that will not be eternal, in slia 
 Allah. 
 
 Like his predecessors, Abd ar-Razzaq divides men 
 into classes according to their insight into divine 
 things. The first is of men of the world, who are 
 ruled by the flesh {nafs) and who live careless of all 
 religion. The second is of men of reason {aql). They 
 through the reason contemplate God, but see only 
 His external attributes. The third is of men of the 
 spirit {ruh) who, in ecstasy, see God face to face in 
 His very essence, which is the substrate of all cre- 
 ation. 
 
 In his cosmogony, Abd ar-Eazzaq follows, of 
 course, the neo-Platonic model and shows great inge- 
 nuity in weaving into it the crude and materialistic 
 
IBN TATMIYA 273 
 
 phrases and ideas of the Qur'an. Like all MusUm 
 thinkers he displays an anxiety to square with his 
 philosophy the terms dear to the multitude. 
 
 To Ibn Taymiya all this was the very abomination 
 of desolation itself. He had no use for mystics, 
 philosophers, Ash'arite theologians, or, in fact, for 
 anyone except himself. A contemporary described 
 him as a man most able and learned in many sci- 
 ences, but with a screw loose. However it may have 
 been about the last point, there can be no question 
 that he was the reviver for his time and the trans- 
 mitter to our time of the genuine Hanbalite tradi- 
 tion, and that his work rendered possible the Wah- 
 habites and the Brotherhood of as-Sanusi. He was 
 the champion of the religion of the multitude as op- 
 posed to that of the educated few with which we have 
 been dealing so long. This popular theology had 
 been going steadily upon its way and producing its 
 regular riots and disputings. It is related of a cer- 
 tain Ash'arite doctor, Fakhr ad-Din ibn Asakir (d. 
 620), that, in Damascus, he never dared to pass by a 
 certain way through fear of Hanbalite violence. The 
 same Fakhr ad-Din once gave, as in duty bound, the 
 normal salutation of the Peace to a Hanbalite theolo- 
 gian. The Hanbalite did not return it, which was 
 more than a breach of courtesy, and indicated that 
 he did not regard Fakhr ad-Din as a Muslim. When 
 people remonstrated with him, he turned it as a the- 
 ological jest and replied, " That man believes in 
 ' Speech in the Mind ' (Jcalam nafsi, Jiaditli fi-n-nafs), 
 so I returned his salutation mentally." The point is 
 a hit at the Ash'arites, who contended that thought 
 
274 THEOLOGY 
 
 was a kind of speech without letters or sounds, and 
 that God's quality of Speech could therefore be with- 
 out letters or sounds. 
 
 But even the simple orthodoxy of the populace 
 had not remained unchanged. It had received a vast 
 accretion of the most multifarious superstitions. The 
 cult of saints, alive and dead, of holy sites, trees, gar- 
 ments, and the observance of all manner of days and 
 seasons had been developing parallel to the advance 
 of Sufiism among the educated. The walis were un- 
 tiring in the recital of the Jcaramat which God had 
 worked for them, and the populace drank in the 
 wonders greedily. The metaphysical and theological 
 side they left untouched. "This is a holy man," 
 they said, "who can work miracles; we must fear 
 and serve him." And so they would do without 
 much thought whether his morality might not be an- 
 tinomian and his theology pantheistic. To abate this 
 and other evils and bring back the faith of the 
 fathers was the task which Ibn Taymiya took up. 
 
 He was born near Damascus in 661 and educated 
 as a Hanbalite. His family had been Hanbalite for 
 generations, and he himself taught in that school and 
 was reckoned as the gxeatest Hanbalite of his time. 
 His position, too, was practically that of Ahmad ibn 
 Hanbal, modified by the necessities imposed by new 
 controversaries. Thus he was an anthropomorphist, 
 but of what exact shade is obscure. He was accused 
 of teaching that God was above His throne, could be 
 pointed at, and that He descended from His seat as 
 a man might, i.e., that He was in space. But he 
 certainly distinguished himself from the crasser ma- 
 
A MUJTAHID 275 
 
 berialists. He refused to be classed as the adherent 
 of any school or of any system save that of Muham- 
 mad and the agreement of the fathers. He claimed 
 for himself the rights of a mujtahid and went back to 
 first sources and principles in everything. His self- 
 confidence was extreme, and he smote down with 
 proud words the Rightly Guided Khalifas, Umar and 
 Ali, themselves. His bases were Qur'an, tradition 
 from the Prophet and from the Companions and anal- 
 ogy. Agreement, in the broad sense of the agree- 
 ment of the Muslim people, he rejected. If he had 
 accepted it he would have been forced to accept in- 
 numerable superstitions, beliefs, and practices — -espe- 
 cially the whole doctrine of the walis and their won- 
 ders — for their basis was agreement. The agree- 
 ment of the Companions he did accept, while con- 
 victing them right and left of error as individuals. 
 
 His life was filled up with persecutions and misfort- 
 une. He was a popular idol, and inquiries for his 
 judgment on theological and canonical questions kept 
 pouring in upon him. If there was no inquiry, and 
 he felt that a situation called for an expression of 
 opinion from him, he did not hesitate to send it out 
 with all formality. It is true that it is the duty of 
 every Muslim, so far as he can, to do away or at 
 least to denounce any illegality or unorthodox view or 
 practice which he may observe. This duty evi- 
 dently weighed heavily on Ibn Taymiya, and there 
 was fear at one time at the Mamluk court lest he 
 might go the way of Ibn Tumart. In one of these 
 utterances he defined the doctrine of God's qualities 
 as Ibn Hazm had done, and joined thereto denuncia- 
 
276 THEOLOGY 
 
 tions of the Ash'arite kalam and of the Qur'anic exe- 
 gesis of the mutakallims as a whole. They were 
 nothing but the heirs and scholars of philosophers, 
 idolaters, Magians, etc. ; and yet they dared to go 
 beyond the Prophet and his heirs and Companions. 
 The consequence of this fatwa or legal opinion was 
 that he was silenced for a time as a teacher. On 
 another occasion he gave out & fatwa on divorce, pro- 
 nouncing tahlil illegal. Tahlil is a device by which 
 an awkward section in the canon law is evaded. If a 
 man divorces his wife three times, or pronounces a 
 threefold divorce formula, he cannot remarry her until 
 she has been married to another man, has cohabited 
 with him and been divorced by him. Muslim ideas 
 of sexual purity are essentially different from ours, 
 and the custom has grown up, when a man has thus 
 divorced his wife in hasty anger, of employing another 
 to marry her on pledge of divorcing her again next 
 day. Sometimes the man so employed refuses to 
 carry out his contract; such refusal is a frequent 
 motif in oriental tales. To avoid this, the husband 
 not infrequently employs one of his slaves and then 
 presents him to his former wife the next day. A 
 slave can legally marry a free woman, but when he 
 becomes her property the marriage is ipso facto 
 annulled, because a slave cannot be the husband of 
 his mistress or a slave woman the wife of her master. 
 It is to Ibn Taymiya's credit that he was one of the 
 few to Hf t up their voices against this abomination. 
 His independence is shown at its best. 
 
 But it was with the Sufis that he had his worst con- 
 flicts, and at their hands he suffered most. In many 
 
CONTEOVEESY WITH SUFIS 277 
 
 points his career is parallel to tliat of Ahmad ibn 
 Hanbal, the Sufi movement taking the place that was 
 played by Mu'tazilism in the life of the earher saint. 
 One great difference, it may be remarked, was that al- 
 Ma'mun urged the persecution of Ibn Hanbal, while 
 an-Nasir, the great Mamluk Sultan (reg. 693, 698- 
 708, 709-741), supported Ibn Taymiya as far as he 
 possibly could. The beginning of the Sufi contro- 
 versy was characteristic. Ibn Taymiya heard that a 
 certain an-Nasr al-Manbiji (d. 719 ? ), a reputed fol- 
 lower of Ibn Arabi and of Ibn Sab'in, had reached a 
 position of influence in Cairo. That was enough to 
 make Ibn Taymiya address an epistle to him, in- 
 tended to turn him from his heresies. It is needless 
 to give in detail the position and content of the 
 epistle. He wrote as a strong monotheist of the old- 
 fashioned type and exposed and assailed unmercifully 
 the doctrine of Unity {ittihad) of the mystics. Al- 
 Manbiji retorted with countercharges of heresy, and, 
 as he had behind him aU the Sufis of Egypt — as 
 great an army as the Christian monks and ascetics or 
 earlier Egypt and much like to them — Ibn Taymiya 
 had to pay for his eagerness for a fight with long and 
 painful imprisonment at Cairo, Alexandria and Da- 
 mascus. Here it is evident that he had lost touch with 
 the drift of popular, and especially Egyptian, feeling. 
 But his fearlessness was like that of Ibn Hanbal 
 himself, and in 726 he gave out a fahva which ran 
 still straighter in the teeth of the beliefs of the peo- 
 ple and which sent him to a prison which he never left 
 alive. It had long been a custom in Islam to make 
 pious pilgrimage to the graves of saints and prophets 
 
278 THEOLOGY 
 
 and there to do reverence to their memory and to 
 ask their aid. It was part of that cult of saints 
 which had so overspread and overcome the earlier 
 simplicity of Islam. The most outstanding case in 
 point was, and is, the pilgrimage to the tomb of Mu- 
 hammad at al-Madina, which has come to be a more 
 or less essential part of the Hajj to the Ka'ba itself. 
 Against aU this Ibn Taymiya lifted a voice of em- 
 phatic protest. These shrines were in great part 
 false, and when they were genuine the visitation of 
 them was an idolatrous imitation of heathen practices. 
 Equally idolatrous was all invoking of saints or proph- 
 ets, including Muhammad himself ; to God alone 
 should prayer be directed. The clamor raised by 
 ihisf atwa was tremendous. This was no doctrine of 
 the schools which he had touched, but a bit of con- 
 crete religiosity which appealed to everyone. His 
 public life practically ended, and the practices which 
 he had denounced abide to this day. It is a bitter 
 satire on his position that when he died in 726 the 
 populace paid to his relics all these signs of super- 
 stitious reverence against which he had protested. 
 He became a saint, malgre lui. His work had been 
 to keep alive the Hanbalite doctrine and pass it on 
 unchanged to modern times. He did not destroy 
 philosophy : it was dead of itself before he came. 
 Nor Sufiism : it is still very much alive. Nor kalam : 
 it still continues in the form to which it had crystal- 
 lized by his time. But he and his disciples made 
 possible the Wahhabites and the monotheistic re- 
 vival of our day. The faith of Muhammad himself 
 was not to perish entirely from the earth. 
 
ASH-SHA'EANI 279 
 
 It would now be possible to pass at once to tlie 
 Wahhabite moYement in the latter part of the twelfth 
 century of the Hijra. All the elements for the ex- 
 planation of it and of the modern situation are in our 
 hands. But there is one figure which stands out so 
 clearly in an otherwise most obscure picture and is 
 so significant for the time, that some account must be 
 taken of it. It is that of ash-Sha'rani, theologian, 
 canonist, and mystic. He was a Cairene and died in 
 973. The rule of Egypt had passed half a century 
 before to the Ottoman Turks, and they governed by 
 means of a Turkish Pasha. The condition of the 
 people, as we find it sketched by ash-Sha'rani, was a 
 most unhappy one. They were bent down, and es- 
 pecially the peasantry, under a load of taxation. The 
 Turks found it advisable, too, to cultivate the friend- 
 ship of the canon lawyers and professional theologi- 
 ans in order to maintain their hold upon the people. 
 These canonists, in consequence, were rapidly becom- 
 ing an official class with official privileges. Further, 
 the process, the beginnings of which we have already 
 seen, by which religious science was narrowed io Jiqh, 
 had gone still further. Practically, the two classes of 
 theologians left were the canonists and the mystics. 
 And the mystics had fallen far from their pride of 
 power under the Mamluks. They now were of the 
 poor of the land, a kind of Essenes over against the 
 Pharisees of the schools. 
 
 Such, at least, is the picture of his time which ash- 
 Sha'rani gives. How far it is exact must remain un- 
 certain. For, of the many puzzling personalities in 
 Islam, ash-Sha'rani is perhaps for us the most unin- 
 
280 THEOLOGY 
 
 telligible. He combined the most abject superstitions 
 of a superstitious age and country with lofty ethical 
 indignation ; social humility of the most extreme with 
 an intellectual pride and arrogance rarely paralleled, 
 a keen and original grasp of the canon law of the 
 four schools with an utter submission of the intellect 
 to the inbreathings of the divine from without ; a 
 power of discreet silence as to the inconvenient with 
 an open-mouthed vehemence in other things. He 
 was a devoted follower of Ibn Arabi and defended his 
 memory against the accusation of heresy. Yet his 
 position is singularly different from that of Ibn Arabi, 
 and a doubt cannot but rise as to either his knowl- 
 edge, his intelligence, or his honesty. Practically 
 where he differs from the ordinary Muslim is in his 
 extension of the doctrine of saints. As to the Most 
 Beautiful Names (al-asma al-husna), he follows Ibn 
 Hazm. So, too, as to God's qualities, he follows the 
 older school and would prefer to leave them uncon- 
 sidered. But he is, otherwise and in general, a sound 
 Ash'arite, e.g., on the doctrine of predestination, and 
 of man's part in his works (iktisab). There is in him 
 no sign of the Plotinian pantheism of Ibn Arabi. 
 The doctrine of God's difference {mukhalafa) he 
 taught, and that He created the world by His will 
 and not by any emanation of energy. 
 
 But truth for him is not to be reached by specula- 
 tion and argument : its only basis is through the un- 
 veiling of the inner eye which brings us to the imme- 
 diate Vision of the Divine. Those who have reached 
 that Vision, guide and teach those who cannot or 
 have not. Upon that Vision all systems are built. 
 
THE UNSEEN WOELD 281 
 
 and reason can only serve the visionary as a defence 
 against the gainsayer or against his own too wild 
 thoughts. Naturally, with such a starting-point as 
 this the supernatural side of things (al-ghayb) receives 
 strong emphasis. The Jinn and the angels are most 
 intense realities. Ash-Sha'rani met them in familiar 
 converse. He met, too, al-Khadir, the undying pil- 
 grim saint who wanders through the lands, succoring 
 and guiding. The details of these interviews are 
 given with the greatest exactness. A Jinni in the 
 form of a dog ran into his house on such a day by 
 such a door, with a piece of European paper in his 
 mouth — this is a touch of genius — on which certain 
 theological questions were written. The Jinni wished 
 ash-Sha'rani's opinion as to them. Such was the 
 origin of one of his books, and another sprang from 
 a similarly exactly described talk with al-Khadir. Yet 
 he was content also with smaller mercies and reckons 
 as a Jcarama that he was enabled to read through a 
 certain book for some time at the rate of two and a 
 half times daily. To all this it would be possible of 
 course to say flatly that he lied. But such a judg- 
 ment applied to an oriental is somewhat crude, and 
 the knot of the mystic's mind in any land is not to be 
 so easily cut. Further, the doctrine of the waits is 
 developed by him at length. They possess a certain 
 illumination {ilham), which is, however, different from 
 the inspiration (wahy) of the prophets. So, too, they 
 never reach the grade of the prophets, or a nearness 
 to God where the requirements of a revealed law fall 
 away from them, i.e., they must always walk accord- 
 ing to the law of a prophet. They are all guided by 
 
282 THEOLOGY 
 
 God, whatever their particular Eule (tariqa) may be, 
 but the Eule of al-Junayd (p. 176) is the best because 
 it is in most essential agreement with the Law 
 (shari'a) of Islam. Their karamat are true and are a 
 consequence of their devout labors, for these are in 
 agi'eement with the Qur'an and the Sunna. The 
 order of nature will not be broken for anyone who 
 has not achieved more than is usual in religious 
 knowledge and exercises. All walis stand under a 
 regular hierarchy headed by the Qutb ; yet above 
 him in holiness stand the Companions of the Prophet. 
 This marks a very moderate position. Many Sufis 
 bad contended that the loalis stood higher than even 
 the prophets, not to speak of their Companions. 
 
 It will be seen that his position is essentially a 
 mediating one. He wishes to show that the beliefs 
 of the mystics and of the mutakallims are really one 
 although they are reached by different paths. In 
 _/%/i he made a similar attempt. The Sufis had al- 
 ways looked down on those theologians who were 
 canonists pure and simple. A study of canon law 
 was a necessity, they thought ; but as a propaedeutic 
 only. The canonists who went no further never 
 reached religion at all. Especially they held that no 
 Sufi should join himself to any of the four contend- 
 ing schools. Their controversies were upon insignif- 
 icant details which had nothing to do with the life 
 in God. But could it not be shown that their dif- 
 ferences were not actual — one view being true and 
 the other false — but were capable of being reduced 
 to a unity ? This was the problem that ash-Sha'rani 
 attacked. These differing opinions, he held, are 
 
THE WAHHABITES 283 
 
 adapted to different classes of men. Some men of 
 greater gifts and endurance can follow the hardest 
 of these opinions, while the easier are to be recognized 
 as concessions (ruJchsa) from God to the weakness of 
 others. Each man may follow freely the view which 
 appeals to him ; God has appointed it for him. 
 
 Ash-Sha'rani was one of the last original thinkers 
 in Islam ; for a thinker he was despite his dealings 
 with the Jinn and al-Khadir. Egypt keeps his 
 memory. A mosque in Cairo bears Ms name, as 
 does also a division of the Badawite darwishes. In 
 modern times his books have been frequently re- 
 printed, and his influence is one of the ferments in 
 the new Islam. 
 
 We must now pass over about two hundred years 
 and come to the latter part of the twelfth century of 
 the Hijra, a period nearly coinciding with the end of 
 the eighteenth of our era. There these two move- 
 ments come again to light. Wahhabism, the histori- 
 cal origin of which we have already seen (p. 60), is 
 a branch of the school of Ibn Taymiya. Manuscripts 
 of the works of Ibn Taymiya copied by the hand 
 of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab exist in Europe. So the 
 Wahhabites refused to accept as binding the de- 
 cisions of the four orthodox sects of canon law. 
 Agreement as a source they also reject. The whole 
 People of Muhammad can err and has erred. Only 
 the agreement of the Companions has binding force 
 for them. It is, therefore, the duty and right of every 
 man to draw his own doctrine from the Quran and 
 the traditions ; the systems of the schools should 
 have no weight with him. Again, they take the 
 
284 THEOLOGY 
 
 anthropomorphisms of the Qur'an in their literal 
 sense. God has a hand, God settles Himself on His 
 throne ; so it must be held " without inquiring how 
 and without comparison." They profess to be the 
 only true Muslims, applying to themselves the term 
 Muwahhids and calling all others Mushriks, assigners 
 of companions to God. Again, like Ibn Taymiya, 
 they reject the intercession of lualis with God. It is 
 allowable to ask of God for the sake of a saint but 
 not to pray to the saint. This applies also to Mu- 
 hammad. Pilgrimage to the tombs of saints, the 
 presenting of offerings there, all acts of reverence, 
 they also forbid. No regard should be paid even 
 to the tomb of the Prophet at al-Madina. All 
 such ceremonies are idolatrous. Whenever possible 
 the Wahhabites destroy and level the shrines of 
 saints. 
 
 Over other details, such as the prohibition of the 
 use of tobacco, we need not spend time. Wahhabism 
 as a political force is gone. It has, however, left the 
 Sanusi revolt as its direct descendant and what may 
 be the outcome of that Brotherhood we have no 
 means of guessing. It has also left a general revival 
 and reformation throughout the Church of Islam, 
 much parallel, as has been remarked, to the counter- 
 reformation which followed the Protestant Reforma- 
 tion in Europe. 
 
 The second movement is the revival of the influence 
 of al-Ghazzali. That influence never became ab- 
 solutely extinct and it seems to have remained espe- 
 cially strong in al-Yaman. In that corner of the Mus- 
 lim world generations of Sufis lived comparatively 
 
INFLUENCE OE AL-GHAZZALI 285 
 
 undisturbed, and it was the Sayyid Murtada, a native 
 of Zabid in Tiliama, who by his great commentary on 
 the Ihya of al-Ghazzali practically founded the modem 
 study of that book. There have been two editions 
 of this commentary in ten quarto volumes and many 
 of the Ihya itself and of other works by al-Ghazzali. 
 Whether his readers understand him fully or not, 
 there can be no question of the wide influence which 
 he is now exercising. At Mecca, for example, the 
 orthodox theological teaching is practically Ghaz- 
 zalian and the controversy throughout all Arabia is 
 whether Ibn Taymiya and al-Ghazzali can be called 
 Shaykhs of Islam. The Wahhabites hold that any- 
 one who thus honors al-Ghazzali is an unbeliever, and 
 the Meccans retort the same of the followers of Ibn 
 Taymiya. 
 
 These two tendencies then — that back to the simple 
 monotheism of Muhammad and that to an agnostic 
 mysticism — are the hopeful signs in modern Islam. 
 There are many other drifts in which there is no such 
 hope. Simple materialism under European, mostly 
 French, influence is one. A seeking of salvation in 
 the study of canon law is another. Canon law is still 
 the field to which an enormous proportion of Muslim 
 theologians turn. Again, there are various forms 
 of frankly pantheistic mysticism. That is especially 
 the case among Persians and Turks. For the body 
 of the people, religion is stiU overburdened, as in 
 Ibn Taymiya's days, with a mass of superstition. 
 Lives of lualis contaiuing the wildest and most 
 blasphemous stories abound and are eagerly read. 
 The books of ash-Sha'rani are especially rich in such 
 
286 THEOLOGY 
 
 hagiology. It is difficult for us to realize that stories 
 like the most extravagant in the TJiousand and One 
 Nights are the simplest possibilities to the masses of 
 Islam. The canon lawyers, still, in their discussions, 
 take account of the existence of Jinn, and no theo- 
 logian would dare to doubt that Solomon sealed them 
 up in brass bottles. Of philosophy, in the free and 
 large sense, there is no trace. Ibn Eushd.'s reply to 
 al-Ghazzali's " Destruction of the Philosophers " has 
 been printed, but only as a pendant to that work. 
 In it, too, Ibn Eushd carefully covers his great here- 
 sies. His tractates on the study of kalam, spoken of 
 above, have also been reprinted at Cairo from the 
 European edition. But these tractates are arranged 
 to give no clew to his real philosophy. The Arabic 
 Aristotelianism has perished utterly from the Muslim 
 lands. Of the modern Indian Mu'tazihsm no ac- 
 count need be taken here. It is derived from Europe 
 and is ordinary Christian Unitarianism, connecting 
 with Muhammad instead of with Jesus. 
 
 From the above sketch some necessary conditions 
 are clear, which must be fulfilled if there is to be a 
 chance for a future development in Islam. Educa- 
 tion must be widely extended. The proportion of 
 trained minds must be greatly increased and the bar- 
 rier between them and the commonalty removed. 
 The economy of teaching has failed ; it has destroyed 
 the doctrine which it sought to protect. Again, the 
 slavery of the disciple to the master must cease. It 
 must always be possible for the student, in defiance 
 of taqlid, to go back to first principles or to the 
 primary facts and to disregard what the great Imams 
 
THE PROBLEM OE THE EXJTUBE 287 
 
 and Mujtahids have taught. So much of health there 
 was in the Zahirite system. 
 
 Third, these primary facts must include the facts 
 of natural science. The student, emancipated from 
 the control of the schools, must turn from the study 
 of himself to an examination of the great world. And 
 that examination must not be cosmological but bio- 
 logical; it must not lose itself in the infinities but 
 find itself in concrete realities. It must experiment 
 and test rather than build lofty hypotheses. 
 
 But can the oriental mind thus deny itself? The 
 English educational experiment in Egypt may go far 
 to answer that question. 
 
APPENDICES 
 
 I. Illustrative Documents Teanslatbd fbom the Ababic. 
 n. Selected Bibliography. 
 III. Chronological Table. 
 
APPENDIX I 
 
 1. Ash-Shahrastani on the Classification of Muslim Sects. 
 8. Two Tkaditions from Muhammad on the Essentials op 
 Islam. 
 
 3. A short Creed by al-Ash'ari. 
 
 4. A SHORT Creed by al-Ghazzali. 
 
 5. A SHORT Creed by an-Nasafi (Mataridite). 
 
 6. A Scholastic exposition of the Fundamentalb of The- 
 
 ology. 
 
 7. Analysis of a Treatise in Canon Law. 
 
 Notes have been added where such appeared called for, but the 
 index, facilitating reference to the body of the book, renders a 
 full commentary unnecessary. The student should use the indez 
 as a Tooabulary of technical terms, referring for their explanation 
 to the passages where they occur. 
 
 ASH-SHAHBASTANI on the OLASSmOATION of MUSLIM BEOTS 
 
 Then I applied myself to what of arrangement was easy of 
 attainment and to what of attainment was easy of an'angement, 
 until I had crowded them [the different opinions] into four 
 fundamentals, which are the great principles. The first 
 fundamental concerns the Qualities {si/at) with the Unity 
 (tawhid) ; it embraces the question of the eternal (azali) Qual- 
 ities, affirmed by some and denied by others, and of the ex- 
 position of the essential Qualities (si/at adh-dhat) and of the 
 active Qualities (si/at al-Ji'T) and of what is necessary in God 
 Most High and whfit is possible for Him and what is impos- 
 sible ; it involves the controversies between the Ash'arites and 
 the Karramites and the Anthropomorphists (mujassims) and 
 the Mu'tazilites. The second fundamental concerns decree 
 {qadar) and justice {adl) ; it embraces the question of destiny 
 (qada) and decree {qadar) ; of force (jabr) and acquisition 
 
 391 
 
292 APPENDIX I 
 
 {kasb) ; of the willing of good and of evil and of the decreed 
 and the known, affirmed by some and denied by others ; it 
 involves the controversies between the Qadarites and Najjarites 
 and Jabarites and Ash'arites and Karramites. The third 
 fundamental concerns promise (wa'd) Oad the decisions {hu- 
 kms) ; it embraces the question of faith {iman) and repentance 
 (iawba) and threatening {wa'id) and postponing (irja) and 
 pronouncing anyone an unbeliever (takfir) and leading anyone 
 astray {tadlU), affirmed by some and denied by others ; it 
 involves the controversies between the Murji'ites and the 
 Wa'idites and the Mu'tazilites and the Ash'arites and the 
 Karramites. The fourth fundamental concerns tradition 
 (sam) and reason (aql) and the prophetic mission (risala) 
 and the imamate ; it embraces the questions of the determi- 
 nation of actions as good (tahsin) or vile (taqbih) ; of the ad- 
 vantageous (salah) and most advantageous (aslah) ; of be- 
 nignity (lutf) ; of the prophets being guarded against sin 
 (isma) ; of the condition of the imamate, by statute (nass) 
 according to some and by agreement {ijma) according to 
 others, and how it is transferred on the view of those who say 
 it is by statute, and how it is fixed on the view of those who 
 say it is by agreement ; it involves the controversies between 
 the Shi'ites and the Kharijites and the Mu'tazilites and the 
 Karramites and the Ash'arites. — Translated from Cureton's 
 Arabic text, p. 4. 
 
 n 
 
 THE PEOPHKT IN A TBADIMON 
 
 "Islam is built upon five things; testimony that there is 
 no god but God and that Muhammad is the Apostle of God. 
 Prayer (salaf), the Poor-rate (zakat), Pilgrimage (kajj) and 
 Fast (sawm) in Ramadan.'' 
 
 A TKADITION OF THE PROPHET 
 
 Jibril came in the form of an Arab of the desert and sat 
 down so that his knees touched the knees of the Prophet and 
 said, "O Apostle of God, what is Islam?" He said, "That 
 thou should bear witness that there is no god save God and 
 
MUHAMMAD; AL-ASH'ARI 293 
 
 that I am the Apostle of God ; that thou shouldest perform 
 the prayers {salat) and bring the poor-rate {zakat) and fast in 
 the month of Eamadan and pilgrimage to the House it the 
 way is possible for thee." He said, " Thou hast spoken truly." 
 Then he said, "What is Faith (imaii)?" The Prophet said, 
 "That thou should believe in God and His angels and His 
 books and His messengers and in the Last Day, and that thou 
 should believe in the decreeing (qadar) both of good and 
 of evil." He said, " Thou hast spoken truly." Then he said, 
 "What is right doing (ihsan)?" The Prophet said, "That 
 thou should serve God as though thou sawest Him ; for 
 though thou seest Him not. He sees thee." He said, " Thou 
 hast spoken truly." Then he said, " When shall be the Last 
 Day (as-sa'a) ? " The Prophet said, " The questioned know- 
 eth not more of that than the questioner." Then he arose and 
 ■went out. And the Prophet said, " That was Jibril ; he came 
 to you to teach you your religion {din)." — Translated from 
 Cureton's teaA of ash-Shahrasiani, p. 27. 
 
 in 
 
 A SHOBT OBEED BY AL-ASH*ABI 
 
 Our doctrine which we teach and our religion {diyana) which we follow 
 consists in clinging fast to the Book of God and the Usage (sunna) of 
 His Prophet and to that which is handed down from the CompanionB, 
 their immediate followers (tabi's) and from the leaders (imams) in 
 tradition — with that we take refuge; and we teach that which 
 Ahmad ibn Hanbal — may God illumine his face, exalt his rank and 
 make great his reward — ^followed ; and we shun that which is op- 
 posed to his doctrine. For he is the excellent leader, the perfect 
 chief, through whom God made plain the truth, when error was made 
 manifest, and showed the path and smote down the innovations of 
 the uinoTators, the deviations of the deviators and the doubts of the 
 doubters. So, the mercy of God be upon him for an appointed 
 leader and an instructed chief, and upon all thQ leaders of the Mus- 
 lims. 
 
 The sum of our doctrine is this, that we believe in God, His 
 Angels, His Books, His Apostles, in all that has come from 
 God, and what trustworthy men (tkiqat) have reported from 
 
294 APPENDIX I 
 
 the Apostles of God ; we oppose nothing thereof. That God 
 is One God, Single, One, Eternal ; beside Him no God exists ; 
 He has taken to Himself no wife (sahiba), nor child (walad) ; 
 and that Muhammad is His Servant (abd) and His Apostle. 
 That Paradise and Hell are Verity and that the Hour (as-sa'a) 
 will come without doubt, and God will arouse those that are 
 in the graves. That God has settled Himself (istawa) upon 
 His throne, as He has said, (Qur. 20, 4); "the Kahman has 
 settled Himself upon His throne." That God has a counte- 
 nance, as He has said, (Qur. 55, 27) ; " and the countenance of 
 thy Lord will abide, full of majesty and glory ; " and two 
 hands, as He has said, (Qur. 5, 69); " much more ! both His 
 hands are spread oiit," and (Qur. 38, 75); " that which I have 
 created with both My hands ; " and two eyes, without asking 
 how (bila hayfj), as He has said, (Qur. 54, 14) ; " which swims 
 forth under Our eyes." That whoever thinks that God's name 
 is other than He, is in error. That God has Knowledge (ilm), 
 as He has said, (Qur. 35, 12); "Not one woman becomes 
 pregnant and brings forth, except by His knowledge." We 
 maintain that God has Power [qudra), as He has said, (Qur. 
 41, 14) ; "and have they not seen that God who created them 
 is stronger than they 1 " We maintain that God has Hearing 
 (sam) and Seeing (basar) and do not deny it, as do the Mu'- 
 tazilites, Jahmites and Kharijites. We teach that God's Word 
 (kalam) is uncreated, and that He has never created anything 
 except by saying to it, " Be ! " and it forthwith became, as He 
 has said, (Qur. 16, 42) ; "Our speech to anything when We 
 willed it was, ' Be ' and it was." Nothing exists upon earth, 
 be it good or bad, but that which God wills ; but all things 
 are by God's Will (mashya). No one is able to do anything 
 before God does it, neither is anyone independent of God, 
 nor can he withdraw himself from God's Knowledge. There 
 is no Creator but God. The works {amals) of creatures are 
 created and predestined by God, as He said, (Qur. 37, 94) ; 
 " and God has created you and what ye do." Man is able to 
 create nothing ; but they are created, as He has said, (Qur. 
 35, 31) ; " Is there any Creator except God? " and (Qur. 16, 17) 
 
al-ash'aei 295 
 
 " and is He who created like him who created not ? " and 
 (Qur. 52, 35) ; " were they created out of nothing, or are they 
 the creators ? " and such passages are many in the Qur'an. 
 And God maintains the believers in obedience to Him, is 
 gracious unto them, cares for them, reforms them, and guides 
 them aright; but the unbelievers He leads astray, guides 
 them not aright, vouchsafes them not Faith (iman), by His 
 Grace, as the People of error and pride maintain. For should 
 He be gracious unto them and help them aright, then would 
 they be pious, and should He guide them aright, then would 
 they allow themselves to be guided aright, as He has said, 
 (Qur. 7, 177) ; "whom God guideth aright, he allows himself 
 to be guided aright, and whom He leads astray, they are the 
 losers." God is able to help the unbelieving aright and to 
 be gracious unto them, so that they shall become believing, 
 but He wills that they shall be unbelieving as is known. For 
 He has made them impervious to all help and sealed their 
 hearts. Good and Evil happen according to the Destiny [qada) 
 and Decree (qadar) of God for good and evil, for the sweet 
 and the bitter. We know that the misfortune that befalls us 
 is not in order that we may go astray, and that the good fort- 
 une which befalls us is not in order that we may go aright. 
 We have no control over that which is good or hurtful to us, 
 except so far as God wills. We flee from our anxieties to God 
 and commit at all times our distress and poverty to Him. We 
 teach that the Qur'an is God's Word, and that it is uncreated, 
 and that whosoever says that it is created is an unbeliever 
 {kafir). We believe that God at the Day of Resurrection 
 {yawm al-qiyomia) will be visible to the eyes, as the moon is 
 seen upon the night of the full moon ; the believers will see 
 Him, according to traditions which have come down from the 
 Prophet. We teach that while the believers will see Him, 
 the unbelievers will be separated from Him by a wall of divis- 
 ion, as God has said, (Qur. 83, 15) ; " Surely not ! They will 
 be separated from their Lord, upon that Day." We teach that 
 Moses besought God that he might see Him in this world ; 
 then God revealed Himself to the mountain and turned it into 
 
296 APPENDIX 1 
 
 dust and taught Moses thereby that he could not see Him in 
 this world (Qur. 7, 139). We are o£ the opinion that we may 
 not accuse anyone of unbelief {kufr), who prays towards Mec- 
 ca, on account of sin committed by him, such as unchastity, 
 theft, wine drinking, as the Kharijites believe, who judge that 
 these thereby become unbelievers. We teach that whoever 
 commits a great sin {kabira), or anything like it, holding it 
 to be allowed, is an unbeliever, since he does not believe in 
 its prohibition. We teach that Islam is a wider idea than 
 Faith (iman), so that not every Islam is Faith. We believe 
 that God turns the hearts upside down, and holds them 
 between two of His fingers, that He lays the heavens upon a 
 finger and the earth upon a finger, according to the tradition 
 from the Prophet. We believe that God will not leave in 
 Hell any of those who confess His Unity (muwahhid) and hold 
 fast to the Faith, and that there is no Hell for him whom the 
 Prophet has by his witness appointed to Paradise. We hope 
 for Paradise for sinners and fear on their account, that they 
 will be punished in Hell. We teach that God will release a 
 few out of Hell, on account of Muhammad's intercession 
 {skafa'a) after they have been scorched there. We believe in 
 the punishment of the grave. We believe that the Tank 
 (hawdj and the Balance are Verities : that the Bridge as-Sirat 
 is a Verity ; that the Arousing (ba'th) after death is a Verity ; 
 that God will set up His creatures in a place [mawqif) and will 
 hold a reckoning with the Believers. * We believe that Faith 
 {iman) consists in word (qawl) and in work (amatj and that 
 it increases and diminishes. We trust in the sound Tra- 
 ditions handed down from the Apostle of God, which trust- 
 worthy people (thiqat), just man from just man, up to the 
 Apostle, have transmitted. We hold by the love of the early 
 
 * For Muslim eschatology reference may still be made to Sale's 
 introduction to the Qur'an, § 4. The punishment of the grave is 
 what, in the case of unbelievers, follows the inquisition by the two 
 angels Mwrikar and Ndkir; see on them Lane's Modern Egyptians, 
 chap. iXTiii; on the whole subject, see translations by Gautier and 
 WolfE and tractate by Ruling (Bibliography, p. 367). 
 
AL-ASH'ARI 297 
 
 Believers (salaf), whom God chose to be Companions to the 
 Prophet, and we praise them with the praise with which God 
 praised them, and we carry on their succession. We assert 
 that the Imam succeeding the Apostle of God was Abu Bakr ; 
 that God through him made the Beligion {din) mighty, and 
 caused him to conquer the Apostates {murtadds) . The Mus- 
 lims made him their Imam, just as Muhammad had made him 
 Imam at prayers. Then followed [as legal Imam] Umar ibn 
 al-Khattab ; then Uthman ibn Affan ; his murderers killed 
 him out of wickedness and enmity ; then Ali ibn Abi Talib. 
 These are the Imams after the Apostle, and their Khalifate is 
 that of the Prophetic ofBce [i.e., they are, though not prophets, 
 successors of the Prophet]. We bear witness of Paradise for 
 the Ten (al-asharatu-l-mubashshara), to whom the Apostle 
 bore witness of it, and we carry on the succession of the other 
 Companions of the Prophet and hold ourselves far from that 
 which was in dispute between them. We hold that the four 
 Imams were in the true way, were rightly guided and excel- 
 lent, BO that no one equals them in excellence. We hold as 
 true the traditions which the People of Tradition (naql) have 
 established, concerning the descent of God to the lowest 
 heaven (sajrea ad-dunya), and that the Lord will say, " Is 
 there a supplicant ? Is there a seeker for forgiveness ? " and 
 the rest of that which they have handed down and established, 
 contrary to that which the mistaken and misled opine. We 
 ground ourselves in our opposition on the Qur'an, the Sunna 
 of the Prophet, the agreement of the Muslims and what is in 
 accordance therewith, but put forth no novelty (bid'a) not 
 sanctioned by God, and opine of God nothing that we have 
 not been taught. We teach that God will come on the Day 
 of Eesurrection, as He has said, (Qur. 89, 23) ; " When the 
 earth shall be turned to dust, and the Lord shall appear and 
 the angels, rank on rank," and that God is near to His ser- 
 vants, in what way {Jcai^a) He wills, as He has said, (Qur. 50, 
 15) ; " and We are nearer to him than the artery in his neck ; " 
 and (Qur. 53, 8) ; " Then He approached and came near and 
 was two bows' length distant or even nearer." To our Eelig- 
 
298 APPENDIX I 
 
 ion (din) belongs further, that we on Fridays and on festival 
 days pray behind every person, pious and profane — so are the 
 conditions for congregational prayers, as it is handed down 
 from Abd Allah ibn Umar that he prayed behind al-Hajjaj. 
 To our Religion belongs the wiping (mash) of the inner boots 
 (khuffs) upon a journey and at home, in contradiction to the 
 deniers of this.* We uphold the prayer for peace for the 
 Imams of the Muslims, submission to their office, and main- 
 tain the error of those who hold it right to rise against them 
 whenever there may be apparent in them a falling away from 
 right. We are against armed rebellion against them and civil 
 war. 
 
 We believe in the appearance of anti-Christ {ad-Bajjal) ac- 
 cording to the tradition handed down from the Prophet ; in 
 the punishment of the grave, and in Munkar and Nakir and in 
 their questions to the buried in their graves. We hold the 
 tradition of the journey to heaven [mi'raj, Qur. 17) of Mu- 
 hammad as true, and declare many of the visions in sleep to 
 be true, and we say that there is an explanation for them. 
 We uphold the alms for the dead of the Muslims and prayer 
 for them, and believe that God will help them therewith. We 
 hold as true that there are enchanters in; the world, and that 
 enchantment is and exists. We hold as a religious duty the 
 prayer which is held over the dead of those who have prayed 
 toward Mecca, whether they have been believers or godless ; 
 we uphold also their right of testation. We acknowledge 
 that Paradise and Hell are created, and that whoever dies or 
 is killed, dies or is killed at his appointed time (ajaT) ; that 
 the articles of sustenance (j-izq) from God, with which He 
 sustains His creatures, are permitted (halal) and forbidden 
 (haram) ; t that Satan makes evil suggestions to men, and puts 
 
 * This, one of the dividing questions between Sunnites and Shi- 
 'ites, belongs to theology as well as law. See p. Sli and Goldziher, 
 Zur LiteraturgeschicMe der Si^a, p. 87. 
 
 fThe Mu'tazilites held that articles of sustenance of a forbidden 
 nature, such as pork or wine, could not be called rizg in this tech- 
 nical sense ; that God could not so use them. The orthodox re- 
 
al-ash'abi 299 
 
 them in doubt, and causes them to be possessed, contrary to 
 that which the Mu'tazilites and the Jahmitea maintain, as God 
 said, (Qur. 2, 276) ; "Those wh'o take usury will [at the Resur- 
 rection] stand there like one whom Satan causes to be pos- 
 sessed by madness,'' and (Qur. 114, 4 ff.) ; "I take my refuge 
 in God, from the evil suggestion, from the stealthy one who 
 makes suggestions in the hearts of men, by means of men and 
 Jinn." We affirm that God may distinguish the pious by 
 signs which He manifests through them. Our teaching con- 
 cerning the little children of the polytheists (mushriqs) is this, 
 that God will kindle a fire in the other world for them, and 
 will say, "Eun in there ; " — as the tradition says.* We be- 
 lieve that God knows what men do and what they will to do, 
 what happens and how that which does not happen, if it 
 should happen, would happen. We believe in the obedience 
 of the Imams and in their counsel of the Muslims. We con- 
 sider right the separation from every inciter to innovation 
 (bid'd) and the turning aside from the People of wandering 
 desires {ahl al-ahwa) . — Translated from the Arabic text in Spitta's 
 Zur Gesckichte al-As'ari's, pp. 133 ff. 
 
 torted that a man might live his life out on forbidden things ; had 
 he then been independent of God as to his sustenance ? The 
 Mu'tazilites defined rizq as " a possession which its possessor eats " 
 and as " that from which one is not hindered from profiting " ; the 
 orthodox, as a name for that which God sends to man and the other 
 animals and they eat it and profit by it. 
 
 * Some will run into the fire and find themselves immediately in 
 Paradise ; these would have been beUevers. Others will refuse, 
 and will be treated as their parents. 
 
300 APPENDIX I 
 
 IV 
 
 A SHORT CREED BT AL-GHAZZALI 
 
 An exposition of the Creed of the People of the Sunna on the two Words 
 of Witnessing (kalimatan ash-shahada) which form one of the 
 Foundations of Islam. 
 
 [Intended to be committed to memory by children. It forms the 
 first section of the second book of his Ihya, vol. ii, pp. 17-42 of 
 edit, of Cairo with commentary of the Sayyid Murtada.] 
 
 We say — and in God is our trust — Praise belongeth unto 
 God, the Beginner, the Bringer back, the Doer of what He 
 ■willeth, the Lord of the Glorious Throne and of Mighty Grasp, 
 the Guider of His chosen creatures to the right path and to the 
 true way, the Granter of benefits to them after the witness to 
 the Unity (tawhid) by guarding their articles of belief from 
 obscurities of doubt and opposition. He that bringeth them to 
 follow His Apostle, the Chosen one {al-Mustafa), and to imi- 
 tate the traces of his Companions, the most honored, through 
 His aid and right guidance revealed to them in His essence 
 and His works by His beautiful qualities which none perceives, 
 save he who inclines his ear. He is the witness who maketh 
 known to them that He in His essence is One without any 
 partner (s/iari^). Single without any similar, Eternal without 
 any opposite. Separate without any like. He is One, Prior 
 (qadim) with nothing before Him, from eternity (azali) with- 
 out any beginning, abiding in existence with none after Him, 
 to eternity (afiadi) without any end, subsisting without ending, 
 abiding without termination. He hath not ceased and He 
 will not cease to be described with glorious epithets ; finish- 
 ing and ending, through the cutting off of the ages and the 
 terminating of allotted times, have no rule over Him, but He 
 is the First and Last, the External and the Internal, and He 
 knoweth everything. 
 
 We witness that He is not a body possessing form, nor a 
 substance possessing bounds and limits : He does not resemble 
 
AL-6HAZZALI 301 
 
 bodies, either in limitation or in accepting division. He is 
 not a substance and substances do not exist in Him ; and He 
 is not an accident and accidents do not exist in Him, nay He 
 does not resemble an entity, and no entity resembles Him ; 
 nothing is like Him and He is not like anything ; measure 
 does not bound Him and boundaries do not contain Him ; the 
 directions do not surround Him and neither the earth nor the 
 heavens are on different sides of Him. Lo, He is seated flrmly 
 upon His Throne (arsh), after the manner which He has said, 
 and in the sense in which He willed a being seated firmly 
 {isHwa), which is far removed from contact and fixity of loca- 
 tion and being established and being enveloped and being re- 
 moved. The Throne does not carry Him, but the Throne and 
 those that carry it are carried by the grace of His power and 
 mastered by His grasp. He is above the Throne and the 
 Heavens and above everything unto the limit of the Pleiades, 
 with an aboveness which does not bring Him nearer to the 
 Throne and the Heavens, just as it does not make Him further 
 from the earth and the Pleiades. Nay, He is exalted by de- 
 grees from the Throne and the Heavens, just as He is exalted 
 by degrees from the earth and the Pleiades ; and He, in spite 
 of that, is near to every entity and is " nearer to a creature 
 than the artery of his neck " (Qur. 50, 15), and He witnesseth 
 everything, since His nearness does not resemble the nearness 
 of bodies, just as His essence does not resemble the essence 
 of bodies. He does not exist in anything, just as nothing ex- 
 ists in Him : He has exalted Himself far therefrom that a 
 place should contain Him, just as He has sanctified Himself 
 far therefrom that time should limit Him. Nay, He was be- 
 fore He had created Time and Place and He is now above that 
 which He was above, and distinct from His creatures through 
 Hia qualities. There is not in His essence His equal, nor in 
 His equal His essence. He is far removed from change of 
 state or of place. Events have no place in Him, and mishaps 
 do not befall him. Nay, He does not cease, through Hia 
 glorious epithets, to be far removed from changing, and 
 through His perfect qualities to be independent of perfecting 
 
302 APPENDIX I 
 
 increase. The existence of His essence is known by reason ; 
 His essence is seen with the eyes, a benefit from Him and a 
 grace to the pious, in the Abiding Abode and a completion in 
 beatitude from Him, through gazing upon His gracious face. 
 
 We witness that He is living, powerful, commanding, con- 
 quering ; inadequacy and weakness befall Him not ; slumber 
 seizes Him not, nor sleep. Passing away does not happen to 
 Him, nor death. He is Lord of the Worlds, the Visible and 
 the Invisible, that of Force and that of Might ; He possesses 
 Rule and Conquest and Creation and Command ; the heavens 
 are rolled in His right hand and the created things are over- 
 come in His grasp ; He is separate in creating and inventing ; 
 He is one in bringing into existence and innovating ; He 
 created the creation and their works and decreed their sus- 
 tenance and their terms of life ; not a decreed thing escapes 
 His grasp and the mutations of things are not distant from 
 His power ; the things which He hath decreed cannot be 
 reckoned and the things which He knoweth have no end. 
 
 We witness that He knoweth all the things that can be 
 known, comprehending that which happeneth from the bounds 
 of the earths unto the topmost heavens ; no grain in the earth 
 or the heavens is distant from His knowledge. Yea, He 
 knows the creeping of the black ant upon the rugged rook in 
 a dark night, and He perceives the movement of the mote in 
 the midst of the air ; He knows the secret and the concealed 
 and has knowledge of the suggestions of the minds and the 
 movements of the thoughts and the concealed things of the 
 inmost parts, by a knowledge which is prior from eternity ; He 
 has not ceased to be describable by it, from the ages of the 
 ages, not by a knowledge which renews itself and arises in 
 His essence by arrival and removal. 
 
 We witness that He is a Wilier of the things that are, a 
 Director of the things that happen ; there does not come 
 about in the world, seen or unseen, little or much, small or 
 great, good or evil, advantage or disadvantage, faith or un- 
 belief, knowledge or ignorance, success or loss, increase or 
 diminution, obedience or rebellion, except by His will. What 
 
AL-GHAZZALI 303 
 
 He wills is, and what He wills not is not. Not a glance of one 
 who looks, or a slip of one who thinks is outside of His will : 
 He is the Creator, the Bringer back, the Doer of that which 
 He wills. There is no opponent of His command and no re- 
 peater of His destiny and no refuge for a creature from dis- 
 obeying Him, except by His help and His mercy, and no 
 strength to a creature to obey Him except by His wQl Even 
 though mankind and the Jinn and the Angels and the Shaytans 
 were to unite to remove a single grain in the world or to bring 
 it to rest without His will, they would be too weak for that. 
 His will subsists in His essence as one of His qualities ; He 
 hath not ceased to be described through it as a WiUer, in His 
 infinity, of the existence of things at their appointed times 
 which He hath decreed. So they come into existence at their 
 appointed times even as He has willed in His infinity without 
 precedence or sequence. They happen according to the agree- 
 ment of His knowledge and His will, without exchange or 
 change in planning of things, nor with arranging of thoughts 
 or awaiting of time, and therefore one thing does not distract 
 Him from another. 
 
 And we witness that He is a Hearer and a Seer. He hears 
 and sees, and no audible thing is distant from His hearing, and 
 no visible thing is far from His seeing, however fine it may 
 be. Distance does not curtain off His hearing and darkness 
 does not dull His seeing ; He sees without eyeball or eyelid, 
 and hears without earholes or ears, just as He knows without a 
 brain and seizes without a limb and creates without an instru- 
 ment, since His qualities do not resemble the qualities of 
 created things, just as His essence does not resemble the es- 
 sences of created things. 
 
 And we witness that He speaks, commanding, forbidding, 
 praising, threatening, with a speech from all eternity, prior, 
 subsisting in His essence not resembling the speech of created 
 things. It is not a sound which originates through the slip- 
 ping out of air, or striking of bodies ; nor is it a letter which 
 is separated off by closing down a lip or moving a tongue. 
 And the Qur'an and the Tawrat [the Law of Moses] and the 
 
304 APPENDIX I 
 
 Injil [the Gospel] and the Zabbur [the Psalms] are His book 
 revealed to His Apostles. And the Qur'an is repeated by 
 tongues, written in copies, preserved in hearts : yet it, in spite 
 of that, is prior, subsisting in the essence of God, not subject 
 to division and separation through being transferred to hearts 
 and leaves. And Musa heard the speech of God without a 
 sound and without a letter, just as the pious see the essence of 
 God, in the other world, without a substance or an attribute. 
 
 And since He has those qualities. He is Living, Knowing, 
 Powerful, a Wilier, a Hearer, a Seer, a Speaker, through Life, 
 Power, Knowledge, Will, Hearing, Seeing, Speech, not by a 
 thing separated from His essence. 
 
 We witness that there is no entity besides Him, except what 
 is originated from His action and proceeds from His justice, 
 after the most beautiful and perfect and complete and just of 
 ways. He is wise in His actions, just in His determinations ; 
 there is no analogy between His justice and the justice of 
 creatures, since tyranny is conceivable in the case of a creature, 
 when he deals with the property of some other than himself, 
 but tyranny is not conceivable in the case of God. For He 
 never encounters any property in another besides Himself, so 
 that His dealing with it might be tyranny. Everything besides 
 Him, consisting of men and Jinn and Angels and Shaytans 
 and the heavens and the earth and animals and plants and 
 inanimate things and substance and attribute and things per- 
 ceived and things felt, is an originated thing, which He 
 created by His power, before any other had created it, after 
 it had not existed, and which He invented after that it had 
 not been a thing, since He in eternity was an entity by Him- 
 self, and there was not along with Him any other than He. 
 So He originated the creation thereafter, by way of manifesta- 
 tion of His power, and verification of that which had preceded 
 of His Will, and of that which existed in eternity of His 
 Word ; not because He had any lack of it or need of it. And 
 He is gracious in creating and in making for the first times 
 and in imposing of duty — not of necessity — and He is gener- 
 ous in benefiting ; and well-doing and gracious helping be- 
 
AL-OHAZZALI 305 
 
 long to Him, since He is able to bring npon TTia creatares 
 different kinds of punishment and to test them ■with different 
 varieties of pains and ailments. And if He did that, it would 
 be justice on His part, and would not be a -vile action or 
 tjiannv in Him. He rewardeth His believing creatures for 
 their acts of obedience by a decision which is of generosity 
 and oi promise and not of right and of obligation, since no 
 particular action toward anyone is incumbent upon Him, and 
 tvrauny is inconceivable in Him, and no one possesses a right 
 against Him. And His right to acts of obedience is binding 
 upon the creatures because He has made it binding through 
 the tongues of His prophets, not bv reason alone. But He 
 sent apostles and manifested their truth by plain miracles, 
 and they brought His commands and forbiddings tuid promis- 
 ings and threatenings. So, belief in them as to what they 
 have brought is incumbent upon the creation. 
 
 The Seoont) 'Wobd of 'Whsessisg is witnessing that the 
 apostolste belongs to the apostle, and that God sent the un- 
 lettered Quiayshite prophet, Muhammad, with his apostolate 
 to the totality of Arabs and foreigners and Jinn and men. 
 And He abrogated by his law the other laws, except so much 
 of them as He confirmed ; and made him excellent over the 
 rest of the prophets and made him the Lord of Mankind and 
 declared incomplete the Faith that consists in witnessing the 
 Unity, which is saying, "There is no god except God," so 
 long as there is not joined to thsit a witnessing to the Apostle, 
 which is saying, '■ Muhammad is the Apostle of God." And 
 He made obligatory upon the creation belief in him, as to all 
 which he narrated concerning the things of this world and the 
 next. And th.<it He wotild not accept the faith of a creature, 
 so long as he did not believe in that which the Prophet nar- 
 rated concerning things after death. The first of that is the 
 question of Munkar and Xakir ; these are two awful and ter- 
 rible beings who will cause the creature to sit up in his grave, 
 complete, both soul and body ; and they will ask him, • ' Who 
 is thy Lord, and what is thy religion {din), and who is thy 
 Prophet ? " They are the two testers in the grave and their 
 
306 APPENDIX I 
 
 questioning is the first testing after death. And that he 
 should believe in the punishment of the grave — that it is a 
 Verity and that its judgment upon the body and the soul is 
 just, according to what God wills. And that he should be- 
 lieve in the Balance — it with the two scales and the tongue, 
 the magnitude of which is like unto the stages of the heavens 
 and the earth. In it, deeds are weighed by the power of God 
 Most High ; and its weights in that day will be of the weight 
 of motes and mustard seeds, to show the exactitude of its jus- 
 tice. The leaves of the good deeds will be placed in a beauti- 
 ful form in the scale of light ; and then the Balance will be 
 weighed down by them according to the measure of their de- 
 gree with God, by the grace of God. And the leaves of evil 
 deeds will be cast in a vile form into the scale of darkness, 
 and the Balance will be light with them, through the justice 
 of God. And that he should believe that the Bridge {as-sirat) 
 is a Verity ; it is a bridge stretched over the back of Hell 
 (jahannam), sharper than a sword and finer than a hair. The 
 feet of the imbelievers slip upon it, by the decree of God, 
 and fall with them into the Fire. But the feet of believers 
 stand firm upon it, by the grace of God, and so they pass into 
 the Abiding Abode. And that he should believe in the Tank 
 (hawd), to which the people shall go down, the Tank of Muh- 
 hammad from which the believers shall drink before entering 
 the Garden and after passing the Bridge. Whoever drinks 
 of it a single draught will never thirst again thereafter. Its 
 breadth is a journey of a month ; its water is whiter than milk 
 and sweeter than honey ; around it are ewers in numbers like 
 the stars of heaven ; into it flow two canals from al-Kawthar 
 (Qur. io8). And that he should believe in the Beckoning 
 and in the distinctions between men in it, him with whom it 
 will go hard in the Beckoning and him to whom compas- 
 sion will be shown therein, and him who enters the Garden 
 without any reckoning, — these are the honored (muqarrab). 
 God Most High will ask whomsoever He will of the prophets, 
 concerning the carrying of His message, and whomsoever He 
 will of the unbelievers, concerning the rejection of the mes- 
 
AL-GHAZZALI 307 
 
 sengers; and He will ask the innovators (mubtadi's) concern- 
 ing the Sunna; and the Muslims concerning works. And 
 that he should believe that the attestors of God's Unity 
 (muwahhids) will be brought forth from the Fire, after ven- 
 geance has been taken on them, so that there will not remain 
 in Hell an attestor of God's Unity. And that he should be- 
 lieve in the intercession {shafa'a) of the prophets, next of the 
 learned {ulama), next of the martyrs, next of the rest of the 
 believers — each according to his dignity and rank with God 
 Most High. And he who remains of the believers, and has no 
 intercessor, shall be brought forth of the grace of God, whose 
 are Might and Majesty. So there shall not abide eternally in 
 the Fire a single believer, but whoever has in his heart the 
 weight of a single grain of faith shall be brought forth there- 
 from. And that he should confess the excellence of the Com- 
 panions — May God be well pleased with them ! — and their 
 rank ; and that the most excellent of mankind, after the 
 Prophet, is Abu Bakr, next Umar, next Uthman, next Ali — 
 May God be well pleased with them ! And that he should 
 think well of all the Companions and should praise them like 
 as he praises God, whose are Might and Majesty, and His 
 Apostles. All this is of that which has been handed down in 
 traditions from the Prophet and in narratives from the follow- 
 ers. He who confesses all this, relying upon it, is of the 
 People of the Truth and the Company of the Sunna, and hath 
 separated himself from the band of error and the sect of 
 innovation {bid' a). So we ask from God perfection of cer- 
 tainty and firm standing in the Faith (din) for us and for all 
 Muslims through His compassion. — lo ! He is the Most Com- 
 passionate ! — and may the blessing of God be upon our Lord 
 Muhammad and upon every chosen creature. 
 
308 APPENDIX I 
 
 ABTIOLES OP BBLIKP OF NAJM AD-DIN ABU HAFS AN-NA8AFI 
 
 [A Mataridite who d. a.h. 537. This creed is still used as a 
 text-book in schools. It is translated from Cureton'a edition (Lon- 
 don, 1843) with the assistance of at-Taftazani's commentary (Con- 
 stantinople, A.H. 1310). The asterisks mark the poii)ts on which 
 al-Mataridl differed from al-Ash'ari.] 
 
 In the name of God, the me'cif al Compassionator. 
 
 The Shaykh, the Imam, Najm ad-Din Abu Hafs Umar ibn 
 Muhammad ibn Ahmad an-Nasafi — may God have mercy upon 
 him ! — said ; — The People of Verity, contradicting the Scep- 
 tics \Sufistiqiya, i.e.. Sophists] say that the real natures of 
 things are validly established and that the science of them is 
 certain. 
 
 Further, that the sources of knowledge for mankind are 
 three: the sound Senses, true Narration {khabar), andKeason 
 {aql). As for the Senses, they are five : Hearing, Sight, 
 SmeU, Taste and Touch, and by each sense you are informed 
 concerning that for which it is appointed. True Narration, 
 again, is of two kinds. The one is Narration handed down 
 along a large number of lines of tradition (mutawatir); that 
 is, it is established by the tongues of a number of people of 
 whom we cannot imagine that they would agree in a lie. It 
 compels a knowledge which is of necessity (daruri), such as 
 the knowledge of departed kings in past times and of distant 
 countries. And the second is Narration by the Apostle {rasul) 
 aided by miracle [i.e., Muhammad], and it compels deduced 
 knowledge (istidlali), and the knowledge established by it 
 resembles in certainty and fixity the knowledge established 
 by necessity. 
 
 Then as for Keason, it is a cause of knowledge also ; and 
 whatever is established by intuition {badaha) is of necessity, 
 as the knowledge that everything is greater than its parts ; 
 and whatever is established by inference is acquired knowl- 
 edge (iktisabi), as the existence of fire from the appearance of 
 
AN-NASAFI 309 
 
 smoke. And the Inner Light (ilham) with the People of Ver- 
 ity is not one of the causes of knowledge as to the soundness 
 of anything.! 
 
 Further, the world in the totality of its parts is a thing 
 originated (muhdath), in that it consists of Substances (ayns) 
 and Attributes (arads). The Substances are what exist in 
 themselves, and a substance is either a compound, that is a 
 body (jism), or not compounded like an essence (jawhar), 
 namely a division that is not further divided. And the attri- 
 butes are what do not exist in themselves but have a depend- 
 ent existence in bodies or essences, such as colors, tastes, 
 conditions (kawtis), odors. 
 
 The Originator (Muhdith) of the world is God Most High, 
 the One, the Eternal, the Decreeing, the Knowing, the Hear- 
 ing, the Seeing, the Willing. He is not an attribute, nor a 
 body, nor an essence, nor a thing formed, nor a thing bounded, 
 nor a thing numbered, nor a thing divided, nor a thing com- 
 pounded, nor a thing limited; and He is not described by 
 quiddity {makiya), nor by modality (kayfiyd), and He does 
 not exist in place or time, and there is nothing that resembles 
 Him and nothing that is outwith His knowledge and power. 
 
 He has qualities (sifat) from all eternity {azali) existing in 
 His essence. They are not He nor are they any other than 
 He. They are Knowledge and Power and Life and Strength 
 and Hearing and Seeing and Doing and Creating and Sustain- 
 ing and Speech (kalam). 
 
 And He, whose Majesty is majestic, speaks with a Word 
 {kalam). This Word is a quality from all eternity, not belong- 
 ing to the genus of letters and sounds, a quality that is incom- 
 patible with coming to silence and that has no weakness. 
 
 God Most High speaks with this Word, commanding and 
 
 f This is not the normal doctrine of Islam and the commentators 
 have to explain this passage away. Consult in the chapters on the- 
 ology, the whole Sufi development and especially the views of al- 
 Ghazzali. Al-Mataridi was greatly influenced by Abu Hanifa, who 
 was hostile to mystics. Notice, too, the philosophical basis and 
 beginning of this creed. 
 
310 APPENDIX I 
 
 prohibiting and narrating. And the Qur'an is the uncreated 
 Word of God, repeated by our tongues, heard by our ears, 
 written in our copies, preserved in our hearts, yet not simply 
 a transient state (hal) in these [i.e., the tongues, ears, etc.]. 
 And Creating [tdkwin) is a quality of God Most High from all 
 eternity, and it is the Creating of the world and of every one 
 of its parts at the time of its becoming existent, and this 
 quality of Creating is not the thing created, according to our 
 opinion.* And Willing is a quality of God Most High from 
 all eternity, existing in His essence. 
 
 And that there is a Vision (ru'ya) of God Most High is 
 allowed by reason and certified by tradition {naql). A proof 
 on authority has come down with the affirmation that believ- 
 ers have a Vision of God Most High in Paradise and that He 
 is seen, not in a place or in a direction or by facing or the 
 joining of glances or the placing of a distance between him 
 who sees and God Most High. 
 
 And God Most High is the Creator of all actions of His 
 creatures, whether of unbelief or belief, of obedience or of 
 rebellion ; all of them are by the will of God and His sen- 
 tence and His conclusion and His decreeing. 
 
 And to His creatures belong actions of choice (ikhtiyar),* 
 for which they are rewarded or punished, and the good in 
 these is by the good pleasure of God [rida) and the vile in 
 them is not by His good pleasure.* 
 
 And the ability to do the action (istita'a) goes along with 
 the action and is the essence of the power (qudra) by which 
 the action takes place, and this word '' ability " means the 
 soundness of the causes and instruments and limbs. And the 
 validity of the imposition of the task {tdklif) is based upon 
 this ability,* and the creature has not a task imposed upon 
 him that is not in his power. 
 
 And the pain which is found in one who is beaten as a con- 
 sequence of being beaten by any man, and the state of being 
 broken in glass as a consequence of its being broken by any 
 man, and such things, all that is created by God Most High, 
 and the creature has no part in its creation and a slain man is 
 
AN-NASAFI 311 
 
 dead because his appointed time (a/jal) has come ; and death 
 exists in a slain man and is created by God Most High, and 
 the appointed time is one.f 
 
 And that which is forbidden (haram) is still Sustenance 
 (rizq), and each one receives his own Sustenance whether it 
 consists of permitted or of forbidden things ; and let no one 
 imagine that a man shall not eat his Sustenance or that an- 
 other than he shall eat his Sustenance. 
 
 And God leadeth astray whom He wills and guideth aright 
 whom He wills, and it is not incumbent upon God Most High 
 to do that which may be best {aslah) for the creature. 
 
 The punishment of the grave for unbelievers and for some 
 rebellious ones of the believers, and the bliss of the obedient 
 in the grave, and the questioning by Munkar and Nakir are 
 established by proofs of authority. And the Quickening of 
 the Dead (ba'th) is a Verity, and the Weighing is a Verity, and 
 the Book is a Verity and the Tank (hawd) is a Verity, and 
 the Bridge, as- Sir at, is a Verity, and_the Garden is a Verity, 
 and the Fire is a Verity, and they are both created, existing, 
 continiiing ; they shall not pass away and their people shall 
 not pass away. 
 
 A great sin {kabira) does not exclude the creature who be- 
 lieves from the Belief [iman) and does not make him an unbe- 
 liever. And God does not forgive him who joins another with 
 Himself, but He forgives anything beneath that to whom He 
 wills, of sins small (saghira) or great. 
 
 And there may be punishment for a small and pardon for a 
 great one, if it be not of the nature of considering lawful what 
 is forbidden, for that is unbelief (kufr). And the intercession 
 {shafa'a) of the Apostles and of the excellent on behalf of 
 those who commit great sins is established. 
 
 •|- A sect of the Mu'tazilites held that a man could have two ajalSi 
 one his end by a natural death appointed by God, the other his end 
 by a violent death, not so appointed. The " Philosophers " are 
 said to have held that one ajal would be when the mechanism of the 
 body ceased to work through the failing of its essential moisture 
 and heat, and another ajal might come through sicknesses and ac- 
 cident generally. 
 
312 APPENDIX I 
 
 And those believers who commit great sins do not remain 
 eternally in the Fire although they die without repentance. 
 
 Belief (iman) is assent (tasdiq) to that which comes from 
 God and confession (iqrar) of it. Then, as for Works [amal), 
 they are acts of obedience and gradually increase of them- 
 selves, but Belief does not increase and does not diminish. 
 And Belief and al-Islam are one.* And whenever assent and 
 confession are found in a creature, it is right that he should 
 say, " I am a believer in truth." And it is not fitting that he 
 should say, " I am a believer if God will." * 
 
 The happy one sometimes becomes miserable and the miser- 
 able one sometimes becomes happy,* and the changing is in 
 happiness and misery, and not in making happy and making 
 miserable : for those are both qualities of God Most High, 
 and there is no changing in Him nor in His qualities. 
 
 And in the sending of Apostles (rasuls) is an advantage and 
 God has sent Apostles of flesh unto flesh with good tidings, 
 warning and explaining to men the things of the world and of 
 faith, of which they have need. And He has aided them with 
 miracles (mu'jizat) which break the order of nature. The first 
 of the Prophets [nabis) was Adam and the last is Muhammad, 
 Upon both of them be Peace ! A statement of their number 
 has been handed down in several traditions, but the more 
 fitting course is that there should be no limiting to a num- 
 ber in naming them; God Most High has said, " Of them are 
 those concerning whom We have recited to thee, and of them 
 are those concerning whom We have not recited to thee." 
 And there is no security in a statement of number against 
 there being entered among them some that are not of them, 
 or of there being excluded from them some that are of them. 
 They all give intelligence concerning God Most High, are 
 veracious and sincere, and the most excellent of the Prophets 
 is Muhammad — Upon him be Peace ! 
 
 The Angels are servants of God and work according to His 
 commands. They are not described as masculine or feminine. 
 
 And God has books which He has revealed to His Prophets, 
 and in them are His commands and His promises. 
 
AN-NASAFI 313 
 
 The Night Journey (mi'raf) of the Apostle of God — Upon 
 whom be Blessing and Peace ! while awake, in the body, to 
 Heaven, then to what place God Most High willed of the 
 Exalted Eegions, is a Verity. 
 
 The Wonders (karamat) of the Saints {waits) are a Verity. And 
 a Wonder on the part of a Saint appears by way of a contra- 
 diction of the ordinary course of nature, such as passing over 
 a great distance in a short time, and the appearing of meat and 
 drink and clothing at a time of need, and walking upon the 
 water and in the air, and the speech of stones and of beasts, 
 and the warding off of an evil that is approaching, and the 
 guarding of him who is anxious from enemies, and other 
 things of the same kind. And such a thing is to be reckoned 
 as an evidentiary miracle (mu'jiza) on behalf of the Apostle 
 followed by the Saint on whose part the wonder appears. For 
 it is evident by it that he is a Saint and he could never be a 
 Saint unless he were right in his religion and worship and in 
 abiding by the message committed to his Apostle. 
 
 The most excellent of mankind after the Prophets are Abu 
 Bakr, the Very Veracious (as-Siddiq), then Umar, the Divider 
 {al-Faruq), then Uthman, he of the Two Lights (Bhu-n-Nur- 
 ayn) , then AH — The good- will of God be upon them ! Their 
 Khalifates were in this order, and the Khalifate extended to 
 thirty years ; then, thereafter, came kings and princes. 
 
 The Muslims cannot do without a leader {Imam) who shall 
 occupy himself with the enforcing of their decisions, and in 
 maintaining their boundaries and guarding their frontiers, 
 and equipping their armies, and receiving their alms, and 
 putting down robberies and thieving and highwaymen, and 
 maintaining the Friday services and the Festivals, and remov- 
 ing quarrels that fall between creatures, and receiving evi- 
 dence bearing on legal claims, and marrying minors, male and 
 female, and those who have no guardians, and dividing booty. 
 And it is necessary that the leader should be visible, not hid- 
 den and expected to appear (muntazar), and that he should be 
 of the tribe of Quraysh and not of any other. And he is not 
 assigned exclusively to the sons of Hashim nor to the children 
 
314 APPENDIX I 
 
 of Ali. And it is not a condition that he should be protected 
 by God from sin (isma), nor that he should be the most ex- 
 cellent of the people of his time, but it is a condition that he 
 should have administrative ability, should be a good governor 
 and be able to carry out decrees and to guard the restric- 
 tive ordinances (hadds) of Islam and to protect the wronged 
 against him who wrongs him. And he is not to be deposed 
 from the leadership on account of immorality or tyranny. 
 
 Prayer is allowable behind anyone whether pure or a sin- 
 ner. And we give the salutation of Peace to the pure and to 
 the sinner. 
 
 And we abstain from the mention of the Companions {sahibi) 
 of the Prophet except with good. 
 
 And we bear witness that Paradise is for the ten to whom 
 the Prophet — God bless him and give him Peace ! — gave 
 good tidings of Paradise [al-asharatu-l-mubashshara). 
 
 And we approve the wiping {mash) of the inner-shoes (khuffs) 
 both at home and when on a journey. 
 
 And we do not regard nabidh as forbidden. 
 
 And the Saint does not reach the level of the Prophets. 
 And the creature does not come to a point where commands 
 and prohibitions and the details of the statutes in their out- 
 ward sense {zahir) fall away from him ; and the turning aside 
 from these to the views which the People of the Inner Mean- 
 ing (hatin) assert is a deviation (ilhad) through unbelief. 
 
 And feeling safe from God is unbelief. And despairing of 
 God is unbelief. And rejection of the statutes and contempt 
 for the law is unbelief. And believing a diviner (kahin) in 
 what he tells of the Unseen (ghayb) is unbelief. And what 
 does not exist (ma'dum) is known of God Most High just as 
 what exists (mawjud) is known of Him and it [i.e. , what does 
 not exist] is neither a thing (shay) nor an object of vision 
 (mar' an). 
 
 And in prayer of the living for the dead, and in alms of- 
 fered for them there is an advantage to them. And God Most 
 High answers prayers and supplies needs. 
 
 And what the Prophet has reported of the conditions of the 
 
AL-FUDALI 315 
 
 last day (as-sa'a), of the appearance of ad-Dajjal and of the 
 beast of the earth [cf. Revelations xiii, 11 ff.] and of Yajuj and 
 Majuj and the descent of Isa from heaven and the rising of 
 the sun in the west, that is verity. 
 
 And the Mujtahids sometimes err and sometimes hit the 
 mark. And the Apostles of mankind are more excellent than 
 the Apostles of the angels ; and the Apostles of the angels are 
 more excellent than the generality of mankind ; and the gen- 
 erality of mankind of the true believers is more excellent than 
 the generality of the angels. 
 
 VI 
 
 THE OBEED OAIiIiED THE SUFFICIBNOT OP THE OOMMONALTY IN THE 
 SCIENCE OF SCHOLASTIC THEOIiOGT, BT MUHAMMAD AL-FUDAI,! 
 [d. PIEST HALP of THE THIRTEENTH OENTUBY OF THE HIJBA] 
 
 [Translated from the Arabic text of Cairo, a.h. 1315, with the 
 commentary of al-Bayjuri.] 
 
 In the name of God, the merciful CompasBionator. Praise belongeth 
 unto God who alone bringeth into existence, and blessing and peace 
 be upon our Lord Muhammad, his family and companions, posses- 
 sors of beauty and guidance. 
 
 To proceed : The creature who stands in need of the mercy 
 of his exalted Lord, Muhammad ibn ash-Shafl'i al-Fudali 
 says : One of the brethren asked me that I should compose a 
 tractate on the divine unity (tawhid), and I agreed to that, 
 following the example of the moat learned Shaykh, as-Sanusi, 
 [d. 895,] in the establishing of proofs, except that I adduced 
 each proof (dalil) in connection with the doctrine that was to be 
 proved, and added to it an exposition on account of my knowl- 
 edge of the limitations of that student. So, in the ascription 
 of praise to God Most High, it became a tractate, useful and 
 excellent for the establishing of that which is in it. And I 
 called it, the sufficibnot of the people in that which is 
 
 NECESSABT TO THEM OP THE SOIENOE OP SCHOLASTIC THEOLOGY 
 
 (kalam). And I pray God Most High that He will make it 
 
316 APPENDIX I 
 
 useful, for He is my sufficiency, and excellent is the Guar- 
 dian. 
 
 Know that it is incumbent upon every Muslim that he 
 should know fifty articles of belief (aqidas), and for each 
 article that he should know a proof, general (ijmali) or de- 
 tailed [tafsili). Some say that it is required that he should 
 know a detailed proof, but the common opinion is that a gen- 
 eral proof suffices for each article of the fifty. An example of 
 a detailed proof is when someone says, " What is the proof 
 of the existence (wujud) of God ? " that the answer should be, 
 "These created things." That the asker should then say, 
 " Do the created things prove the existence of God on the 
 side of their possibility or on the side of their existence after 
 non-existence (adam) ? " and that his question should be an- 
 swered. And if the further question is not answered, but the 
 only answer is, " These created things," and the answerer does 
 not know whether it is on the side of their possibility or of 
 their existence after non-existence, then the proof is said to 
 be general ; but it is sufficient according to the common posi- 
 tion. And with regard to taqlid (blind acceptance), which is 
 that fifty articles are known but no proof of them is known, 
 either general or detailed, the learned difier. Some say that it 
 does not suffice, and that the mukallad (blind accepter) is an un- 
 believer IJcaflr). Ibn al-Arabi [d. 543] held this and as-Sanusi, 
 and the latter gave in his commentary on his kuhra a lengthy 
 refutation of those who hold that taqlid is sufficient. Yet there 
 is a report that he retired from this position, and acknowl- 
 edged the sufficiency of taqlid ; but I have never seen in his 
 books anything but the opinion that it does not suffice. 
 
 INTBODUCTION 
 
 Know that an understanding of the fifty following articles 
 must be based upon three things — the necessary (wajib), the 
 impossible (musiaMl), and the possible (ja'iz). The necessary 
 is that the non-existence of which cannot be apprehended by 
 the intellect (aql), that is, the intellect cannot affirm its 
 
AL-FUDALI 317 
 
 non-existence, as boundary to a body (jirm), i.e., its taking np 
 a certain measure of space (faragk). An example of a body 
 is a tree or a stone. Then, whenever a person says to you, 
 that a tree, for example, does not take up room (mahall) 
 in the earth, your intellect cannot aflSrm that, for its taking 
 up room is a necessary thing, the absence of which your intel- 
 lect cannot affirm. The impossible is that the existence of 
 which cannot be apprehended ; that is, the intellect cannot 
 affirm its existence. Then, whenever anyone says that such a 
 body is bare of motion and rest at the same time, your intel- 
 lect cannot affirm that, because being bare of motion and rest 
 at the same time is an impossibility, the occurrence and ex- 
 istence of which the intellect cannot affirm, and whenever it 
 is said that weakness (ajz) is impossible in God, the meaning 
 is that the occurrence or existence of weakness in God is un- 
 thinkable. So, too, with the other impossibilities. And the 
 possible is that the existence of which at one time, and the 
 non-existence at another, the intellect can affirm, as the ex- 
 istence of a child of Zayd's. When, then, someone says that 
 Zayd has a child, your intellect acknowledges the possibility of 
 the truth of that ; and whenever he says that Zayd has no child, 
 your intellect acknowledges the possibility of the truth of that. 
 So the existence and the non-existence of a child of Zayd 
 is possible ; the intellect can believe in its existence or in its 
 non-existence. And whenever it is said that God's sustaining 
 Zayd with a dinar is a possibility, the meaning is that the intel- 
 lect assents to the existence of that sustaining {rizq) at one 
 time and to its non-existence at another. 
 
 On these three distinctions, then, is based the science of 
 the articles of belief ; and these three are necessary for every 
 mukallaf [one who has a task imposed upon him ; in this case 
 of religious duty], male and female, for that upon which the 
 necessary is based is necessary. The Imam al-Haramayn (d. 
 478) even held that an understanding of these three consti- 
 tuted reason itself and that he who did not know the meaning 
 of necessary, impossible and possible, was not a reasoning 
 being. So, whenever it is said here that Power is necessary 
 
318 APPENDIX I 
 
 (wajib) in God, the meaning is that the intellect cannot affirm 
 its non-existence, because the necessary is that the non-exist- 
 ence of which the intellect cannot affirm, as has preceded. 
 But necessary (wajib, incumbent) in the sense of that the not 
 doing of which is punished, is an idea which does not enter 
 into the science of the divine Unity. So, do not let the mat- 
 ter be confused for you. It is true that if one says that belief 
 in the Power of God is incumbent (wajib) on the mukallaf, 
 the meaning is that he is rewarded for that and punished for 
 omitting that. Thus there is a distinction between saying 
 that belief in such and such is incumbent and that the knowl- 
 edge, for example, is necessary. For when it is said that 
 knowledge is necessary in God, the meaning is that the intel- 
 lect cannot affirm the non-existence of knowledge in God. 
 But when it is said that belief in that knowledge is incum- 
 bent, the meaning is that belief in it is rewarded and lack of 
 belief punished. So, apply thyself to the distinction between 
 the two and be not of those who regard taqlid in the articles 
 of Religion as right, that so your faith [iman) should differ 
 from the tmth and you should abide in the Fire, according 
 to those who hold that taqlid does not suffice. As-Sanusi 
 said, "A person is not a Believer when he says, 'I hold by 
 the Articles and will not abandon them though I be cut in 
 pieces ; ' nay, he is not a Believer until he knows each Article 
 of the fifty, along with its proof." And this science of theol- 
 ogy must be studied &st of all sciences, as may be gathered 
 from the commentary [by at-Taftazani, d. 791] on as-Sanusi's 
 Articles; for he made this science a foundation on which 
 other things are built. So a judgment as to anyone's cere- 
 monial ablution {wudu) or prayer is not valid unless the per- 
 son in question knows these articles or, on the other hand, 
 holds them without proof. 
 
 Now, let us state to you the fifty articles shortly, before 
 stating them in detail. Know, then, that twenty qualities 
 are necessary in God Most High, that twenty are impossible 
 in Him and that one is i^ossible. This makes up forty-one. 
 
AL-FUDALI 319 
 
 And in the case of the Apostles, four qualities are necessary, 
 four impossible and one possible. This makes up the fifty. 
 And there shall come an accurate account of doctrines along 
 with the statement of them, if it be the will of God Most 
 High. 
 
 The first of the qualities necessary in God is existence {wu- 
 jud) ; and there is a difference of opinion as to its meaning. 
 All except the Imam al-Ash'ari and his followers hold that 
 existence is the state [hal] necessary to the essence so long as 
 the essence abides; and this state has no cause (ilia). And 
 the meaning of it being a state is that it does not attain to 
 the degree of an entity (mawjud) and does not fall to the 
 degree of a non-entity {ma'dum), so that it should be non- 
 existence pure, but is half way between an entity and a non- 
 entity. So the existence of Zayd, for example, is a state 
 necessary to his essence ; that is, it cannot be separated from 
 his essence. And when it is said that it has no cause, the 
 meaning is that it does not originate in anything, as opposed 
 to Zayd's potentiality (qadir, powerful), for example, which 
 originates in his power [qudra). So Zayd's potentiality and 
 his existence are two states which subsist in his essence, un- 
 perceived by any of the five senses ; only, the first has a cause 
 in which it originates, and it is power, and the second has no 
 cause. This is the description of a personal state (AaZ nafsi) 
 and eveiy state subsisting in an essence, without a cause, is a 
 peisonal quality {sifa nafsiya). It is that without which the 
 essence is unthinkable ; that is, the essence cannot be appre- 
 hended by the intellect and comprehended except through its 
 personal quality, like limitation for a body. For, if you ap- 
 prehend and comprehend a body, you have comprehended 
 that it is limited. So, according to this doctrine — that exist- 
 ence is a state — the essence of God is not His existence and 
 the essences of the created things are not their existences. 
 But al-Ash'ari and his followers hold that existence is the 
 self (ayn) of an entity, and according to their view the exist- 
 tence of God is the self of His essence and not an addition to 
 it externally, and the existence of a created thing is the self 
 
320 APPENDIX I 
 
 of its essence. And, on this view, it is not clear how exist- 
 ence can be reckoned as a quality, because existence is the 
 self of the essence, and a quality, on the other hand, as we 
 have seen already, is something else than the essence. But if 
 he makes existence a quality, then the thing is plain and the 
 meaning that existence is necessary in God, according to the 
 first view, is that the personal quality is a state established 
 in God; and its meaning, on the second view, is that the 
 essence of God is an entity with external reality, so that if the 
 veil were removed from us we would see it. The essence of 
 God, then, is a reality ; only, its existence is something else 
 than it, on the one view, and is it, on the other. 
 
 And the proof of the existence of God is the origin (huduth) 
 of the world ; that is, its existence after non-existence. The 
 world consists of bodies (jirms) like essences ; and accidents 
 (arads) like motion, and rest and colors. And the origin of 
 the world is a proof of the existence of God only because it is 
 not sound reasoning that it should originate through itself 
 without someone bringing it into existence. Before it ex- 
 isted, its existence equalled its non-existence ; then, when it 
 entered existence and its non-existence ceased, we know that 
 its existence overbalanced its non-existence. But this exist- 
 ence had previously equalled the non-existence ; and it is not 
 sound reasoning that it could overbalance the non-existence 
 through itself ; so that it is clear that there must have been 
 one who caused the overbalancing, other than itself, and it 
 is He that brought it into existence ; for it is impossible that 
 one of two equal things could overbalance the other without 
 an overbalancer. For example, before Zayd exists it is pos- 
 sible that he may come into existence in such and such a 
 year and also that he may remain in non-existence. So, his 
 existence is equal to his non-existence. So, then, when he exists 
 and his non-existence ceases, in the time in which he exists, 
 we know that his existence is by a bringer-into-existence and 
 not through himself. The proof, in short, is that you say : — 
 The world, consisting of bodies and accidents, is a thing 
 originated [hadiih), i.e., an entity after non-existence. And 
 
AL-FUDALI 321 
 
 every originated thing cannot help but have an originator 
 (muhdiih). Therefore, the world must have had an originator. 
 
 This is what can be gained by an intellectual proof. But 
 as for the Originator being named by the Glorious and Lofty 
 Expression [i.e., Allah, God] or the other Names (asma), 
 knowledge of that is to be gained from the Prophets only. 
 So note this point carefully and also the proof which has pre- 
 ceded, that the originating of the world is a proof of the ex- 
 istence of Him Most High. 
 
 But as for the proof that the world has had an origin, know 
 that the world consists of bodies and accidents only, as has 
 preceded. And the accidents, like motion and rest, are orig- 
 inated, because you observe their changing from existence to 
 non-existence and from non-existence to existence. You see 
 it is so in the motion of Zayd. His motion is lacking if he is 
 at rest ; and his rest is lacking if he is in motion. Then his 
 rest, which comes after his motion, exists after that it has 
 been lacking through motion ; and his motion, which comes 
 after his rest, exists after that it has been lacking through his 
 rest. And existence after non-existence means having an 
 origin. And bodies are inseparable from attributes, because 
 they are never free from either motion or rest. And whatever 
 is inseparable from a thing having origin must have origin ; 
 i.e. , must be an entity after non-existence. So, the bodies are 
 originated also, like the attributes. The proof, in short, is 
 that you say : Bodies are inseparable from attributes and these 
 have an origin ; everything that is inseparable from that which 
 has an origin, itself has an origin ; therefore, bodies have an 
 origin. And the origin of the two things — bodies and attri- 
 butes — that is their existence after non-existence, is a proof of 
 the existence of Him Most High, because everything having 
 an origin must have an originator, and there is no originator 
 of the world save God Most High alone, who has no partner 
 (sharik) as shall be shown in the proof of His Unity. This, 
 then, is the general proof, a knowledge of which is incumbent 
 upon every muhallaf, male and female, according to the opinion 
 of Ibn al-Arabi and as-Sanusi, who hold those who do not 
 
322 APPENDIX I 
 
 know it to be unbelievers. So, beware lest there be a con- 
 tradiction in your faith. 
 
 The second Quality necessary in God is Priority (qidam) ; 
 its meaning is lack of beginning. And the meaning of God's 
 being Prior (qadim) is that there was no beginning to His ex- 
 istence, as opposed to Zayd, for example. Zayd's existence 
 had a beginning and it was the creation from the drop from 
 which he was created. And there is a difference of opinion 
 whether Prior and Azali (eternal with respect to past time) 
 mean the same or not. Those who hold that they mean the 
 same, define them as that which has no beginning, and ex- 
 plain "that which" by thing (shay). That is, prior and 
 azali are the thing which has no beginning ; so the essence of 
 God and His qualities are included. And those who hold 
 that their meaning is different define prior as the entity which 
 had no beginning and azali as that which had no beginning, 
 covering thus both entity and nonentity, So azali is broader 
 than prior, but they both come together in the essence of God 
 and His existential qualities. The essence of God is azali 
 and His Power [qudra) is azali. But only azali is said of the 
 states (hals) like God's being powerful, in accordance with the 
 doctrine of the states. For God's -being powerful is called 
 azali, in accordance with that doctrine, and is not called prior, 
 because in prior there must be existence, and " being power- 
 ful " does not rise to the level of existence [to being an entity], 
 but is only a state [hal). 
 
 And the proof of God's Priority is that if He were not Prior 
 He would be a thing originated (hadith), because there is no 
 medium between the prior and the thing originated ; to every- 
 thing of which priority is denied, origin belongs. But if God 
 were a thing originated, He would need an originator, and His 
 originator would need an originator, and so on. Then, if the 
 originators did not coincide, there would be the Endless 
 Chain (tasalsul), that is a sequence of things, one after another 
 to infinity ; and the Endless Chain is impossible. And if the 
 series of originators comes to an end by it being said that the 
 originator of God was originated by Him, then we have the 
 
AL-FITDALI 323 
 
 Circle {daier) and it is that one thing depends on another thing 
 which agaia depends on the first. For if God had an orig- 
 inator, He would depend on this originator ; bnt the hypoth- 
 esis is that God originated this originator and so the orig- 
 inator depends on Him. But the Circle is impossible ; that 
 is, its existence is unthinkable. And that which leads to the 
 Circle and to the Chain, both being impossible, involves the 
 origiaating of God. So, the originating of Godisimi)ossible ; 
 for what involves an impossibility is impossible. The proof, 
 in short, is that you say, "If God were other than Prior, 
 through being a thing originated. He would have need of an 
 originator. Then the Circle or the Chain would be unavoid- 
 able ; but they are both impossible. So, the originating of 
 Gt)d is impossible and His Priority is established ; and that is 
 what has been sought." This is the general proof of the 
 Priority of God, and by it the mukaJlqf eso&yes from the noose 
 of iaqlid, the remainer in which will abide eternally in the 
 Fire, according to the opinion of Ibn al-Arabi and as-Sannsi, 
 as has preceded. 
 
 The third Quality necessary in Grod is Continuance (baqa). 
 The meaning of it is lack of termination of the existence ; and 
 the meaning of God's being continuing is that there is no end 
 to His existence. And the proof of God's continuance is that 
 if it were possible that any lack could be joined to Him, then 
 He would be a thing originated and would need an originator 
 and then the Circle or the Chain would necessarily follow, A 
 definition of each one of these two has preceded in the proof 
 of Priority and in the esplsuaation that to a thing with which 
 non-existence is possible, priority must be denied. For the 
 existence of everyone to whom non-existence is joined is pos- 
 sible, and everything whose existence is possible is a thing 
 originated, and everything originated requires an originator. 
 But Priority has been established for Grod by the preced- 
 ing proof, and non-existence is impossible for everything for 
 which Priority has been established. So the proof of Con- 
 tinnance in Giod is the same as the proof of Priority. That 
 proof, in short, is that you say, " If ContiQuance is not neces- 
 
324 APPENDIX I 
 
 sary in Him, then Priority must be negated of Him. But 
 Priority cannot be negated on account of the preceding proof." 
 This is the general proof of Continuance, a knowledge of 
 which is incumbent on every individual. And similarly a 
 knowledge of every article is necessaiy and of its general 
 proof. Then, if some of the articles are known with their 
 proofs, and the rest are not known with their proofs, that is 
 not sufficient according to the opinion of those who do not 
 regard taqlid as sufficient. 
 
 The fourth Quality necessary in God is diflference (mu- 
 khala/a) from originated things. That is, from created things 
 (makhluqat), for God is different from every created thing, 
 men. Jinn, angels and the rest ; and it is not good that He 
 should be described with the descriptions which apply to cre- 
 ated things, as walking, sitting, having members of the body, 
 for He is far removed [munazzah) from members of the body, as 
 mouth, eye, ear and the like. Then, from everything that is 
 in your mind of length and breadth and shortness and fat- 
 ness, God is different ; He has removed Himself far from all 
 descriptions which apply to the creation. And the proof of 
 the necessity of this difference in God is that if any originated 
 thing resembled Him, that is, if it were laid down that God 
 could be described with any of the things with which an 
 originated thing is described, then He would be an originated 
 thing. And if God were an originated thing, then He would 
 need an originator, and His originator, another originator, 
 and so we would come necessarily to the circle or the chain, 
 and both of these are impossible. This proof, in short, is 
 that you say, " If God resembles a created thing in anything, 
 He is an originated thing, because what is possible in one of 
 two things resembling each other, is possible in the other. 
 But that God should be originated is impossible, for priority 
 is necessary in Him. And when being originated is denied 
 in Him, His difference from created things stands fast and 
 there is absolutely no resemblance between Him and the 
 originated things. This is the general proof, the knowledge 
 of which is necessary, as has preceded. 
 
AL-FUDALI 325 
 
 The fifth Quality necessary in God is self -subsistence (giyam 
 hin-^afs). That is in the essence ; and its meaning is that 
 there is independence of a locus {mahall, subject) and a speci- 
 fier {mukhassis). The lociis is the essence and the specifier is 
 thebringer-into-existence (mujid) ; then the meaning of God's 
 subsisting in Himself is that He is independent of an essence 
 in which He may subsist, or of a bringer-into-existence ; for 
 He is the bringer-into-existence of all things. The proof that 
 He subsists in Himself is that you say, " If God had need of a 
 locvs, that is an essence, in which He might subsist, as white- 
 ness has need of an essence in which it may subsist. He would 
 be a quality, as whiteness, for example, is a quality. But it 
 it is not sound to say of Him that He is a quality, for He is 
 described by qualities, and a quality is not described by qual- 
 ities, so He is not a quality. And if He had need of a bringer- 
 into-existence. He would be an originated thing, and His 
 originator would be an originated thing also, and the Circle 
 or the Chain would necessarily follow. Then it stands fast 
 that He is the absolutely independent, that is. He is inde- 
 pendent of everything. But the created thing that is inde- 
 pendent is independent in a limited sense only ; that is, of one 
 thing in place of another. And may God rule thy guidance. 
 
 The sixth Quality in God is Unity (wihdamiya). It is unity in 
 essence and qualities and acts in the sense of absence of mul- 
 tiplicity. And the meaning of God's being one in His es- 
 sence is that Hi a essence is not compounded of parts, and this 
 compounding is called internal quantity (kamm muttasil). 
 And in the sense that there is not in existence or in possibil- 
 ity an essence which resembles the essence of God, this im- 
 possibility of resemblance is called external quantity (kamm 
 muvfasil). The unity, then, in the essence denies both quan- 
 tities, external and internal. And the meaning of God's One- 
 ness in qualities is that He has not two qualities agreeing in 
 name and meaning, like two Powers, or two Knowledges or 
 two Wills — for He has only one Power and one Will and one 
 Knowledge, in opposition to Abu Sahl, who held that He had 
 knowledges to the number of the things known. And this, I 
 
326 APPENDIX I 
 
 mean multiplicity in qualities, is called internal quantity in 
 qualities. Or the sense is, that no one has a quality resembling 
 a quality of God. And this, I mean anyone possessing a qual- 
 ity, etc., is called external quantity in qualities. Oneness, 
 then, in qualities, negates quantity in them, internal and ex- 
 ternal. And the meaning of God's Oneness in acts is that no 
 created thing possesses an act, for God is the creator of the 
 acts of created things, prophets, angels and the rest. And as 
 for what happens when an individual dies or falls into pain 
 on opposing himself to a saint (toali), that is by the creation of 
 God, who creates it when the saint is angry with the man who 
 opposes him. Do not then explain Oneness in acts by saying 
 that no other than God has an act like God's act, for that in- 
 volves that some other than God has an act, but that it is not 
 like the act of God. That is false. God it is who is the cre- 
 ator of all acts. What comes from you by way of movement 
 of the hand, when you strike Zayd, for example, is by the 
 creation of God. He has said (Qur. 37, 99), "God created 
 you, and what do ye do ? " And another than God being 
 possessor of an act is called external quantity in acts. 
 
 80 the unity necessary in God denies the five impossible 
 quantities. Internal quantity in the essence makes the essence 
 a compound of parts ; external quantity means that there is 
 an essence which resembles it. Internal quantity in the qual- 
 ities is that God has two Powers, for example ; external 
 quantity in them means that someone else has a quality which 
 resembles one of His qualities. External quantity in acts 
 means that some other than God possesses an act. These five 
 quantities deny the unity necessary in God. The meaning of 
 quantity is number (adad). 
 
 The proof that Unity is necessary in God is the existence of 
 the world. If God had a partner (sharik) in divinity (uluhiya), 
 the case could not be in doubt. Either they would agree on 
 the existence of the world, in that one of them would say, 
 "I will cause the world to exist," and the other would say, "I 
 will cause it to exist along with thee, that we may help one 
 another in it." Or they would disagree, and one of them 
 
AL-FTTDALI 327 
 
 would say, " I will cause the world to exist by my power," 
 and the other, "I will that the existence be lacking." Then, 
 if they agreed upon the existence of the world in that both of 
 them together caused it to exist, and it existed through their 
 action, that would necessarily involve the coincidence of two 
 impressors upon one impression, which is impossible. And 
 if they disagreed, it is plain that the will of one either would 
 be carried out or it would not be carried out . If the will of 
 one, rather than the other, is carried out, then the other 
 whose will is not carried out must be weaker. But our hy- 
 pothesis was that he was equal in divinity to the one whose 
 will was carried out. So whenever weakness is established 
 in the case of the one, it is established in the case of the 
 other, for he is like the other. And if the wills of both are 
 not carried out, they are both weak. And upon every alterna- 
 tive, that they agree or differ, the existence of a single thing 
 of the world is impossible ; because if they agree on its ex- 
 istence, there necessarily follows the coincidence of two im- 
 pressors upon one impression if their will is carried out, and 
 that is impossible. So the carrying out of their will is not 
 affected, and it is not possible that a single thing of the world 
 should come into existence then. And if they disagree and 
 the will of one of them is carried out, the other is weak. But 
 he is his like. So it is not possible that there should come 
 into existence a single thing of this world, for he is weak. 
 So the God is not except one. And if they differ and their 
 will is not carried out, they are weak and not able to cause the 
 existence of a thing of the world. But the world exists, by 
 common witness (mushahada). So it stands fast that the God 
 is one ; and that was what was sought. So the existence of 
 the world is proof of the Unity of God and that He has no 
 partner in any act, and no second cause in an action. He is 
 the independent (al-Ghani), the absolutely independent. 
 
 And from this proof it may be known that there is no im- 
 pression, by fire or a knife or eating, upon anything, consist- 
 ing of burning or cutting or satiety, but God makes the being 
 burnt in a thing which fire touches, when it touches it, and 
 
328 APPENDIX I 
 
 being cut in a thing with which a knife is brought into con- 
 tact, when it is brought into contact with it, and satiety at 
 eating and satisfaction at drinking. And he who holds that 
 fire burns by its nature (tab), and water satisfies by its nat- 
 ure, and so on, is an unbeliever (Jcafir) by agreement (ijma). 
 And he who holds that it bums by a power (quwa) created in 
 it by God, is ignorant and corrupt, because he knows not the 
 true nature (haqiqa) of Unity. 
 
 This is the general proof a knowledge of which is incum- 
 bent upon every individual, male and female : and he who 
 knows it not is an unbeliever, according to as-Sanusi and al- 
 Arabi. And may God rule thy guidance. 
 
 And Priority and Continuance and Dificrence from originated 
 things and Self-Subsistence and Unity are negative qualities 
 (si/at salabiyd), that is, their meaning is negation and exclu- 
 sion, for each of them excludes from God what does not be- 
 seem Him. 
 
 The seventh Quality necessary in God is Power (qudra). It 
 is a quality which makes an impression on a thing that is ca- 
 pable of existence or non-existence. So it comes into connec- 
 tion (ta'allaqa) with a non-entity and makes it an entity, as it 
 came into connection with you before you existed. And it 
 comes into connection with an entity and reduces it to a non- 
 entity, as it comes into contact with a body which God desires 
 should become a non-entity, that is, a not-thing {la shay). 
 This connection is called accomplished {tanjizi) in the sense 
 that it is actual (bil-fi'l), and this accomplished connec- 
 tion is a thing that takes place (hadith). But this quality has 
 also an eternal, potential connection (saluhi qadim), and it is 
 its potentiality from eternity of bringing into existence. It is 
 potential in eternity to make Zayd tall or short or broad, or 
 give him knowledge ; but its accomplished connection is con- 
 ditioned by the state in which Zayd is. So it has two connec- 
 tions ; one eternal, potential, which has been described, and 
 one accomplished, happening. The last is its connection with 
 a non-entity, when it makes it an entity ; and with an entity, 
 when it makes it a non-entity. And this, I mean its connection 
 
AL-FUDALI 329 
 
 with an entity or a non-entity, is a real {haqiqi) connection. 
 But it has also a flgfurative (majazi) connection. That is, its 
 connection with an entity after it has become so and before it 
 has become a non-entity, as it is connected with us after we 
 have come to exist and before we have ceased to exist. It is 
 called the connection of grasping (ta'alluqu-l-qabdati) in the 
 sense that the entity is in the grasp [qabda) of the Power of 
 God. If God will. He makes it remain an entity ; and if He 
 will. He reduces it to non-entity. And its connection with 
 the non-entity before that God wills its existence is like its 
 connection with Zayd at the time of the Flood [tufan), for ex- 
 ample ; it also is a connection of grasping in the sense that 
 the non-entity is in the grasp of the Power of God. If God 
 wills. He makes it remain in non-existence, and if He wills. 
 He brings it out into existence. And similar is its connection 
 with us after our death and before the resurrection (ba'th). 
 It, too, is called a connection of grasping in the sense of what 
 has preceded. So the quality of Power has seven connec- 
 tions : (1) eternal, (2) connection of grasping (that is, its con- 
 nection with us before God wills our existence), (3) actual con- 
 nection (that is, God's bringing the thing into existence), 
 
 (4) connection of grasping (that is, connection with a thing 
 after existence and before God has willed non-existence), 
 
 (5) actual connection (that is, God's making a thing a non-en- 
 tity), (6) connection of grasping after non-existence and before 
 the resurrection, (7) actual connection (that is, God's making 
 us exist on the day of resurrection). 
 
 But the real connections of these are two ; God's bringing 
 into existence and bringing into non-existence. This is a 
 detailed statement ; and a general statement would be that 
 God's Power has two connections — as is commonly accepted 
 — a potential and an accomplished ; but the accomplished is 
 limited to actual bringing into existence and non-existence. 
 And the connection of grasping is not to be described as 
 accomplished, nor as eternal. And what has preceded about 
 this quality connecting with existence and non-existence is 
 the opinion of the multitude on the subject. But some hold 
 
380 APPENDIX I 
 
 that it does not connect with non-existence ; that whenever 
 God desires the non-existence of an individual, He takes away 
 from him the aids (imdadat) which are the cause of his con- 
 tinuance. 
 
 The eighth Quality necessary in God is Will {irada). It is 
 the quality which specifies the possible with one of the things 
 possible to it. For example, tallness and shortness are pos- 
 sible to Zayd ; then Will specifies him with one, — tallness, 
 say. Power brings tallness out of non-existence into exist- 
 ence. So Will specifies and Power brings out. And the 
 possibilities (mumkinat) with which Power and Will connect 
 are six : (1) existence, (2) non-existence, (3) qualities, like 
 tallness and shortness, (4) times, (5) places, (6) directions. 
 
 And the possibilities are called "the mutual opposers" 
 (mutaqabilat), existence opposes non-existence and tallness 
 opposes shortness and direction upward opposes direction 
 downward, and one place, like Egypt, opposes another place, 
 like Syria. And this, in short, means that it is possible in 
 the case of Zayd, for example, that he should remain in non- 
 existence and also that ho should enter existence at this time. 
 Then, whenever he enters existence, Will has specified exist- 
 ence instead of non-existence, and Power has brought out 
 existence. And it would have been possible that he might 
 have entered existence at the time of the Flood (iufan) or at 
 some other time ; so that which specifies his existence at this 
 time instead of any other is Will. And it is possible that he 
 should be tall or short ; then that which specifies his tallness 
 instead of shortness is Will. And it is possible that he should 
 be in the direction upward, then that which specifies him in 
 the direction downward is Will. And Power and Will are 
 two qualities subsisting in God's essence — two entities ; if the 
 veil were removed from us we could see them. They have 
 connection with the possible only ; but none with the impos- 
 sible, such as a partner for God. He is far removed from 
 that! Nor with the necessary, like the essence of God and 
 His qualities. Ignorance is the saying of those who hold 
 that God has power to take a son (walad) ; for Power has no 
 
AL-FTJDALI 331 
 
 connection with the impossible and taking a son is impossible. 
 But it should not be said that because He has no power to 
 take a son, He is therefore weak. We say that weakness 
 would follow only if the impossible were of that which is 
 allotted to Power. But Power has not been connected with 
 that, seeing that nothing is allotted to it except the possible. 
 And Will has two connections, one eternally potential, and it 
 is its potentiality to specify from all eternity. So, in the case 
 of the tall or the short Zayd, it is possible that he might be 
 otherwise than what he is, so far as relationship to the poten- 
 tiality of Will is concerned. For Will is potential that Zayd 
 should be a Sultan or a scavenger, so far as the potential 
 connection is concerned. And Will has also an eternal ac- 
 complished connection, and it is the specifying by God of a 
 thing with a quality which it possesses. So God specified 
 Zayd from all eternity by His Will with the knowledge that 
 he possesses. And his being specified with knowledge, for 
 example, is eternal and is called an eternal accomplished con- 
 nection. And the potentiality of Will to specify him with 
 knowledge, etc., in relationship to the essence of Will, cut- 
 ting off all consideration of actual specifying, is called an 
 eternal potential connection. And some say that Will has also 
 a temporal, accomplished connection. It is, for example, the 
 specifying of Zayd with tallness, when he is actually brought 
 into existence. According to this view, Will has three con- 
 nections ; but the truth is that this third is not a connection 
 but is the making manifest of the eternal, accomplished con- 
 nection. 
 
 And the connection of Power and Will is common to every 
 possible thing to the extent that the aficctions of the mind 
 (khatarat) which arise in the mind of an individual are speci- 
 fied by the Will of God and created by His Power as the 
 Shaykh al-Malawi [Ahmad al-Malawi, d. 1181] has said in 
 some of his books. But know that the attributing of specify- 
 ing to Will and of bringing out into existence to Power is 
 only metaphorical ; for the true specifier is God by His Will 
 and the true producer and bringer-into-existenoe is God by 
 
332 APPENDIX I 
 
 His Power. Then, in the case of the saying of the common 
 people that Power does such and such to so and so, if it is 
 meant that the doing belongs to Power actually, or to it and 
 to the essence of God, that is unbelief Qcvfr). Eather, the 
 doing belongs to the essence of God by His Power. 
 
 The ninth Quality necessary in God is Knowledge (iVni). 
 It is an eternal quality subsisting in the essence of God, an 
 entity by which what is known is revealed with a revealing of 
 the nature of complete comprehension (ihata), without any 
 concealment having preceded. It is connected with the 
 necessary, the possible and the impossible. He knows His 
 own essence and qualities by His Knowledge. And He knows 
 impossibilities in the sense that He knows that a partner is 
 impossible to Him and that, if one existed, corruption would 
 accme from it. And Knowledge has an eternal, accomplished 
 connection only. For God knows these things that have been 
 mentioned from all eternity with a complete knowledge that 
 is not by way of opinion (zann) or doubt {shakk) ; because 
 opinion and doubt are impossibilities in God. And the mean- 
 ing of the saying, "without any concealment having pre- 
 ceded," is that He knows things eternally ; He is not first 
 ignorant of them and then knowing them. But an origi- 
 nated being (hadiih) is ignorant of a thing and then knows it. 
 And God's Knowledge has no potential connection in the sense 
 that there is a potentiality that such and such should be 
 revealed by it, because that involves that the thing in ques- 
 tion has not been actually revealed, and lack of actual reveal- 
 ing of it is ignorance. 
 
 The tenth Quality necessary in God is Life {kayak). It is 
 a quality which in him in whom it subsists validates percep- 
 tion, as knowledge and hearing and seeing : that is, it is valid 
 that he should be described therewith. But being character- 
 ized by actual perception does not necessarily follow from 
 possessing the quality. Life. And it is not connected with 
 anything, entity or non-entity. 
 
 The proof that Knowledge and Power and Will and Life 
 are necessary is the existence of the created things. Because> 
 
AL-FUDALI 333 
 
 if any one of these four is denied, why does the created world 
 exist ? So, since the created things exist, we know that God 
 is to be described by these qualities. And the reason of the 
 existence of the created things depending on these four is 
 this. He who makes a thing does not make it except when 
 he knows the thing. Then he wills the thing which he would 
 make and, after his willing, he busies himself with making it 
 by his power. Further, it is known that the maker caimot 
 but be living. And Knowledge and Will and Power are 
 called qualities of impression {si/at cU-taHhir), for making an 
 impression depends upon them. Because he who wills a 
 thing must have knowledge of it before he aims at it ; then, 
 after he has aimed at it, he busies himself with doing it. For 
 example, when there is something in your house and you 
 wish to take it, your knowledge precedes your wish to take 
 it, and after your wish to take it, you take it actually. The 
 connection of these qualities, then, is in a certain order, in 
 the case of an originated being ; first comes the knowledge of 
 the thing, then the aiming at it, then the doing. But in the 
 case of God, on the other hand, there is no sequence in His 
 qualities, except in our comprehension ; in that, Knowledge 
 comes first, then Will, then Power. But as for the making 
 of an impression externally, there is no sequence in the qual- 
 ities of God. It is not said that Knowledge comes into 
 actual connection, then Will, then Power; because all that 
 belongs to originated beings. Order is only according to our 
 comprehensions . 
 
 The eleventh and twelfth Qualities of God are Hearing 
 {sam) and Seeing (basar). These are two qualities subsisting 
 in the essence of God and connected with every entity ; that 
 is, by them is revealed every entity, necessary or possible. 
 And Hearing and Seeing are connected with the essence of 
 God and His qualities'; that is. His essence and qualities are 
 revealed to Him by His Seeing and Hearing, besides the re- 
 vealing of His Knowledge. And God hears the essences of 
 Zayd and Amr and a wall and He sees them. And He hears 
 the sound of the possessor of a sound and He sees it, that is 
 
334 APPENDIX I 
 
 the sound. Then, if you say, " Hearing a sound is plain, but 
 hearing the essence of Zayd and the essence of a wall is not 
 plain ; so, too, the connection of seeing with sounds, for 
 sounds axe heard only," we reply, "Belief in this is incum- 
 bent upon us because these two qualities are connected with 
 every entity ; but the how ( kayfiya) of the connection is un- 
 known to us. God hears the essence of Zayd, but we do not 
 know how hearing is connected with that essence. And it is 
 not meant that He hears the walking of the essence of Zayd, 
 for the hearing of his walking enters into the hearing of all 
 the sounds (sawt), but what is meant is that He hears the 
 essence of Zayd and his body (jutMha), besides hearing his 
 walking. But we do not know how the hearing of God is 
 connected with the person {nafs) of the essence. This is what 
 is binding upon every individual, male and female — Our trust 
 is in God 1 
 
 The proof of Hearing and Seeing is the saying of God that 
 He is a Hearer and Seer. And know that the connection of 
 Hearing and Seeing in relation to originated things is an 
 eternal, potential connection before the existence of these, 
 and after their existence it is a temporal, accomplished con- 
 nection. That is, after their existence, they are revealed to 
 God by His Hearing and Seeing besides the revealing of His 
 Knowledge. So they have two connections. And in relation 
 to God and His qualities, the connection is eternal, accom- 
 plished, in the sense that His essence and His qualities ai'e 
 revealed to Him from all eternity through His Hearing and 
 Seeing. So, God hears His essence and all His existential qual- 
 ities [all except the states and the negative qualities], Power, 
 Hearing, and all the rest ; but we do not know how the con- 
 nection is, and He sees His essence and His qualities of ex- 
 istence, Power, Seeing and the rest, but again we do not 
 know how the connection is. The preceding statement that 
 Hearing and Seeing are connected with every entity is the 
 opinion of as-Sanusi and those who follow him ; it is the 
 preponderating one. But it is said, also, that Hearing is 
 only connected with sounds and Seeing with objects of vision. 
 
AL-FVPALI 335 
 
 Aiivl GvxTs Hearing is not vith ear or ear-hole, and His Seeing 
 is U05 wish eT>fl)aU or evvUvl. 
 
 The thiweeach QuatitT of God is Speech (iuirat). It is an 
 etertiai qisalitiT, saWstiag ia God's esseaoe. not a wotvl o« 
 sijQiid. sad 6tr i^movevl from orvlor of preoediag- aad follow- 
 ing, from iali<?otioa aad straotare, opposevl to the speech of 
 originated beia^rs. Aadbv the Speech that is aecessarr to God 
 is ao« ateaat the Glorious Expressiozis ^iVs/ii revealed to the 
 Ptv>phet, because theise are originated aad the quality that 
 sul>sists ia the esseace of Gcvl is eternal. And tlwse embrace 
 pnjcediag *ad foUowiag, iadectioa aad eliapters and ver^s ; 
 bat the eternal vjiialitT is bare of all these things. It has no 
 verses or ohapcers or indectioas, becaase such belong to the 
 speech which embraces letters and sounds, and the eternal 
 quaiitT is far remo"sed frv^m letters and sounds, as has pre- 
 ceded. Anvl those Glorious Expressions are not a guide to 
 the eternal ijualitv in the sense that the eternal qnahtr eaa 
 be understood from them. What is understood frvai these 
 espressioas equals what would be uaderstood from the eternal 
 quality if the veil were reaioved from us aad we could hear 
 it. Ia short, these expressions sire a guide to its meaaing. 
 aad this meaaiag equals what would be understood from the 
 eternal Speech which subsists ia the essence of God, So medi- 
 tate this disuiactioa. for aiaay have erred ia it. Aad both 
 the Glorious Expressions aad the eternal quality are called 
 Qor'aa and the "Word (,iifc\r.'«l of God. But the Glorious Ex- 
 pressiv^ns are created and writtea on the Preserved Tablet 
 (Ltw.rti7.Ka^mi.t.Va-j) : Jibril brought them down [i.<f., revealed 
 them] to the Prophet after that they had beea brought down 
 in the Xight of Pecree (.^nn,"La^;<.-0-^latr .■ ijur. 97. 1> to the 
 lEghty House • jLSsra-iVjs.:', a place ia the Heavea aearest to 
 the earth : it was written in books (sis-isr'af' and placed ia the 
 3Egh:y House. It is said that it was brought down to the 
 Mighty House aU at oace aad thea brought down to the 
 Prophet in twenty years, and some say. ia tweaty-five. And 
 it is also said that it was brought down to the Mighty Hottse 
 only to the amooat that w*s to be revealed each year and not 
 ail at once. 
 
336 APPENDIX I 
 
 And that which was brought down to the Prophet was ex- 
 pression and meaning. And it is said also that only the mean- 
 ing was brought down to him. There is a conflict of opinion 
 on this ; some say that the Prophet clothed the meaning with 
 expressions of his own, and others, that he who so clothed the 
 meaning, was Jibril. But the truth is that it was sent down 
 in expressions and meaning. In short, the quality subsisting 
 in the essence of Ood is not a letter nor a sound. And the 
 Mu'tazilites called in doubt the existence of a kind of Speech 
 without letters. But the People of the Sunna answered that 
 because thoughts in the mind (hadith an-nafs), a kind of 
 speech with which an individual speaks to himself, are with- 
 out letter or sound, there exists a kind of speech without let- 
 ters or words. By this the People of the Sunna do not wish 
 to institute a comparison between the Speech of Qod and 
 thoughts in the mind ; for the Speech of God is eternal and 
 thoughts in the mind are originated. They wished to dis- 
 prove the contention of the Mu'tazilites when they urged that 
 speech cannot exist without letter or sound. 
 
 The proof of the necessity of Speech in God is His saying 
 (Qur. 4, 162) ; " and God spoke to Moses." So He has estab- 
 lished Speech for Himself. And Speech connects with that 
 with which Knowledge connects, of necessary and possible 
 and impossible. But the connection of Knowledge with these 
 is a connection of revealing, in the sense that they are re- 
 vealed to God by His Knowledge ; and the connection of 
 Speech with them is a connection of proof, in the sense that 
 if the veil were taken away from us and we heard the eternal 
 Speech we would understand these things from it. 
 
 The fourteenth Quality subsisting in God is Being Power- 
 ful {Jcawn qadir). It is a Quality subsisting in His essence, 
 not an entity and not a non-entity. It is not Power, but be- 
 tween it and Power is a reciprocal inseparability. When 
 Power exists in an essence, the quality called " Being Power- 
 ful " exists in that essence, equally whether that essence is 
 eternal or originated. So, God creates in the essence of Zayd 
 Power actual, and He creates also in it the quality called 
 
AL-FUDALI 337 
 
 Zayd's Being Powerful. This quality is called a state (hal) 
 and Power is a cause (ilia) in it in the case of created things. 
 But in the case of Gtoi, Power is not said to be a cause in His 
 Being Powerful ; it is only said that between Power and God's 
 Being Powerful there is a reciprocal inseparability. The 
 Mu'tazilites hold also the reciprocal inseparability between 
 the Power of an originated being and its Being Powerful. 
 But they do not say that the second quality is by the creation 
 of God, only that when God creates Power in an originated 
 being, there proceeds from the Power a quality called Being 
 Powerful, without creation. 
 
 The Fifteenth Quality necessary in God is Being a Wilier 
 (karcn murid). It is a quality subsisting in His essence, not 
 an entity and not a non-entity. It is called a state {Jial) and it 
 is not Will, equally whether the essence is eternal or created. 
 So, God creates in the essence of Zayd Will actual, and He 
 creates in it the quality called Zayd's Being a Wilier. And 
 what is said above, about the disagreement between the Mu'- 
 tazilites and the People of the Sunna on Being Powerful, ap- 
 plies also to Being a Wilier. 
 
 [The same thing applies exactly to Qualities Sixteen, Sev- 
 enteen, Eighteen, 2<ineteen and Twenty, — Being a Knower 
 (alim), a Living One {hayt/), a Hearer (fami), a Seer {ha fir), a 
 Speaker (muiakalUm).] 
 
 Notice. The Qualities, Power, Will, Knowledge, Life, 
 Hearing, Seeing, Speech, which have preceded, are called, 
 "Qualities consisting of ideas" (si/at al-ma'ani. thought- 
 qualities as opposed to ivetive qualities ; see below) ; on account 
 of the connection of the general with the particular (idafalu- 
 l-iimm lil-kJiass). or the explanatory connection (dl-idafalii-l- 
 bai/ani^a). And those which follow these, God's Being Pow- 
 erful, etc., are called " Qualities cferjcad from ideas " (si/at ma- 
 nainvii), by way of derivation (nisba) from the "Qualities 
 consisting of ideas," because they are inseparable from them 
 in a thing eternal and proceed from them in a thing originated, 
 according to what has preceded. 
 
 And the Mataridites added to the " Qualities consisting of 
 
338 APPENDIX I 
 
 Ideas," an Eighth Quality and called it, Making to Be (tak- 
 win). It is a quality and an entity like the rest of the "Qual- 
 ities consisting of Ideas " ; if the veil were removed from us 
 we would see it, just as we would see the other " Qualities 
 consisting of Ideas " if the veil were removed from us. But 
 the Ash'arites opposed them and urged that there was no ad- 
 vantage in having a quality, Making to Be, besides Power, 
 because the Mataridites said that God brought into existence 
 and out of existence by the quality of Making to Be. Then 
 these replied that Power prepared the possibility for existence, 
 that is, made it ready to receive existence after it had not 
 been ready ; that thereafter Making to Be brought it into ex- 
 istence actually. The Ash'arites replied that the possible was 
 ready for existence without anything further. And on ac- 
 count of their having added this quality, they said that the 
 active qualities (si/at al-af'al), such as Creating (khalq), 
 Bringing to Life (ihya), Sustaining {razq), Bringing to Death 
 (imata), were eternal, because these expressions are names of 
 the quality Making to Be, which is a quality and an entity, ac- 
 cording to them. But it is eternal ; therefore these active 
 qualities are eternal. But according to the Ash'arites, the 
 active qualities are originated, because they are only names 
 of the connections of Power. So Bringing to Life is a name 
 for the connection of Power with Life, and Sustaining is a 
 name for the connection of Power with the creature to be sus- 
 tained, and Creating is a name for its connection with the 
 thing to be created, and Bringing to Death, a name for its 
 connection with death. And the connections of Power, ac- 
 cording to them, are originated. 
 
 And among the Fifty Articles are twenty which express the 
 opposites of the twenty above. They are Non-existence, the 
 opposite to Existence. 
 
 The Second, Origin Qiuduth), is the opposite of Priority. 
 
 The Third, Transitoriness {/ana), is the opposite of Con- 
 tinuance. 
 
 The Fourth, Resemblance (mumathala), is the opposite of 
 Difference. It is impossible that God should resemble orig- 
 
AL-rUDALr 339 
 
 inated things in any of those things with which they are de- 
 sciibed ; time has no effect upon Him and He has not a place 
 or movement or rest ; and He is not described with colors or 
 with a direction ; it is not said with regard to Him that He is 
 above such a body, or on the right of such a body. And He 
 has no direction from Him. So it is not said, " I am under 
 God." And the saying of the commonalty, " I am under our 
 Lord," and "My Lord is over me," is to be disapproved. 
 Unbelief is to be feared on the part of him who holds the use 
 of it to be an article of his faith. 
 
 The Fifth is having need of a locus (ihtiyaz ila mahall), that 
 is, an essence in which He may subsist, or a Specifier, that is 
 a bringer-into-existence. This is the opposite of Self-sub- 
 sistence. 
 
 The Sixth is Multiplicity {ta'addud), in the sense of com- 
 bination in the essence or the qualities, or the existence of a 
 being similar in essence or qualities or acts. This is the op- 
 posite of Unity. 
 
 The Seventh is Weakness (ajz) and it is the opposite of 
 Power. So, being unequal to any possibility is impossible in 
 God. 
 
 The Eighth is Unwillingness {karaha, lit. dislike). It is the 
 opposite of Will, and it is impossible in God that He should 
 bring into existence anything of the world, along with Un- 
 willingness toward it, that is, lack of Will. Entities are pos- 
 sibilities which God brought into existence by His Will and 
 Choice (ikMiyar). And it is derived from the necessity of Will 
 in God, that the existence of created things is not through 
 causation [ta'Hl), or by way of nature (tab). And the dif- 
 ference between the two is that the entity which exists through 
 causation is whatever exists whenever its cause exists, without 
 dependence on another thing. The movement of the finger 
 is the cause of the movement of the ring ; when the one exists, 
 the second exists, without dependence on anything else. And 
 the entity which exists, by way of nature, depends upon a 
 condition and upon the nullifying of a hindrance. So, fire 
 does not burn except on the condition of contact with wood 
 
340 APPENDIX I 
 
 and the nullifying of moistness whicli is the hindrance of its 
 burning. For fire burns by its nature according to those who 
 hold the doctrine of nature — Whom may God curse ! — But 
 the truth is, that God creates the being burned in the wood 
 when it is in contact with the fire, just as He creates the 
 movement of the ring when movement of the finger exists. 
 And there is no such thing as existence through causation or 
 nature. So it is an impossibility in God that there should be 
 a cause in the world which proceeds from Him without His 
 choice, or that there should be a course of nature and that the 
 world should exist thereby. 
 
 The Ninth is Ignorance (jaM). Ignorance of any possible 
 thing is impossible in God, equally whether it is simple, that 
 is, lack of knowledge of a thing ; or compound, that is, per- 
 ception of a thing as different from what it really is. And In- 
 attention (gka/ala) and Neglect (dhuhul) are impossible in 
 God. This is the opposite of Knowledge. 
 
 The Tenth is Death (mawt). It is the opposite of Life. 
 
 The Eleventh is Deafness {samam). It is the opposite of 
 Hearing. 
 
 The Twelfth is Blindness (ama). It is the opposite of See- 
 ing. 
 
 The Thirteenth is Dumbness (Jcharas). In it is the idea of 
 Silence (hakam) and it is the opposite of Speech. 
 
 The Fourteenth is God's Being Weak {Icawn ajiz). It is 
 the opposite of His Being Powerful. 
 
 The Fifteenth is His Being an Unwilling One [Jcawn Tcarih). 
 It is the opposite of His Being a Wilier. 
 
 The Sixteenth is His Being an Ignorant One (Jcawnjahil). 
 It is the opposite of His Being a Knower. 
 
 The Seventeenth is His Being a Dead One (Jcaion mayyit). 
 It is the opposite of His Being a Living One. 
 
 The Eighteenth is His Being Deaf [asamm). It is the op- 
 posite of His Being a Hearer. 
 
 The Nineteenth is His Being Blind {a'md). It is the op- 
 posite of His Being a Seer. 
 
 The Twentieth is His Being Silent {abham). In it is the 
 
AL-FtJDALI 341 
 
 idea of Dumbness (Maras) and it is tlie opposite of His Being 
 a Speaker. 
 
 All these twenty are impossible in God. And know that the 
 proof of each one of the twenty qualities necessary in God 
 establishes the existence of that quality in Him and denies to 
 Him its opposite. And the proofs of the seven thought-quali- 
 ties are proofs of the seven derived from these. Thus, there 
 are Forty Articles ; twenty of them are necessary in God ; 
 twenty are denied in Him ; and there are twenty general 
 proofs, each proof establishing a quality and annulling its 
 opposite. 
 
 Notice. Some say that things are four, entities, non-en- 
 tities, states and relations (i'tibarat). The entities are like the 
 essence of Zayd which we see ; the non-entities are like your 
 child before it is created ; the states are like Being Powerful ; 
 and so, too, the relations, like the establishing of standing in 
 Zayd. This — I mean that things are four — is the view which 
 as-Sanusi follows in his Sughra, for he asserts in it the ex- 
 istence of states and makes the necessary qualities to be twenty. 
 But elsewhere, he follows the opinion which denies states, 
 and that is the right view. 
 
 According to that view, the Qualities are thirteen in number, 
 because the seven derived qualities — God's Being Powerful, 
 etc., drop out. God has no quality called Being Powerful, 
 because the right view is denial that states are things. Ac- 
 cording to this, then, things are three : — entities, non-entities 
 and relations. Then when the seven derived qualities drop 
 out from the twenty necessary qualities, seven drop also from 
 the opposites, and there is no quality called. Being Weak, 
 etc., and there is no need to number these among the im- 
 possibilities. So, the impossibilities are thirteen also ; at 
 least, if existence is reckoned as a quality. That it should be 
 is the opinion of all except al-Ash'ari. But the opinion of al- 
 Ash'ari was that Existence is the self (ayre) of an entity. So, 
 the existence of God is the self of His essence and not a 
 quality. The necessary qualities, on that view, are twelve. 
 Priority and Continuance and Difference and Self -subsistence 
 
342 APPENDIX I 
 
 — expressed also as Absolute Independence — and Unity and 
 Power and Will and Knowledge and Life and Hearing and 
 Seeing and Speech ; and the derived qualities drop out, be- 
 cause their existence is based upon the view that there are 
 things called states ; but the right view is the opposite. 
 
 And if you wish to instruct the commonalty in the qualities 
 of God, then state them as names (asma) derived from the 
 qualities just mentioned. So it is said that God is an Entity. 
 Prior, Different from originated things, Independent of every- 
 thing. One, Powerful, a Wilier, a Knower, Living, a Hearer, 
 a Seer, a Speaker. And they should know their opposites. 
 
 And know that some of the Shaykhs distinguish between 
 states and relationships and say of both that they are not en- 
 tities and also not non-entities. But each has a reality in 
 itself, except that a state has a connection with and a subsist- 
 ence in an essence, and a relation has no connection with an 
 essence. And it is said that a relation has a reality outside 
 of the mind. But to this it is opposed that a relation is a 
 quality, and if it has no connection with an essence and has a 
 reality outside of the mind, where is the thing qualified by it ? 
 A quality does not subsist in itself, but must needs have a 
 thing which it qualifies. So the truth is that relations have 
 no reality except in the mind. And they are of two kinds ; 
 the invented relation (i'iibara ikhtiraH), it is that which has no 
 ground in existence, as your making a generous man niggard- 
 ly ; and second, the apprehended relation (intiza'i, claiming), 
 it is that which has ground outside of your mind, as asserting 
 the subsistence of Zayd, for that may be claimed from your 
 saying, " Zayd subsists" ; so the describing of Zayd as sub- 
 sisting is existent outside of your mind. 
 
 The forty-first Article is Possibility in the case of God. 
 It is incumbent upon every mukallaf that he should believe 
 that it is possible for God to create good and evil, to create 
 Islam in Zayd and unbelief in Amr, knowledge in one of them 
 and ignorance in the other. And another of the things, belief 
 in which is incumbent upon every mukallaf, is that the good 
 and the bad of things is by Destiny [qada) and Decree (qadar). 
 
AL-FTJDALI 343 
 
 And there is a difference of opinion as to the meaning of des- 
 tiny and decree. It is said that destiny is the will of God 
 and the eternal (azali) connection of that will ; and decree is 
 God's bringing into existence the thing in agreement with the 
 will. So the Will of God which is connected eternally with 
 your becoming a learned man or a Sultan is destiny ; and the 
 bringing knowledge into existence in you, after your exist- 
 ence, or the Sultanship, in agreement with the Will, is decree. 
 And it is said that destiny is God's eternal knowledge and its 
 connection with the thing known ; and decree is God's bring- 
 ing things into existence in agreement with His knowledge. 
 So, God's knowing that which is connected eternally with a 
 person's becoming a learned man after he enters existence is 
 destiny, and the bringing knowledge into existence in that 
 man after he enters existence is decree. And according to 
 each of these two views, destiny is prior (qadim), because it is 
 one of the qualities of God, whether Will or Knowledge ; 
 and decree is originated, because it is bringing into existence, 
 and bringing into existence is one of the connections of Power, 
 and the connections of Power are originated. 
 
 And the proof that possible things are possible in the case 
 of God is that there is general agreement on their possibility. 
 If the doing of any possible thing were incumbent upon God, 
 the possible would be turned into a necessary thing. And if 
 the doing of a possible thing were hindered from Him, the pos- 
 sible would be turned into an impossible. But the turning of 
 the possible into a necessary or an impossible is false. By 
 this, you may know that there is nothing incumbent upon 
 God, against the doctrine of the Mu'tazilites, who say that it 
 is incumbent upon God to do that which is best (salah) for 
 the creature. So, it would be incumbent upon Him that He 
 should sustain the creature, but this is falsehood against Him 
 and a lie from which He is far removed. He creates faith in 
 Zayd, for example, and gives him knowledge out of His free 
 grace, without there being any necessity upon Him. And one 
 of the arguments which may be brought against the Mu'tazil- 
 ites is that afflictions come upon little children, such as ail- 
 
344 APPENDIX I 
 
 ments and diseases. And in this there is not that which is 
 best for them. So, if doing that which is best is incumbent 
 upon Him, why do aflSictions descend upon little children ? 
 For they say that God could not abandon that which is incum- 
 bent upon Him, for abandoning it would be defect, and God 
 is far removed from defect, by Agreement. And God's re- 
 warding the obedient is a grace from Him, and His punishing 
 the rebellious is justice from Him. For obedience does not 
 advantage Him, nor rebellion injure Him ; He is the Advan- 
 tager and the Injurer. And these acts of obedience or rebellion 
 are only signs of God's rewarding or punishing those described 
 by them. Then him whom He wills to draw near to Himself, 
 He helps to obedience : and in him whose abandoning and 
 rejection He wills. He creates rebellion. And all acts of good 
 and bad are by the creation of God, for He creates the creat- 
 ure and that which the creature does, as He has said (Qur. 
 37, 94), " and God hath created you and that which ye do." 
 
 And the belief is also incumbent that God may be seen in 
 the Other World by believers, for He has joined the seeing 
 (ru'ya) of Him with the standing fast of the mountain in His 
 saying (Qur. 7, 139), "And if it standeth fast in its place, thou 
 wilt see Me." And the standing fast of the mountain was 
 possible : then, that which is connected with it of seeing must 
 also have been possible ; because what is connected with the 
 possible is possible. But our seeing God must be without 
 inquiring how {bila kayfd) ; it is not like our seeing one an- 
 other. God is not seen in a direction, nor in a color, nor in a 
 body ; He is far removed from that. And the Mu'tazilites— 
 may God make them vile ! — deny the seeing of God. That is 
 one of their perverse and false articles of belief. And another 
 of their corrupt articles is their saying that the creature cre- 
 ates his own actions. For this, they are called Qadarites, be- 
 cause they say that the actions of the creature are by his own 
 qudra (power), just as the sect which holds that the creature 
 is forced to the action he does, is called Jabrite, derived from 
 their holding a being forced (jabr) on the part of the creature, 
 and a being compelled. It, too, is a perverse article. And 
 
AL-FUDALI 345 
 
 the tmth is that the creature does not create his own actions 
 and is not forced, but that God creates the actions which issue 
 from the creature, along with the creature's having a free 
 choice (ikhtiyar) in them. As-Sa'd [Sa'd ad-Din at-Taftazani, 
 see above] said, in his commentary on the Articles, " It is not 
 possible to render this free choice by any expression, but 
 the creature finds a difference between the movement of his 
 hand when he moves it himself and when the wind moves it 
 against his will. " 
 
 And to that which is possible in God belongs also the send- 
 ing of a number of Apostles (rasuls). And God's sending them 
 is by His grace, and by way of necessity, as has preceded. 
 
 And it is necessary to confess that the most excellent of cre- 
 ated beings, absolutely, is our Prophet [Muhammad], and 
 there follow him in excellency the rest of the Endowed with 
 Earnestness and Patience (ulu-l-azm ; see Qur. 46, 34) ; they 
 are our Lord Ibrahim, our Lord Musa, our Lord Isa, and our 
 Lord Nuh ; and this is their order in excellency. And that 
 they are five along with our Prophet, and four after him is 
 the correct view. And it is said, too, that the Endowed with 
 Earnestness and Patience are more numerous. And there fol- 
 low them in excellency the rest of the Apostles. Then, the 
 rest of the Prophets (nabis), then the Angels. 
 
 And it is necessary to confess that God has aided them with 
 miracles (mu'jizat) and that He has distinguished our Prophet 
 in that he is the seal of the Apostles, and that his law 
 {shar) will not be abrogated till time is fulfilled. And Isa, 
 after his descent, will judge according to the law of our Proph- 
 et. It is said that he will take it from the Qur'an and the 
 Sunna, It is said also that he will go to the Glorious Tomb 
 [of Muhammad] and learn from him. And know that he will 
 abrogate one part of the law of our Prophet with a later part, 
 just as the waiting period of a woman after the death of her 
 husband was changed from a year to four months and ten days. 
 And in this there is no defect. 
 
 And it is necessary also that every mukallaf, male and 
 female, should know in detail the Apostles who are mentioned 
 
346 APPENDIX I 
 
 in the Qur'an, and should believe in them in detail. As for 
 the other Prophets, belief is necessary in them as a whole. 
 As-Sa'd handed down an authority in his commentary on the 
 Maqasid that belief in all the Prophets as a whole suffices, 
 but he was not followed. 
 And someone put them into verse as follows : 
 
 ' ' There is imposed upon every mukallaf a knowledge 
 Of Prophets in detail, who have been named 
 In that document of ours [i.e., the Qur'an]. Of them are 
 
 eight 
 After ten [i.e., eighteen]. And there remain seven who are 
 Idris, Hud, Shu'ayb, Salih, and similarly, 
 Dhu-1-Kifl, Adam, with the Chosen One [Muhammad] they 
 
 close." 
 
 And it is necessary to confess that the Companions (sahibs) 
 of the Prophet are the most excellent of the generations. 
 Then their followers (iabi's) ; then the followers of their fol- 
 lowers. And the most excellent of the Companions is Abu 
 Bakr, then Umar, then Uthman, then Ali — in this order. 
 But al-Alqami said that our Lady Fatima and her brother, 
 our Lord Ibrahim, were absolutely more excellent than the 
 Companions, including the Pour [Khalifas]. And our Lord 
 Malik [ibn Anas] was wont to say, " There is none more 
 excellent than the children of the Prophet." This is that the 
 confession of which is incumbent ; and we will meet God con- 
 fessing it, if it is His Will. 
 
 And of that the confession of which is also necessary, is 
 that the Prophet was born in Mecca and died in al-Madina. 
 It is incumbent on fathers that they teach that to their chil- 
 dren-. Al-Ajhuri said, "It is incumbent on the individual 
 that he know the genealogy of the Prophet on his father's 
 side and on his mother's." A statement of it will come in our 
 Conclusion, if God will. The learned have said, "Every 
 individual ought to know the number of the children of the 
 Prophet and the order in which they were born, for an Individ- 
 
AL-FUPALI 347 
 
 nal ou^'n: to knotr his Lord?, and thev are the Iicads of the 
 People." But thev do not explain, in -n-hai I have *een. 
 whether that is required (mavji.c) or desired (wtf'uiK.^) : the 
 
 siLsiOirT ^r c :,,■ of things sdmilar tc it would s^^v it w.is 
 required. His children vreiv sevea. three male iuid four 
 leniale, soov^rvling: to the right -riew. Their order of birth 
 was al-Qasim. he was the iret of his children, then Z.ivnab. 
 then Kn.^svyB, then Fstinia, then Umm K-tithtun. then Abd 
 Al.An. he h.vi the to-n-inies (Uignc^ st-Tivrib snd st-Tahir, 
 which are to-nismes oi Abd Alish. no: n-ime* ol two other dif- 
 terent persons. These were aU children of otir Ijadj" Khadija. 
 And the seventh was our Lord rowhinj. Ivm oi Marija, the 
 Coy-:. So it stands. Let tis n.^w ref.tm to the concltision of 
 the Arricies. 
 
 The Forty-seov^nd is the Veracity ^Jii;' of the Apostles in 
 all their So,yt-cs. 
 
 The Forty-third is their trastwcrthiness -:'-;,!tus''. that is, 
 their being pi\?serTed i i>'-i<») frv^ni f.^oing into things forbidden 
 imtikarram) or dhs'.iked (sttiir-i': 
 
 The Forty-fourth :s their Conveying {i-.z'rli :'-:'' to the 
 creatttres th.'it which they were c.^nin^.'inded to convey. The 
 Forty-fifth is intelligence "j;,i?ilj). These t.ur things are 
 necessary in the Apostles in the sense th.-=: the lack of them 
 is nnrhinh.^hle. And Faith depends on the knowlevige of 
 these, aooording to the controversy between iis-Sann.si snd his 
 opponents. 
 
 The opposites of these fonr are impossifale in the Apostles, 
 th.^t is, LyinsT •i.i'ir'. Unisithfnlness (,l';ijy<mij) in a thing 
 forbidden or dislikeu. Concealment (JriAittiM) of a thing ther 
 h.ive been commanded to convey, snd Stnpi'.ity (J«.^!•,f^J^. 
 These fotir sre impossible in them, in the sense th.-.: the exist- 
 ence of them is ttntninksb'e. And Faith depends upon the 
 knowledge of these. aS h.is preoexied. 
 
 These are Nine .^nd Forty Articles and the Fiftieth is the 
 possibility of the ooonrrenoe of sn.'h lieshly accidents in them 
 ss do not lead to defect in their lofty rank. 
 
 And tne proof of the existence of Teracity in them is tiiat if 
 
348 APPENDIX I 
 
 they were to lie, then information from God would be a lie, 
 for He has guaranteed the claim of the Apostles by the mani- 
 festation of miracles at their hands. For the miracle is 
 revealed in place of an utterance from God, " My servant is 
 truthful in all that he brings from Me." That is, whenever 
 an Apostle comes to his people and says, " I am an Apostle to 
 you from God," and they say to him, "What is the proof of 
 your apostolate?" then he shall say, "The splitting of this 
 mountain," for example. And when they say to him, " Bring 
 what you say," God will split that mountain at their saying, as 
 a guarantee of the claim of the Apostle to the apostolate. So, 
 God's splitting the mountain is sent down in place of an utter- 
 ance from God, " My servant is truthful in all which he 
 brings to you from Me." And if the Apostle were lying, this 
 information would be lying. But lying is impossible in the 
 case of God, so lying on the part of the Apostles is impossible. 
 And whenever lying is denied in them. Veracity is established. 
 
 And as for the proof of the Trustworthiness, that is, their 
 being preserved internally and externally from forbidden and 
 disliked things ; if they were unfaithful in committing such 
 things, we would be commanded to do the like. But it is 
 impossible that we could be commanded to do a forbidden or 
 disliked thing, ' ' for God does not command a vile thing " 
 (Qur. 7, 27). And it is evident that they did nothing except 
 obedience, whether required or desired, and " permitted " (mu- 
 bah) things entered among their actions only to show, when- 
 ever they did a "permitted " thing, that it was allowable {ja'iz.) 
 
 And as for the proof of Intelligence, if it were failing in 
 them, how would they be able to establish an argument against 
 an adversary? But the Qur'an indicates in more than one 
 place, that they must establish arguments against adversaries. 
 And such establishing of arguments is only possible with 
 intelligence. 
 
 And the proof that fleshly accidents do befall them is that 
 they do not cease to ascend in their lofty rank ; for the 
 occurrence of such accidents is in them for increase in their 
 lofty rank, for example, and that others may be consoled, 
 
AL-FUDALI 349 
 
 and that the thouglitful may know that the world is not a 
 place of recompense for the lovers of God ; since if it were, 
 why should aught of the defilements of the world befall the 
 Apostles ? The Blessing of God be upon them and upon their 
 Mighty Head, our Lord Muhammad, and upon his family and 
 Companions and descendants, all ! 
 
 The Fifty Articles are completed with their Glorious 
 Proofs. 
 
 Let us mention to you now somewhat of that which must 
 be held of the things whose proofs are authority {sam'i) : 
 Know that it must be believed that our Prophet has a Tank 
 (Tiawd) ; and ignorance as to whether it is on one side or the 
 other of the Bridge (^as-simi) does not hurt. On the Day of 
 Besurrection (yawm al-qiynma) the creatures will go down to 
 drink of it. It is different from cd-Kawthar, which is a 
 Eiver in the Garden. 
 
 And it must also be believed that he wiU make intercession 
 {sliafa'a) on the Day of Besurrection in the midst of the Judg- 
 ment, when ^e shall stand and long to depart, even though it 
 be into the Fire. Then he shall intercede that they may 
 depart from the Station (mawqif) ; and this intercession be- 
 longs to him only. 
 
 And it must also be believed that falling into great sins 
 (kabiras), other than Unbelief {ku/r), does not involve Un- 
 belief, but repentance {laicba) from the sin is necessary at 
 once ; and if the sin be a small one (sagJiira) repentance is 
 necessary to him who is liable to fall into it. And repent- 
 ance is not injured by returning to sin ; but for the new sin a 
 new repentance is necessary. 
 
 And it is incumbent upon the individual that he set aside 
 arrogance (kibr) and jealousy (/lasad) and slander {ghiba) on 
 account of what the Prophet has said, " The gates of the 
 Heavens have curtains which reject the works of the people of 
 arrogance, jealousy and slander." That is, they prevent them 
 from rising, and so they ai-e not received. Jealousy is a 
 desiring that the well-being of another should pass away, 
 equally whether it is desired that it should come to the jeal- 
 
350 APPENDIX I 
 
 ous one or not. And arrogance is considering the truth to 
 be falsehood and rejecting it, and despising God's creation. 
 And it is incumbent also upon him that he should not spread 
 malicious slanders among the people, for a tradition has come 
 down, "A slanderer (qattat) shall not enter the Garden." 
 And jealousy is forbidden, as is said above, when the well- 
 being does not lead its possessor to transgression, and if it 
 does, then desire that the well-being should pass away is 
 allowable. 
 
 It is necessary also to hold that some of those who commit 
 great sins will be punished, though it is only one of them . 
 
 Conclusion. Faith (iman), in the usage of the language, is 
 acknowledgment that something is true (tasdiq), in general. 
 In that way it is used by God, when he reports the words of 
 the sons of Ya'qub (Qur. 12, 17). "But thou dost not believe 
 us [art not a believer (mu'min) in us]." Legally, it is belief 
 in all that the Prophet has brought. But there is a differ- 
 ence of opinion as to the meaning of belief, when used in this 
 way. Some say that it means knowledge (ma'ri/a) and that 
 everyone who knows what the Prophet has brought is a be- 
 liever {mu'min}. But this interpretation is opposed by the 
 fact that the unbeUever (Jcafir) knows, but is not a believer. 
 Nor does this interpretation agree with the common saying, 
 that the muqallad is a believer, although he does not know. 
 And the right view as to the interpretation of belief is that it 
 is a mental utterance (hadith an-na/s) following conviction, 
 equally whether it is conviction on account of proof, which 
 is called knowledge, or on account of acceptance on authority 
 (iaqlid). This excludes the unbeliever because he does not 
 possess the mental utterance, the idea of which is that you 
 say, " I am well pleased with what the Prophet has brought.'' 
 The mind of the unbeliever does not say this. And it includes 
 the muqallad ; for he possesses the mental utterance following 
 conviction, though the conviction is not based on a proof. 
 
 And of that which must be believed is the genealogy of the 
 Prophet, both on his father's side and on his mother's. On 
 his father's side he is our Lord, Muhammad, son of Abd 
 
ABTJ SHUJA 351 
 
 Allah, son of Abd al-Muttalib, son of Hashim, son of Abd 
 Manaf, son of Qnsay, son of Kilab, son of Mnrra, son of KaT), 
 son of Ln'ay, or Luway, son of Ghalib, son of Fihr, son of 
 Malik, son of Nadr, son of Kinana, son of Khuzayma, son of 
 Mudrika, son of Alyas, son of Mudar, son of Nizar, son of 
 M&'add, son of Adnan. And the Agreement {ijma) unites upon 
 this genealogy np to Adnan. But after him to Adam there is no 
 sure path in that -which has been handed down. And as to 
 his genealogy on his mother's side, she is Amiaa, daughter of 
 Wahb, son of Abd Manaf, son of Zuhra — this Abd Manaf is 
 not the same as his ancestor on the other line — son of Kilab, 
 ■who is already one of his ancestors. So the two lines of de- 
 scent join in Kilab. 
 
 And it is necessary also to know that he was of mixed white 
 and red complexion, according to what some of them have 
 said. 
 
 This is the last of that which God has made easy by His 
 grace. His Blessing be upon our Lord Muhammad and 
 upon his family and his Companions and his descendants, so 
 so long as the mindful are mindful of him and the heedless 
 are heedless of the thought of him. And Praise belongeth 
 unto God, the Lord of the Worlds. 
 
 vn 
 
 AnaiiTsis op the Taqrih of Abu Shota aii-Ispahani* 
 
 Book I. Of Ceremonial Purity (Tahara) 
 
 1. The water which may be used for ceremonial ablutions. 
 
 2. Legal materials for utensils ; what can be purified and 
 what cannot. 
 
 3. The use of the toothpick. 
 
 * See in bibliography, S. Keijzer, Precis, etc. Much help as to 
 details of religious ritual and law will be found in Hughes's Diction- 
 ary of Islam, Sachau's Muhammedamsches Becht, Lane's Modern 
 Egyptians, and commentary to his translation of the Ardbia/n 
 Nights, Burton's Pilgrimage, and Sell's Faith of Islam,. 
 
352 APPENDIX I 
 
 4. Description of the different stages of a ceremonial ablu- 
 tion (wudu). 
 
 5. On cleansing from excrement and its ritual generally. 
 
 6. The five things which require a fresh wudu. 
 
 7. The six things which require a complete ablution of the 
 whole body (ghusl) and its ritual. 
 
 8. The seventeen occasions on which a ghusl is prescribed. 
 
 9. When it is allowable to wash the inner shoes {Jchuffs) in- 
 stead of the feet. 
 
 10. The conditions and ritual for the use of sand (tayam- 
 mum) instead of water. 
 
 11. On unoleannesses (najasat) and how and how far they 
 can be removed. 
 
 12. On ailments of women ; duration of pregnancy and 
 their conditions. 
 
 Book II. Of Prayer 
 
 1. The times of prayer (salat). 
 
 2. Upon whom prayer is incumbent, and 
 
 3. On what occasions. 
 
 4. The antecedent requirements of prayer. 
 
 5. The eighteen essential parts of prayer. 
 
 6. The four things in which the prayer of a woman diflfers 
 from that of a man. 
 
 7. The eleven things which nullify prayer. 
 
 8. A reckoning of the occurrences of certain frequently re- 
 peated elements in prayer. 
 
 9. On omissions in prayer. 
 
 10. The five occasions on which prayer is not allowable. 
 
 11. The duty and ritual of congregational prayer. 
 
 12. The prayer of a traveller. 
 
 13. The conditions under which congregational prayer is re- 
 quired and those under which it is lawful. 
 
 14. The requirements in congregational prayer. 
 
 15. The prayers of the Two Festivals and their ritual. 
 
 16. The prayers on occasion of an eclipse. 
 
 17. Prayer for rain. 
 
ABU SHUJA 353 
 
 18. Prayer in presence of the enemy. 
 
 19. What is forbidden of clothing. 
 
 20. The ritual of the dead. 
 
 Booh III. Of Rates for the Poor, etc. 
 
 1. The condition of the rate (zakat) and of the rate-payer ; 
 what it is levied on and consists of. 
 
 2. On camels. 
 
 3. On cattle. 
 
 4. On sheep. 
 
 5. How it affects partners. 
 
 6. On gold and silver. 
 
 7. On grain-stuff. 
 
 8. On merchandise. 
 
 9. The conditions and nature of the rate to be paid at the 
 end of the fast. 
 
 10. Uses to which the rate may be applied. 
 
 Book IV. Of the Fast 
 
 1. The conditions for the fast (sit/am); its description; 
 what breaks it. 
 
 2. What is meritorious in fasting ; when and for whom 
 it is forbidden ; how breaking the fast must be expiated. 
 
 3. The conditions and nature of religious retreat (i'tikaf). 
 
 Book V. Of the Pilgrimage 
 
 1. The conditions of pilgrimaging (hajj) ; its essentials and 
 other elements. 
 
 2. The ten things forbidden on pilgrimage. 
 8. The five sacrifices of the pilgrimage. 
 
 Book VI. Of Barter and Other Biosiness Transactions 
 
 1. Conditions and kinds of barter (bay) ; what may be bar- 
 tered and what not. 
 
 2. Description and conditions of the bargain with payment 
 in advance (salam). 
 
354 APPENDIX I 
 
 3. Of pledging {rahn). 
 
 4. Of those who are not to be permitted to administer their 
 own property {Jiajar as-safih). 
 
 5. Of bankruptcy and composition and common rights in a 
 highway (sulK). 
 
 6. The conditions for the transfer of debts and credits {ha- 
 wald). 
 
 7. Of security for debts {daman). 
 
 8. Of personal security for debts (kafala), 
 
 9. Of partnership (shirka). 
 
 10. Of agency {wakala). 
 
 11. Of confession (iqrar). 
 
 12. Of loans (i'ara). 
 
 13. Of illegal seizure and use of property ; indemnity for it 
 and its damage (ghasb). 
 
 14. Of right of pre-emption (shuf'a). 
 
 15. The conditions of advancing capital with participation 
 in the profits (qiracT). 
 
 16. Of the letting of date-palms and vines (musaqaf), 
 
 17. Of hiring a thing out (ijara). 
 
 18. Of reward for return of a thing lost (ja'ala). 
 
 19. That land may not be let for a fixed amount of its 
 produce {mukhabara). 
 
 20. Of irrigation of waste lands {ihya al-mawat). 
 
 21. Of foundations in mortmain {waqf). 
 
 22. Of gifts {hiba). 
 
 28. Of found property {lugta). 
 
 24. Of foundlings (laqit). 
 
 25. Of deposits (wadi'a). 
 
 Book VII. Of Inheritance and Wills 
 
 1. Of legal heirs (warifh) . 
 
 2. The conditions and proportions of inheritance (farida). 
 
 3. Of legacies {wasiya). 
 
 Book VIII. Of Marriage and Related Subjects 
 
 1. The conditions of marriage (m?Aa^). What women a man 
 may see and to what extent. 
 
ABTJ SHTJJA 355 
 
 2. The form of a legal marriage. 
 
 3. The conditions of asking {khitha) and giving in marriage ; 
 whom a man may not marry ; conditions for nullity of mar- 
 riage . 
 
 4. The settlement (mahr) on a wife by her husband. 
 
 5. On the wedding feast (walima). 
 
 6. On the equality of the rights of the wives and the author- 
 ity of the husband. 
 
 7. On divorce for incompatibility (Jchul). 
 
 8. The forms of divorce {talaq). 
 
 9. On taking a wife back and the three-fold divorce. 
 
 10. The oath not to cohabit {ila). 
 
 11. The temporary separation by the formula, zihar 
 Qur. 58. 
 
 12. The form of accusation of adultery and the defence 
 (li'an). 
 
 13. The period during which a previously married woman 
 cannot remarry (idda). 
 
 14 Of relations with female slaves. 
 
 15. The support and behavior of a woman, divorced or a 
 widow ; mourning. 
 
 16. Law of relationship through suckling (irda). 
 
 17. The support (na/aqa) due to a wife. 
 
 18. The support due to children and parents, slaves and 
 domestic animals. 
 
 19. Of the custody of children (hidana). 
 
 Book IX. Of Crimes of Violence to the Person (jinaya) 
 
 1. On murder, homicide and chance medley. 
 
 2. The lex talionis (qisas) for murder, and 
 
 3. For wounds and mutilations. 
 
 4. The blood-wit {diya). 
 
 5. Use of weak evidence m case of murder. 
 
 6. Personal penance for homicide. 
 
 Book X. Of Restrictive Ordinances of God Quidd) 
 1. Of fornication [zina) of one who has been or is married 
 {muhsan), and of one who has not been or is not married. 
 
356 APPENDIX I 
 
 2. Of accusing of fornication. 
 
 3. Of drinking wine or any intoxicating drink. 
 4 Of theft. 
 
 5. Of highway robbery. 
 
 6. Of killing in defence. 
 
 7. Of rebelling against a just government. 
 
 8. Of apostasy. 
 
 9. Of abandoning the usage of prayer. 
 
 Booh XI. Of the Holy War (jihad) 
 
 1. The general law oi jihad. 
 
 2. The distribution of booty taken in the field (ghomima). 
 
 3. The law of the tax on unbelievers (fay). 
 
 4 The law of the poll-tax on unbelievers (jizya). 
 
 Booh XII. Of Hunting and the Slaughter of Animals 
 
 1. How an animal may be killed in the chase or otherwise. 
 
 2. What flesh may be eaten. 
 
 3. The ritual of sacrifice (udhiya). 
 
 4. The ritual of sacrifice for a child (aqiqd). 
 
 Booh XIII. Of Racing and Shooting with the Bow 
 
 Booh XIV. Of Oaths and Vows (yamin, nadhr) 
 
 1. What oaths are allowable and binding ; how expiated- 
 
 2. Lawful and unlawful vows. 
 
 Booh XV. Of Judgments and Evidence (qada, shahada) 
 
 1. Of the judge (qadi) and court usage. 
 
 2. The division (qasm) of property held in common. 
 
 3. Of evidence and oaths. 
 
 4. The conditions of being a legal witness (adil). 
 
 5. The difference of claims (haqq), on the part of God, and 
 on the part of man, and their legal treatment. 
 
ABU SHUJA 357 
 
 Book XVI. Of Manumission of Slaves 
 
 1. General conditions of manumission (itq). 
 
 2. The clientship which follows {wala). 
 
 3. Of freeing at death [tadhir). 
 
 4. Of the slave buying his freedom ijcitaba). 
 
 5. Of the slave (mtoto walad) that has borne a child to her 
 master or to another and of her children. 
 
APPENDIX II 
 
 I. Books and Akticlbs, General and Ftjndamental, fob 
 
 THE Study of Islam. 
 II. On Muslim History and on Present Condition op 
 Muslim Wobld. 
 
 III. On Muslim Traditions and Law. 
 
 IV. On Muslim Theology, Philosophy and Mysticism. 
 
 Books and Artiolbs, General and Fundamental, pob the 
 Study of Islam 
 
 The non-Arabist will gain much insight into Muslim life 
 and thought by reading such translations as that of Ibn Khal- 
 likan by De Slane (Paris-London ; 1843-71), the Persian 
 Tabari, by Zotenberg (Paris ; 1867-74), Ibn Batuta by De- 
 frgmery and Sanguinetti (Paris ; 1853-58), Mas'udi by C. 
 Barbier de Meynard and Pavet de Courteille (Paris ; 1861-77), 
 Ibn Khaldun's Prolegomenes by De Slane (Paris ; 1862-68), 
 ad-Dimishqi by Mehren (Copenhagen ; 1874), al-Beruni's 
 Chronology by Sachau (London ; 1879). 
 
 The translations and notes in De Sacy's Ohrestomathie arabe 
 (Paris ; 1826) can also be used to advantage. 
 
 Very many valuable articles will be found scattered through 
 the Zeitschrift of the German Oriental Society (hereafter 
 Zdmg), the Journal asiatique (hereafter Ja), the Journal of the 
 Royal Asiatic Society (hereafter Jbas) and the Vienna Zeit- 
 schrift fiir die Kunde des Morgenlandes (hereafter Wz). 
 
 358 
 
BIBLIOGKAPHT 359 
 
 It is always worth while to consult the Encyclopedia Bri- 
 iannica. 
 
 The best translations of the Qur'an into English are those 
 by E. H. Palmer (2 vols., Oxford; 1880) and J. M. Eodwell 
 (London; 1871). The first more perfectly represents the 
 spirit and tone, and the second more exactly the letter. The 
 commentary added by Sale to his version and his introduction 
 are still useful. 
 
 The Thousand and One Nights should be read in its entirety 
 in Arabic or in a translation by every student of Islam. English 
 translation by Lane (incomplete but accurate and with very 
 valuable commentary) ; Burton (last edition almost complete ; 
 12 vols., London : 1894). Payne's translation is complete, as is 
 also Burton's privately printed edition ; but, while exceeding- 
 ly readable, Payne hardly represents the tone of the original. 
 There is an almost complete and very cheap German version 
 by Henning published by Eeclam, Leipzig) ; Mardrus' French 
 version is inaccurate and free to such an extent as to make it 
 useless. Galland's version is a work of genius ; but it belongs 
 to French and not to Arabic literature. 
 
 E. P. A. DozT : Mssai sur Vhistoire de I'islamisme. Leyden, 
 1879. A readable introduction. 
 
 A. MiJLLER: Der Islam im Morgen-und-Ahendland. 2 vols. 
 Berlin, 1885, 1887. The best general history of Islam. 
 
 Stanley Lane-Poole : The Mohammedan Dynasties ; chrono- 
 logical and genealogical tables with historical introductions. West" 
 minster, 1894. An indispensable book for any student of Muslim 
 history. 
 
 C. Beockelmann : Oeschichte der arabischen Litteraiur. 2 
 vols. Weimar, 1898, 1899. Indispensable for names, dates, and 
 books, but not a history in any true sense. 
 
 T. B. Hughes : A Dictionary of Islam. London, 1896. Very 
 full of information, but to be used with caution. Based on Persian 
 sources largely. 
 
 E. W. Lane : An Account of the Manners and Customs of the 
 Modern Egyptians. First edition, London, 1836; third, 1842. 
 Many others. Indispensable. 
 
360 APPENDIX II 
 
 C. M, Doughty . Travels in Arabia Deserta 2 Tole. Cam- 
 bridge, 1888. By far the best book on nomad life in Arabia. Gives 
 the fullest and clearest idea of the nature and workings of the Arab 
 mind. 
 
 J. L. BuRCKHARDT ; Notcs on the Bedouins and Wahabys. 2 
 vols. London, 1831. 
 
 J. L. Bdkckhardt : Travels in Arabia. 2 vols. London, 1829. 
 
 E. P. Burton : Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to al-Ma- 
 dinah and Meccah. 2 vols. Last edition, London, 1898. On 
 the Hajj and Muslim life, thought and studies generally in the 
 middle of the nineteenth century. Readable and accurate to a 
 degree. 
 
 C. Snouok Hurgronje : MeJcka. 2 vols, and portfolio of plates. 
 Haag, 1888, 1889. Is somewhat dull beside Burton, but very full 
 and accurate. 
 
 W. Robertson Smith ; Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. 
 First Series. New edition, London, 1894. Kinship and Mar- 
 riage in Early Arabia. Cambridge, 1885. 
 
 loNAz GoLDZiHER : Muhammcdanische Studien. I, Halle a. S. , 
 1889. II, 1890. Epoch-marking books; as are all Goldziher's 
 contributions to the history of Muslim civilization. 
 
 Alfred von Kremer : Oeschichte der herrschenden Ideen des 
 Isla/ms. Leipzig, 1868. 
 
 Alfred von Kremer : Oulturgeschichte des Orients unter den 
 Chalifen. 2 vols. Wien, 1875-77. Oulturgeschichtliche Streif- 
 zilge. Leipzig, 1873. 
 
 Edward G. Browne : A Year Among the Persians. London, 
 1893. A most valuable account of modern Persian life, philosophy, 
 and theology, and especially of Sufiism and Babism. 
 
 Edward G. Browne : A Literary History of Persia. New 
 York, 1902. Really political and religious prolegomena to such a 
 history. 
 
 G. A. Herklots : Qanoon-e- Islam, or the Customs of the 
 Moosulmans of India. London, 1832. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 361 
 
 11 
 
 On Muslim History and on Present Condition op Muslim 
 World 
 
 August Muller : Die Beherrscher der OlduUgen. Berlin, 1882. 
 A Tery brightly written sketch based on thorough knowledge. 
 
 Gustav Weil : Geschichte der Chalifen. 3 vols. Mannheim, 
 1846-1851. 
 
 Sir William Muir : The Caliphate, its Rise, Decline and Fall. 
 London, 1891. 
 
 Theodor Noldeke : Zur tendentibsen Gestaltung der TJrgt- 
 schichte des Islams. ZDMG, lii, pp. 16 ff. All Noldeke's papers 
 on the early history of Islam are worthy of the most careful study. 
 
 G. VON Vloten : Zivr Ahbasiden Geschichte. ZDMG, lii, pp. 213 
 ff. On the early Abbasids. 
 
 R. E. BEiJNNOw : De Gharidschiten unter den ersten Omayyaden, 
 Leyden, 1884. 
 
 Eduard Sachau : Vler eine Arabische Chronik aus Zanzibar. 
 Mitth, a.d. Sem. f. Orient. Sprachen. Berlin, 1898. On Ibadites, 
 
 Gkorgb Perot Badger : History of the Imams and Seyyids 
 of Om&n, by Salll-ibn-Razlk. London : Hakluyt Society, 1871. 
 Valuable for Ibadite history, law and theology. 
 
 M. J. DE GoEJE : Memoire sur les Carmathes du Bahrain et les 
 Fatimides. Leyden, 1886. 
 
 John Nicholson : An Account of the Establishment of the Fate- 
 mite Dynasty in Africa. Tiibingen and Bristol, 1840. 
 
 QuATREMERE : Mcmoires historiques sur la dynastie des Khalifes 
 Fatimites. JA, 3, ii. 
 
 Stlvestre de Sacy : Expose de la religion des Druzes et la vie 
 du Khalife Sahem-bia/mr-allah. 2 vols. Paris, 1838. 
 
 F. WnsTENFELD : Geschtchte der Fatim/iden-Khalifen. Gottin- 
 gen, 1881. 
 
 Stanley Lane-Poolb : A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages, 
 New York, 1901. Por the origin and founding of the Patimid 
 Dynasty, the Khalifa al- Hakim, etc. 
 
 H. L. Fleischer : Briefwechsel zwischen den Anfiihrern der 
 Wahhabiten und dem Pasha von Damaskus. Kleinere Schriften, 
 iii, pp. 341 ff. First published in ZDMG for year 1857. 
 
362 APPENDIX II 
 
 E. Rehatsek ; The History of the Wahhubys in Arabia and in 
 India. Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal. No. xxiviii (read 
 January, 1880). 
 
 JWJfcey mjEwrope, by "Odysseus." Loudon, 1900. The present 
 situation, with its historical antecedents in European Turkey and the 
 Balkans generally. 
 
 H. O. DwiGHT : Constantinople and its Problems. New York, 
 1901. 
 
 A. S. White : The Expansion of Egypt. London, 1899. The 
 present situation in Egypt and its historical antecedents. 
 
 W. W. Hunter : Our Indian Mvssulma/ns. London, 1871. 
 
 SiK Lewis Pelly : The Miracle Play of Hasan and Husain. 
 London, 1879. 
 
 W. S. Blunt : The Fviv/re of Islam. London, 1880. 
 
 Ill 
 
 On Muslim Tbaditions and Law 
 
 The Mishkat, translated by Matthews. Calcutta, 1809. (A col- 
 lection of traditions.) 
 
 The Hidaya, translated by C. Hamilton. II edition. London, 
 1870. 
 
 N. B. E. Baillie : A Digest of Muhammadan Law. Hanifi 
 Code. London, 1865. 
 
 The same. Imameea Code. London, 1869. The first volume 
 deals with Sunnite, the second with Shii'ite law. 
 
 S. Keijzeb : Precis de Jv/risprudence Mnsnlmane selon le rite 
 Ch&feite par Abu Chodja ; texte arahe avec traduction et annota- 
 tions. Leyden, 1859. To be used with caution. 
 
 Eduard Sachau : Muhammadanisches Recht nach Schafiitischer 
 Lehre. Stuttgart & Berlin, 1897. Based largely on al-Bajuri's 
 commentary to Abu Shuja : corers rather less than half the ma- 
 terial of a corpus of canon law and is the best general introduc- 
 tion to the subject. 
 
 Ignaz Goldziher : Die Z&hiriten, ihr Lehrsystem und ihre 
 Oeschichie. Leipzig, 1884. 
 
 Ignaz Goldziher : Neue Materialien zwr Litteratur des Ueber- 
 lieferungswesen bei den Muhammedanern. ZDMG, I, pp. 465 £E. 
 Deals with Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 363 
 
 Ignaz GoLDzraER : Zwr Litteraiwr des Ichtil&f al-madhdkib. 
 ZDMG, ixrviii, pp. 669 ff. Contains a notice of ash-Sha'rani. 
 
 Ignaz Goldziher ; Vher erne Formel in der judischen Respon- 
 sen-litteratur. ZDMG, liii, pp. 645 ff. On fatwas and ijtihad. 
 
 Ignaz Goldziher : Bas Princip des Istishab in muham. Oesetz- 
 wissenschaft. WZ, 1, pp. 228 ff. 
 
 Eduard Sachatj : Muhammedanisches Erbrecht nach der Lehre 
 der Ibaditischen Araber von Zanzibar und Ostafrika. Sitzungs- 
 berichte der kon. preuas. Akad., 1894. 
 
 Eduard Sachau : Zur dltesten Oeschichte des muhammedanischen 
 Rechis. Wien. Akad., 1870. 
 
 Snouok Hurgronje : Le droit mtisulman. EeTue de I'histoire 
 des religions, xxxyii, pp. 1 ff, and 174 ff. 
 
 Snouck Hdrgronje : Muhammedanisches Rechi nach schafiit- 
 ischer Lehre von Eduard Sachau; Anzeige, ZDMG, liii, pp. 125 ff. 
 
 S. K. Kehn de Hoogerwoerd : Studien zur Einfiihrimg in das 
 Recht des Islam. Erlangen, 1901. Contains introduction and part 
 of section on law of marriage. Gives a good but miscellaneous 
 bibliography and is written from a Persian point of view ; trans- 
 literation is peculiarly eccentric and Arabic scholarship is unsound. 
 
 J. Wellhausen : Medina vor dem, Islam. Muhammad's Gemein- 
 deordnung von Medina. In " Sklzzen und Vorarbeiten," Viertes 
 Heft. Berlin, 1889. 
 
 HuART : Les Zindiqs en droit mvsulman. Eleventh Congress 
 of Orientalists, part iii, ^p. 69 ff. 
 
 D. B. Macdonald : The Emancipation of Slaves under Muslim 
 Law. American Monthly Review of Reviews, March, 1900. 
 
 IV 
 On Muslim Theology, Philosophy and Mysticism 
 
 Theodor Haarbrucker : Asch-Schahrast&ni's Religionspar- 
 teien und Philosophenschulen iibersetzt und erklart. 2 vols. Halle, 
 1850-51. The Arabic text, without which Haarbriicker's German is 
 sometimes hardly intelligible, was published by Cureton, London, 
 1846. 
 
 T. J. DE Boer : Geschichte der Philosophie im Islam. Stuttgart, 
 1901. Unsatisfactory but the best that there is. It is only a sketch 
 and takes hardly sufficient account of theology and mysticism. 
 
364 APPENDIX II 
 
 Stanley Lake-Poole : Studies in a Mosque. II edition. Lon- 
 don, 1893. Miscellaneous essays, lightly written but trustworthy. 
 
 Rrehl : Beitrdge zur CkaracterisUk der Lehre vom Olauben in 
 Islam. Leipzig, 1877. 
 
 G. VON Vloten : Les Hachwia et Nahita. Eleventh Congress of 
 Orientalists, part iii, pp. 99 ff. On early religious sects. 
 
 G. VON Vloten : Irdja. ZDMG, xiv, pp. 181 ff . On the Mur- 
 ji'ites. 
 
 Eduakd Sachau : t/ber de religiosen Anschauungen der ibadit- 
 ischen Muhammedaner in Oman v/nd Ostafrica. Mitth. a. d. Sem. 
 f. Orient. Sprachen. Berlin, 1899. 
 
 H. Steinee : Die MuHaziliten oder die Freidenker im Islam. 
 Leipzig, 1865. 
 
 Wilhelm Spitta : Zur GeschicMe Abu l-Basan al-Ash^a/ri's. 
 Leipzig, 1876. The best as yet on al-Ash'ari, but to be used with 
 caution, especially in the translations of theological texts. 
 
 Martin Schreiner : Zu/r Geschichte des Ash^aritenthums. In 
 Actes du huitieme Congress International des Orientalistes, I, i, 
 pp. 77 ff. Leiden, 1891. 
 
 M. A. E. Mehrbn : Expose de la reforme de rislanvisme com- 
 m,encee au troisieme Steele de I'Hegire par Abou-l-Hasan Ali el- 
 Ash^ari et continuee par son ecole. Third International Congress of 
 Orientalists, vol. ii. 
 
 G. Eltjgel : Al-Kindi genannt '■'■der Philosoph der Araber." 
 Ein Vorbild seiner Zeit und seines Volkes. Leipzig, 1857. 
 
 Sir William Muir : The Apology of al-Kindy, written at the 
 court of al-Mdmiln. London, 1882. 
 
 E. Sell : The Faith of Islam. London, 1896. II edittion. A 
 valuable book, but from the point of view of an Indian missionary. 
 Hence the tone is polemic and the technicalities are Persian rather 
 than Arabic. 
 
 Walter M. Patten : Ahmad iln Hanbal and the Mikna. 
 Leyden, 1897. There is a valuable review by Goldziher in ZDMG, 
 Iii, pp. 155 ff. It traces connection of Hanbalites with Ibn 
 Taymiya and Wahhabites. 
 
 Heinrich RiTTER : Ueber vnsere Kenntniss der Arabischen Phil- 
 osophie. Gottingen, 1844. 
 
 Eriedrich Dieterici : Alfarabi's philosophische Abhandlungen 
 herausgegeben. Leiden, 1890. Aus dem arabischen iibersetzt. 
 Leiden, 1892. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 365 
 
 Al-Fakabi : Der Mitsierstaat. Hercmsgegeben und ijbersetzt 
 von Frdr. Dieierici. Leiden, 1900. 
 
 G. FlCgel : Ueber Inhalt und Verfasser der arabisihen Encyclo- 
 pddie der Ikhwan as-Safa. ZDMG, xiii, pp. 1 ff. See, too, an 
 excellent article by August Mflller in Ersch und Grvher, 11, 42, pp. 
 272 fl:., and Stanley Lane-Poole in his Studies in a Mosque. 
 
 Feiedrich Dietekici : Vie Philosophic der Araher im X. 
 Jahrhundert n. Ghr. aus der Schriften der Icmteren Briider her- 
 aitsgegeben. Berlin and Leipzig, 1861-1879. 
 
 Ignaz Goldziher : Materialien zur Entwickelimgs-geschichte des 
 Sufismus. WZ, xiii, pp. 35 ff. 
 
 Theodor Noldeke : Sufi. ZDMG, xlviii, pp. 45 ff. On the 
 derivation and early usage of the name Sufi. 
 
 Adelbert Merx : Idee vmd Orumdlinien einer allgemeinen 
 Geschichte der Mystik. Heidelberg, 1893. 
 
 John P. Brown : The Derwishes or Oriental Spiritualism. 
 London, 1868. A valuable but uncritical description of modern 
 Turkish and Persian Darwishes. 
 
 Sir James Redhouse : The Mesnevi of Jelaleddinar-rumi trans- 
 lated into English. Book I. London, 1881. See, too, a transla- 
 tion by Whinfield, London, 1887, and an edition of selected ghazels 
 from the Diwan with translation and valuable introduction by R. A. 
 Nicholson, Cambridge University Press, 1898. 
 
 E. J. W. GiBB : A History of Ottoman Poetry. Vol. i. London, 
 1900. A valuable statement of the later Persian and Turkish 
 mysticism and metaphysic on pp. 13-70. 
 
 E. H. Palmer : Oriental Mysticism. Cambridge, 1867. 
 
 Carra de Vaux : Avicenne. Paris, 1900. Contains an intro- 
 ductory sketch of philosophy and theology up to the time of Ibn 
 Sina. Algazali. Paris, 1902. A continuation of the first . 
 
 A. TON Kkemer : Vber die philosophischen Oedichte des Abul 
 Ala Ma'-arry. Wien, 1888. 
 
 A. VON Kremer ; Oedichte des Abu-l-Ala Ma^a/rri. ZDMG, 
 nix, 304 ; xxx, 40 ; xxxi, pp. 471 ff. ; xxiviii, 499 ff. 
 
 Abu-l-Ala al-Ma'arri : Letters Arabic and English, with notes, 
 etc., editedby D. S. Margoliouth. Oxford, 1898. See, too, papers 
 by R. A. Nicholson in JRAS, October, 1900, ff. ; and by Mar- 
 goliouth, for April, 1902. 
 
 E. Fitzgerald : The Suba^iyat of Omar Khayyam. With a 
 commenta/ry by H. M. Batson cmd a biographical Introduction by 
 
S66 APPENDIX II 
 
 E. D. Ross. New York, 1900. The biography by Ross is the only 
 at all adequate treatment of the life and times of Umar which yet 
 exists. Of the Ruba'iyat themselyes there are several adequate 
 translations, e.g. by "Whinfield, Payne and Mrs. Cadell. 
 
 Martin Sohreinee : Zur Oeschdchte der PolemiJc zwischen Juden 
 und Mvhammedanern. ZDMG, xlii, pp. 591 ff. Deals with Ibn 
 Hazm and Fakhr ad-Din ar-Razi. 
 
 Martin Schreinek : Beitrage zur Geschichte der theologischen 
 Bewegungen in Islam. ZDMG, lii, pp. 463 ff. ; 513 ff. ; liii, pp. 
 51 ff. A most valuable collection of materials with considerable 
 gaps and imperfect digestion. 
 
 D. B. Macdonald : The Life ofal-Ohazzali. In the Journal of 
 the American Oriental Society, toI. xx, pp. 71-182. 
 
 D. B. Macdonald : Emotional Religion in Islam as affected hy 
 Music and Singing. Being a translation of a book of the Ihya of 
 al-Ghazzali. In JRAS for April and October, 1901, and January, 
 1902. 
 
 Miguel Asin Palacios : Algazel, dogmaiica, moral, ascetica. 
 Zaragoza, 1901. 
 
 C. Barbier de Meynard : Traduction nouvelle du Traite de 
 Ohazzali, intitule lie Preseryatif de I'Erreur. In JA, Tii, 9, pp. 
 5fE. 
 
 T. J. de Boer : Die Widerspruche der Philosophie nach al- 
 Ghazzali und ilir Ausgleich durch Ibn Roshd. Strassburg, 1894. 
 
 A translation of al-Ghazzali's Tahafut has been begun by Carra 
 de Vanx in Le Musion, xxviii, p. 143 (June, 1899). 
 
 Ignaz Goldzihee : Materialien zur Kenniniss der Almohaden- 
 iewegwng in Nordafrika. ZDMG, xli, pp. 30 S. 
 
 Ignaz Goldziher : Die Bekenntnissformeln der Almohaden. 
 ZDMG, xliv, pp. 168 S. 
 
 Robert Flint : Historical Philosophy in France and French 
 Belgium cmd Switzerland. New York, 1894. Contains an excel- 
 lent estimate of Ibn Khaldun as a philosophical historian. 
 
 A. VON Kremer : Ibn Chaldun und seine Culturgeschichte der 
 islamischen Reiche. Wien, 1879. 
 
 Ernest Renan : Averroes et V Averroisme. Ill edition. Paris, 
 1861. Reviewed by Dozy in JA, 5, ii, pp. 93 ff. This review con- 
 tains a curious description of a Parliament of Religions at Baghdad 
 about A. D. 1000. 
 
 Philosophie und Theologie von Averroes. Aus dem Arabischen 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 367 
 
 iilersetztvon M. J. Miiller. Miinchen, 1875. The Arabic text was 
 published by Miiller in 1859. 
 
 Leon Gauthiek : Ibn TJiofail-Hayy hen Yaqdhan, roman philo- 
 sophique. Texte arabe . . . et traduction franQaise. Alger, 
 1900. There is an earlier edition of Ibn Tufayl's romance by the 
 younger Pocock with a Latin version. Oxford, 1671. 
 
 M. A. P. Meheen : Gorrespondance du Philosophe Soufi Ibn 
 SabHn Abd oul-Haqq avec VEmperev/r Frederic II. de Hohen- 
 staufen. In JA, vii, 14, pp. 341 ff. 
 
 S. Gtjtaed : Abd arSazzaq et son traiti de la Predestination 
 et du libre arbitre. In JA, vii, 1, pp. 125 ff. 
 
 A. DE Keemer : Notice svjr Sha'rany. In JA, vi, 11, pp. 253 ff. 
 
 G. Flugel : Scha^rani und sein Werk uber die muhammada/n- 
 ische Olaubenslehre. ZDMG, xx, p. 1 ff. 
 
 Ignaz Goldziheb ; Beitrdge zwr LitteraturgescMchte der Shi'a. 
 "Wien, 1874. 
 
 James L. Meeeick : The Life and Religion of Mohammed, as 
 contained in the Sheeah Traditions of the Hyat-ul-Kuloob, Bos- 
 ton, 1850. 
 
 J. B. Ruling : Beitrage zv/r Eschatologie des Islam,. Leipzig, 
 1895. 
 
 L. Gauthiek : Ad-dowrra al-fdkhira ; la perle precieuse de Gha- 
 zali. Geneve, 1878. In Arabic and French; a valuable account 
 of Muslim eschatology. 
 
 M. WoLEF : Muhammedanische Eschatologie. Leipzig, 1872. 
 In Arabic and German ; an account of ^qy«/ar Muslim eschatology. 
 
 Depont ET Cappolani : Les Confreries religieuses Musulmanes. 
 Alger, 1897. 
 
 Snouck Hukgkonje : Les Confreries religieuses, la Mecque et le 
 Panislamisme, in Revue de I'histoire des religions, iliv, pp. 262 ff. 
 
APPENDIX III 
 
 For typographical reasons the smooth guttural Ha, the palatals Sad, Dad, 
 Ta, Za, and the long vowels are indicated by italic. The same system is fol- 
 lowed in the index. 
 
 OHKONOlOGIOAIi TABIiB 
 
 A.H. 
 11 M.d. ; Ab« Bakr Kh. 
 
 13 'TJmar Kh. 
 
 14 Battle of al-Qadisiya ; fall of 
 
 Jemsalem ; al-Basra found- 
 ed ; fall of Damascus. 
 
 17 Al-K«fa founded; Syria and 
 Mesopotamia conquered. 
 
 20 Conquest of Egypt. 
 
 31 Battle of Nahawand; Persia 
 conquered. 
 
 2.3 'UthmanKh. 
 
 30 Final redaction of the Qur'on. 
 
 35 'Ali Kh. 
 
 3fi Battle of Carmel. 
 
 40 -Alt d. 
 
 41 Mu'awiya I. Kh. ; Herat. 
 49 Al-^asan d. 
 
 56 Samarqand. 
 
 60 Schism of Ibadites from Khari- 
 
 jites. 
 
 61 Karbala & d. of al-.HuBayn. 
 
 73 Storm of Mecca & d. of 'Abd 
 
 Allah b. aa-Zubayr. 
 
 74 Carthage. 
 
 80 Ma 'bad executed. 
 
 81 M. b. al--ffanafiya d. 
 93 Toledo. 
 
 99-101 'Umar H. Kh. 
 110 Baaan al-Basri d. 
 114 Charles the Hammer at Tours 
 (A.D. 7:^2). 
 
 121 Zayd b. Zayn al-'Abidin d. 
 124 Az-Zuhri d. 
 137-133 Marwan II. Kh. 
 
 130 Jahm b. Safwan killed? 
 
 131 Wa.«l b. 'Ato d. 
 
 133 Fall of Umayyads ; as-SaffaA 
 
 first 'Abbasid Kh. 
 
 134 First Ibad!ite Imam. 
 
 135 Rnbi' a d. 
 136-158 Al-Man,rar Kh. 
 138-423 Umayyads of Cordova. 
 140 Ibn al-Muqaffa' killed. 
 
 143 Halley's comet. 
 
 144 'Amr b. 'Ubayd d. ? 
 
 145 Baghdad founded ; '.^'isha d. 
 
 of Ja' far as-<Sadiq d. 
 
 147 Homage to al-Mahdi as suc- 
 
 cessor in Kh. 
 
 148 Jafar ai-6'adiq d. 
 
 150 Abw Hicaiia, d. ; trace of Suii 
 monastery in Damascus. 
 
 157 Al-Awza'i d. 
 
 158-169 Al-Mahdi Kh. ; John of 
 Damascus d. ? 
 
 161 Sufyan ath-Thawri d. ; Ibra- 
 him b. Adham d. 
 
 165 Da'Md b. Nnsayr d. 
 
 167 Bashshar b. Burd killed. 
 
 170-193 Harwn ar-Rashid Kh. 
 
 178-375 Idriaids. 
 
 179 Malik b. Anas d. 
 
 368 
 
A.H. 182-408 
 
 369 
 
 A.H. 
 
 182 The Qadi Abu Yuaut d. 
 18T Fall of Barmecides ; al-Pu- 
 
 dayl b. 'lyad d. 
 189 M. b. al-flasan d. 
 198-318 Al-Ma'm«nKh. 
 300 Ma'rMf of al-Karkh d. ; trace 
 
 of Sufi monastery inKhura- 
 
 san. 
 304 Ash-Shfflfi'i d. 
 308 AbM 'Ubayda d. ; the Lady 
 
 Nafisa d. 
 311 TheodoruB Abucara d. 
 313 Decree that the Qur'an is 
 
 created. 
 313 Thumama b. Aahras d. 
 315 Ab« Sulayman of Damascus 
 
 d.; 2nd decree. 
 318-334 The MiAna ; AI-Mu'tasim 
 
 Kh. 
 320 Ma 'mar b. 'Abbad. 
 
 333 Pa^ima of Naysabur d. 
 
 326 AbM Hudhayl M. al-'Allaf d. 
 
 327 Bishr al-^afi d. ; al-Wathiq 
 
 Kh. 
 
 331 An-Nazzam d. 
 
 332 Al-Mutawakkil Kh. 
 
 334 Decree that Qur'an is un- 
 
 created ; Scotus Brigena 
 transl. pseudo-Dionysius, 
 A.D. 850. 
 
 340 Ibn Abi Duwad d. 
 
 341 AAmad b. flanbal d. 
 343 Al--earith al-MuAasibi d. 
 245 Dhu-n-Nun d. ; al-Karabisi 
 
 d. 
 250-316 'Alida of Zaydite branch 
 
 in north Persia. 
 255 A\-JaMz d. 
 
 356 Ibn Karram d. 
 
 357 Al-Bnkhari d. ; Sari as-Saqati 
 
 d. 
 260 Al-Kind j d. ? M. b. al-.ffasan 
 al-Muntazar vanished. 
 
 361 Muslim d. ; Abu Yazid al- 
 
 'Bistami d. 
 270 Da'«d az-Zahiri d. 
 273 Ibn Maja d. 
 275 Aba Da'ad as-Sijistani d. 
 377 Qarmailans hold fortress in 
 
 Arab 'Iraq. 
 
 379 At-Tirmidhi d. 
 
 380 Zaydite Imams at as-Sa'da 
 
 and San 'a. 
 289 'Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi in 
 
 North Africa. 
 295-330 Al-Muqtadir 'Abbasid 
 
 Kh. 
 397 First FaiimidKh. ; al-Junayd 
 
 d. 
 300 Return of al-Ash'ari. 
 303 An-Nasa'i d. ; Al-Jubba't d. 
 309 Al-i/allaj executed. 
 317 Umayyads of Cordova take 
 
 title of Commander of the 
 
 Faithful ; Qarmatians in 
 
 Mecca. 
 320^47 Buwayhids ; al-Ash'ari 
 
 d.? 
 322 Ibn ash-Shalmaghani. 
 331 A(-ra;iawi d. 
 
 333 Al-Mataridi d. 
 333-356 Sayf ad-Dawla. 
 
 334 Buwa.yhid8 in Baghdad ; ash- 
 
 Shibli d. 
 339 Return of Black Stone by 
 
 Qarma^ians ; al-Farabi d. 
 356 Fa*imids conquer Egypt ; 
 
 Cairo founded. 
 360 Ikhwcm as-Saia fl. 
 363 Ibn Hani d. 
 381-433 Al-Qodir Kh. 
 386 AbM Talib al-Makki d. 
 388-431 MaAmMd of Ghazna. 
 403 Al-Baqilanj d. 
 408 Persecution of Mu'tazilites 
 
 under al-Qadir. 
 
370 
 
 APPENDIX III 
 
 411 AlSaiam Fa&nid Kh. van- 
 ished ; Firdawsi d. 
 
 438 Ibn Sina d. 
 
 434 AbM Dharr d. 
 
 440 Al-Bcram d. 
 
 447 rughril Beg, the Saljuq, in 
 Baghdad. 
 
 449 Ab«-l-'AIa al-Ma'arti d. 
 
 450 Persecution of Ash'arites. 
 
 455 Alp-Arslan ; Ni^am al-Mulk 
 
 Wazir ; end of perseontion 
 of Ash'arites. 
 
 456 Ibn ifazm az-Zahiri d. 
 465 Al-Qushayri d. 
 
 478 Imam al-ZTaramayn d. 
 
 481 Nasir b. Khusraw d. 
 
 483 iTasan b. as-S&hbah seizes 
 
 Alamut. 
 485 NLsam al-Mulk assass. 
 488 Al-6hazzali leaves Baghdad. 
 505 Al-Ghazzali d. 
 
 515 'Umar al-Khayyam d. 
 
 516 AI-Baghawi d. 
 
 524 Ibn Tamart al-Mahdi d. 
 
 534^558 'Abd al-Mu'min. 
 
 524-667 TheMuwaftMds. 
 
 533 AbM Bakr b. Bajja d. 
 
 .537 Ab?« Bafs an-Nasafi d. 
 
 538 Az-Zamakhshari d. 
 
 540 Yehuda Halevid.=A.D. 1145. 
 
 546 Abw Bakr b. al-'Arabi d. 
 
 548 Ash-Shahrastam d 
 
 558 'Abd al-Mu'min the Mu- 
 
 waMid d. 
 558 'Ad» al-Hakkari d. 
 558-580 AbM Ya'qzib the Mu- 
 
 waAAid. 
 561 'Abd al-Qadir al-J{Iant, 
 
 founder of order of dar- 
 
 wishes, d. 
 567 Conquest of Egypt by SaJadin 
 
 and end of Faiimids. 
 576 Order of Rif a'ites founded. 
 
 A..B.. 
 
 580 Ab« Ya'qub d. 
 
 580-596 AbM Y«suf al-Manj«r. 
 
 581 Ibn Tuf ayl d. 
 
 587 AB-Suhrawardi executed. 
 
 589 Saladin d. 
 
 590 AbaShnja'd.? 
 
 595 Ibn Rnshd d.; Aba Y?tsuf 
 al-MansMr the MuwaMid d. 
 
 601 Maimonides d.— a.d. 1204. 
 
 606 Fakhr ad-Din ar-Razi d. 
 
 620 A.hu-1-Ha.ija] b. TumlMs d. ; 
 Fakhr ad-Din b. 'Asakir 
 d. ; St. Francis of Assisi d. 
 — A.D. 1236. 
 
 635-941 fiafsids at Tunis. 
 
 630-640 4r-Rashid the Muwaft- 
 hid. 
 
 632 'Umar b. al-Farid. 
 
 688 Ibn 'Arabi d. 
 
 648 Frederick n. d.=A.D. 1350. 
 
 654 End of Assassins by Mon- 
 gols ; Ash-Shadhili, found- 
 er of order of darwishes, d. 
 
 667 Ibn Sab 'in d.; end of MuwaA- 
 Aids. 
 
 673 Jalal ad-Din ar-Rwmi d. 
 
 675 A^mad al-Badawi, founder of 
 order of darwisheB, d. 
 
 681 Ibn KhaUikan d. 
 
 685 Al-Baydawi d. 
 
 693, 698-708, 709-741 MuAammad 
 An-Nasir, Mamluk Sulian, 
 reg. 
 
 719 An-Nasr al-Manbiji d.? 
 
 734 Ibn Rushd is still studied at 
 Almeria. 
 
 728 IbnTaymiyad.; MeisterEok- 
 hart d.=A.D. 1338. 
 
 730 'Abd ar-Razzaq d. 
 
 756 Al-'ijid,; Heinrioh Suso d. 
 
 791 At-Taftazani d. ; an-Naqsh- 
 bandi, founder of order of 
 darwishes, d. 
 
A.H. 808-1275 
 
 371 
 
 808 Ibn KhaldMu d. 
 
 857 Capture of Constantinople 
 by Ottomans and office of 
 Shaykh al-Islam created— 
 A.D. 1453. Thomas & Kem- 
 pisd.— A.D. 1471. 
 
 895 M. b. Ywsuf as-Sanwsi d. 
 
 907 Accession of /Safawids. 
 
 933 Conquest of Egypt by Otto- 
 man Tiirks. 
 
 945 Death of al-MutawakMl, last 
 'Abbasid. 
 
 951 Beginning of Sharifs of Mo- 
 rocco. 
 
 A.H. 
 973 Ash-Sha'ranj d. 
 
 1301 'Abd al-Wahhab d. = A.D. 
 1787. 
 
 1305 Sayyid MurtatJa d.; al-Fu- 
 da\i fl. oiro. 1330. 
 
 1353 Foundation of Brotherhood 
 of as-SanKsi— A.D. 1837. 
 
 1360 Ibrahim al-Baj«ri d. ; De- 
 cree of Porte that apostate 
 Muslims should not be put 
 to death. 
 
 1S75 Death of founder of Broth- 
 erhood of as-Sanasi=A.D. 
 1859. 
 
INDEX OF NAMES AND ARABIC WOEDS 
 
 Abadi, 300 
 
 Al-'Abbaa, 10, 33 
 
 • Abbasids, 10, 33, 34, 39, 45, 50, 
 
 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 91, 93-94, 97, 
 
 98, 183-135, 153, 154, 167, 169, 
 
 174 
 'Abd, 394 
 'Abd Allah, father of MuAammad, 
 
 350, f. 
 'Abd Alloh ibn az-Zubayr, 33, 35 
 'Abd Allah ibn Maymwii, 40, 43-44 
 'Abd Allah ibn 'Umar, 398 
 'Abd al-Mu'min, 348, 353 
 ' A.bd al-Mu«alib, 351 
 'Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, 367 
 'Abd ar-EaAman, the Umayyad, 
 
 33 
 'Abd ar-Razzoq, 371, f. 
 '4bid, 173, 174 
 '^bida, 174 
 Abkam, 340 
 Abraham, also Ibrahim, 43, 386, 
 
 345 
 Aba ' Abd Allah ibn Karram ; see 
 
 Ibn Karram 
 Ab«-l-'Ala al-Ma'arri, 199 
 Ab« Bakr, Ist Kh,, 13-16, S3, 34, 
 
 36, 56, 71, 165, 300, 350, 368, 
 
 397, 307, 313, 346 
 Abu Da'itd as-Sijistani, 81 
 AbM Dharr, 207 
 Ahu-lSajia] ibn Tamlus, 260 
 Abw -Hknifa, 94-103, 106, 131, 137, 
 
 193, 309 
 Abu Haahim, 159, f. 
 
 AbM Hudhayl, 136-189, 159, 348 
 
 Ab« Sahl, 835 
 
 Abu Shuja' al-Iapahani, 351 
 
 Abu Sufyon, 38 
 
 AbM Sulayman of Damascus, 175 
 
 Abu Ta\a>, 10 
 
 Abu Tdlih al-Makki, 176, f. 
 
 Abu 'Ubayda, 150 
 
 Abu Ya'qwb ibn 'Abd al-Mu'min, 
 
 353-355 
 Abu Y?isuf , the Qadi, 96-99 
 Abu Yusuf al-Mansur, 353, 355 
 Active Intellect, 236, 350-353, 356, 
 
 365 
 'Ada., 118 
 'Adad, 336 
 Adam, 43, 43, 171, 233, 313, 332, 
 
 346 
 'Adam, 316 
 'Adi al-Hakkari, 267 
 'Ada, 356 
 'Adl, 291 
 Africa, 59 
 Africa, Bast, 34, 36 
 Africa, North, 36, 35, 45, 46, 63, 
 
 243 
 Abl al-ahwa, 133, 299 
 Ahl at-tawAid wal-'adl, 186 
 Ahl Mtab, 34 
 
 AAmad al-Badawi, 267, 369 
 Ahmad al-MalawJ, 331 
 AAmad ar-Rifa'a, 367 
 AAmad ibn 'Abd AUah ibn May- 
 
 mun, 44 
 AAmad ibn Abi Duwad, 156 
 
 373 
 
374 INDEX OF NAMES AND ABABIC WORDS 
 
 Ahmad ibn -Hanbal, 79, 103, 110, 
 157, 158, 173, 175, 176, 187, 274, 
 277,393 
 
 '^'isha, wife of MuAammad, 10, 
 13,31 
 
 'A'isha., daughter of Ja'fai as- 
 5adiq, 173 
 
 Ajal, 398, 311 
 
 Al-Ajhwri, 346 
 
 'Ajz, 317, 339 
 
 A1-A>1ifa.1, 89 
 
 *^lain al-jabarwt, 234 
 
 '^lam al-malakut, 234, 235 
 
 '^lam al-nmlk, 334 
 
 AlanMft, 49, 169, 334 
 
 Alaatu bi-rabbikum, 171 
 
 Aleppo, 163 
 
 Alexandria, 241 
 
 Algeria, 34, 36, 63 
 
 'Alids, 18, 33-35, 37, 51, 155, 157, 
 166, 187 
 
 •Alt ibn Abi Talib, 18-31, 36, 37, 
 44, 45, 88, 121, 155, 183, 349, 
 359, 375, 397, 307, 313, 314, 346 
 
 'AUm, 337 ; of. 'ulama 
 
 Allah, 137, 161,331, 837 
 
 Almeria, 360 
 
 Alp Arslan, 313 
 
 Alphonso the Wise, 233 
 
 Al-'Alqami, 346 
 
 A'ma, 340 
 
 'Ama, 340 
 
 'Amal, 394, 296, 313 
 
 Amana, 347 
 
 'Amr ibn 'Ubayd, 139 
 
 Amina, mother of MuAammad, 351 
 
 Anima Mundi, 833 
 
 Ansar, 9, 13, 18 
 
 'Aqida, 316 
 
 'Aqjqa, 356 
 
 'Aql, 120, 136, 148, 157, 214, 269, 
 273, 393, 308, 316 
 
 Al-'aql al-fa' 'al ; see Active Intel- 
 lect 
 
 Arabs, 8, 14, 17, 34, 40, 44-46, 50, 
 
 51, 60, 67, 68, 74, 134, 135, 137, 
 
 133, 134, 150, 157, 243, 305 
 Arabia, 15, 33, 35, 36, 37, 131 
 Arabia, South, 33, 36, 37, 45, 59 
 Arab 'Iraq ; see al-'lroq 
 'Arad, 159, 309, 330 
 ArAaniii-r-raAimm, 210 
 Aristotelians, Arlstotelianism, 134, 
 
 140, 144, 161-163, 168, 196, 198, 
 
 301, 203, 286 
 Aristotle, 134, 138, 140, 144, 161- 
 
 164, 198, 331, 333, 336, 348, 
 
 253, 255, 356, 260, 364 
 'Arsh, 301 
 Asal, 353, 354 
 Asamm, 340 
 Al-asharatn-I-mubashshara, 268, 
 
 397, 314 
 Al-Ash'ari, 187-190, 193, 193, 200, 
 
 208, 314, 217, 318, 330, 236, 339, 
 
 330, 393, 308, 319, 341 
 Ash'arites, 191, 301, 207-213, 341- 
 
 247, 372, 273, 276, 380, 391, 
 
 393, 338 
 'Ashura, day of, 38 
 Asl, 107, 109 
 Aslaft, 190, 292, 311; see, too, 
 
 saXah 
 Al-asma al-Ausna, 310, 280, 331, 
 
 341 
 Assassins, 27, 49, 53, 59, 169, 170, 
 
 196; see, too, Isma'ilians, 
 
 Ba^inites, Ta 'limites 
 'Ata ibn Yassar, 128 
 Athos, Mount, 178 
 Augustine, 133, 315, 216 
 Avenpace, 250 ; see, too, Ibn Bajja 
 Averroes, Averroism, 251 ; see, 
 
 too, Ibn Rushd 
 Avioenna, 197 ; see, too, Ibn Sina 
 Awlad 'Uwan, 268 
 Awwaliyat, 260 
 Al-Awza H. 98 
 
INDEX OF NAMES AND AKABIC WOEDS 375 
 
 ■Ayn, 191, 309, 319, 341 
 Azalt, 291, 300, 309, 323, 343 
 
 Babism, 5 
 Badaha, 808 
 Badakhshan, 170 
 Badan, 141 
 
 Badawite darwishea, 267 
 Al-Baghawi, 81, 807 
 
 Biahr ibn al-Mu'tamir, 142, 143, 
 
 151, 152 
 Al-Bis«amt, Ab« Yazid, 183, 188, 
 
 225, 268 
 Brotherhood of as-Sanusi, 61, ff. 
 BuddhistB, 134 
 Al-Bukharj, 79, 80, 147, 148 
 Burgundy, 83 
 Burhan, 259, 260 
 
 Baghdad, 5, 50-53, 56, 111, 183, Buwayhids, 51, 52, 167, 194, 195, 
 159, 163, 166-168, 175, 184, 185, 197, 208 
 
 190, 194, 195, 207, 213, 317, 
 
 220, 226, 267 
 Baghdad, Paahalik of, 60 
 Bakam, 340 
 Balasda, 347 
 Balkh, 174 
 Baqa, 833 
 
 Al-Baqilani, 300, 201, 207 
 Bannak, Barmecides, 50 
 Ba«ar, 294, 333 
 Bashshar ibn Bnrd, 160 
 Basir, 337 
 
 Caesarea, 84 
 
 Cairo, 49, 166, 173, 195, 341, 244, 
 
 277 
 Camel, Battle of the, 21 
 Carthage, 88, 243 
 Charles the Hammer, 83 
 Chinese Muslims, 59 
 Christians, Christianity, 24, 47, 48, 
 
 125, 130-184, 137, 144,147, 151, 
 
 181, 194 
 CompanionB ; see Sahiba 
 
 Al-Ba«ra, 18, 23, 25, 83, 150, 159, Code Napoleon, 114 
 
 167, 174, 187, 188 
 Ba'th, 296, 811, 329 
 Batin, 314 
 Baiinites, 42, 196 
 Bata, 42 
 Bay', 853 
 
 AX-Bajdavri, 195, 241 
 Al-Bayjari, 315 
 Baytn-l-'izza, 335 
 Bedawis, 62 
 
 Berbers, 45, 243, 244, 248, 249 
 Al-Berwni, 170, 197 
 Beyrout, 84 
 
 Constantino in Algeria, 45 
 Constantinople, 54, 113 
 Crusaders, 49 
 
 Ad-Dajjal, 398, 315 
 Dalil, 109, 315 
 Daman, 854 
 
 Damascus, 14, 82, 88, 131, 175, 177 
 Dai al-^arb, 55 
 Dar al-Islam, 55 
 Daiuri, 308 
 
 Darwishes, 5, 61, 179, 182, 183, 203, 
 244, 366, 368 
 
 Bid'a, 74, 78, 148, 186, 297, 399, Da'«d az-Zahiri, 103, 108-110 
 
 307 Da'Md ibn Nusayr, 174 
 
 BUa kayfa wala tashbih, 147, 171, Dauphin^, lie, 83 
 
 191, 208, 294, 344 ; cf. kayfa Dawr, 833 
 
 Bil-fi'l ; see Fi'l Dhikrs, 174, 178, 179 
 
 Bishr al-Saii, 175, 176 Dhuh«l, 340 
 
 Bishr al-Marisi, 155 Dh?i-l-faqar, 20 
 
376 INDEX OP NAMES AND AEABIO WORDS 
 
 DhM-1-Kifl, 346 
 
 DhK-n-NMn, 176 
 
 Dhw-n-NKrayn, 313 
 
 Din, 393, 397, 298, 305, 307 
 
 Diya, 355 
 
 Diyana, 293 
 
 Druses, 27, 48, 59, 170 
 
 Bckart, the mystic, 180 
 Edict of the Prator, 87 
 Egypt, Egyptians, 14, 21, S3, 30, 
 
 45-49, 53, 63, 82, 187, 244, 277, 
 
 387 
 Emessa, 163 
 Erigeua, Scotus, 182 
 Euchites, 178 
 Euclid, 134 
 Euphrates, 133 
 
 Fakhr ad-Din ar-Rffzi, 341 
 
 Pakhr ad- Din ibn 'Asakir, 373 
 
 Pana, 338 
 
 Faqih, f uqaha, 73, 85, 270 
 
 Faqirs, 268 
 
 Al-Earabi, 162-164, 165,167,169, 
 
 181, 196, 315, 221, 236, 850 
 Paragh, 317 
 FartZ, 73 
 Favida, 354 
 Al-Far«q, 313 
 Faiana, 347 
 Fatima,, daughter of MuAanunad, 
 
 20, 30, 36, 346, 347 
 Faiima of Naysabar, 173 
 Faiimids, 27, 36, 45, 47, 49, 165- 
 
 167, 169, 173, 184, 197, 324, 341, 
 
 344, 351 
 Fatwa, 115, 184, 276, 277 
 Fay', 356 
 Bil-fi'l, 328 
 Fi maAall ; see maAall 
 Fiqh, 77, 87, 116, 133, 308, 309, 245, 
 
 252, 361, 370, 379, 283; of. 
 
 faqih 
 
 Firdawsi, 170 
 
 St. Francis of Assisi, 180 
 
 Frederick II., the Hohenstaufen, 
 
 263 
 Friday, 35, 51, 235, 298, 313 
 Al-Fud«li, 191, 315 
 Al-Fuda,y\ ibn 'lyad, 174, 175 
 Fuatat, S3 
 
 Galen, 134 
 
 Ghafala, 340 
 
 Al-Ghani, 337 
 
 Ghanima, 356 
 
 Ghasb, 354 
 
 Al-Ghayb, 139, 281, 314 
 
 Al-Ghazzali, 139, 165, 176, 183, 195, 
 
 199, 207, 215-241, 245-249, 253, 
 
 257, 360-264, 267, 370, 284-286, 
 
 300, 309 
 Ghiba, 349 
 Ghusl, 352 
 Gondeshapar, 134 
 Greek monks, 178 
 Greek philosophy, science, etc., 
 
 133, 138, 140, 144, 159, 161, 162 
 
 Ssuhih, 175 
 
 ^add, 314, 355 
 
 flkdith, 75, 77, 78, 87, 94, 131, 190, 
 
 309, 361, 270 
 Sadith, 330, 323, 328, 333 
 £adith an-uafs, 373, 336, 350 
 ifadramawt, 60 
 Bafsids, 365 
 ^ffi'il, 60 
 
 H&jaT as-safih, 354 
 ffaij, 275, 378, 292, 353 
 Al-fiajjaj, 209, 298 
 Al-MaMm Bi'amriUah, 47, 48 
 Al-Sikam ibn abi-l-'^ls, 17 
 Sal, 160, 176, 337, 310, 319, 323, 
 
 337 
 Hal naf si, 319 
 Halal, 398 
 
INDEX OF NAMES AND ARABIC WORDS 377 
 
 Al-ITaJXaj, 183-185, 298 
 Halley'a comet, 34 
 Hamdanids, 162, 165 
 Hamilton, Sir William, 237 
 ^anbaUtes, 115, 121, 158, 167, 190, 
 
 191, 200, 207, 208, 212-214, 237, 
 
 273, 274, 278 
 fianif, 125 
 fianifitee, 115 
 iZaqiqa, 328, 329 
 £aqq, 356 
 ^aram, 73, 298, 311 
 Al--ffaramoii, 56, 213 
 Al--Harith aI-MuAasib», 175, 177, 
 
 187, 225 
 Harran, 133, 134 
 HarMn ar-RashJd, 50, 97, 98, 144, 
 
 153, 155, 175 
 Basad, 349 
 
 Al-aksan, 20, 27, 28, 35 
 Al-^asan al-Basri, 128, 139, 130, 
 
 173, 173 
 ^asan ibn ajs-SsMaah, 324 
 Hashim, 10, 17, 32, 313, 351 
 Jawala, 354 
 
 ffa.wd, 249, 296, 306, 311, 349 
 Bayah, 332 
 Skyy, 337 
 Al-Sayy, 311 
 Sayy ibn Yaqzan, 253, 254 
 Hebron, 336 
 Hegel, 143, 233 
 Herat, 83, 307 
 Hesychasts, 178 
 Hiba, 354 
 Hidana,, 355 
 Hidden Imam, 31, 37, 41, 56, 116; 
 
 cf. Imam, Imamitea 
 Hierotheos, 181 
 Al-fl'ijaz, 213 
 Hippocrates, 134 
 Hwd, 346 
 BiidMth, 330, 338; cf. Aadith, 
 
 muAdath 
 
 flukm, 292 
 Hiilaga, 49, 53 
 Bulul, 338 
 Hume, 229, 230 
 Al-^iiaayn, 20, 28 
 Huwa-1-Aaqq, 203 
 
 I'ara, 354 
 
 Ibadites, 5, 26, 54, 115, 117, 126 
 
 Ibn'Abd al-Wahhab ; see MuAam, 
 
 mad ibn ' Abd al-Wahhab 
 Ibn Abt 'Awja, 80 
 Ibn al-'Aiabi, 316, 323, 323, 338 
 Ibn 'Arabj, 241, 261, 264, 271, 277, 
 
 380 
 Ibn ask-Shalmaghani, 185 
 Ibn Bajja, 350, 353, 255, 257 
 Ibn Hani, 170 
 Ibn ifazm, 209-212, 345-248, 361, 
 
 275, 280 
 Ibn Ibad, 'Abd Allah, 25, 26, 116 
 Ibn Karram, 170, ff. 
 Ibn Khaldwn, 50, 81, 342, t 
 Ibn Khallikan, 185 
 Ibn Maja, 81 
 Ibn al-Muqaffa', 150 7 
 Ibn Rushd, l«fl, 183, 195, 206, 215, 
 \ 236, 348, 252, 355, 356-361, 264- 
 
 286 
 IbnSab'm,'Abdal-aaqq, 263,264, 
 
 267, 277 
 Ibn Sina, 163, 171, 197, 331, 228, 
 
 236, 241, 350, 257 
 Ibn Taymiya, 370-378, 283-385 
 Ibn Tufayl, 253-256, 261 
 Ibn T«mart, 207, 245-248, 252, 375 
 Ibrahim ibn Adham, 174, 268 
 Al-i<Jafatu-l-'amm lU-khass, 337 
 Al-idafatu-l-bayaniya, 337 
 'Idda, 355 
 IdrJs, 346 
 
 Idrts ibn 'Abd Allah, 35 
 Idriaids, 34, 102 
 ViaU, 332 
 
378 INDEX OP NAMES AND ARABIC WOEDS 
 
 lAsan, 293 
 
 lAtiyaj U<t maAall, 839 
 
 lAya, 338 
 
 Ihja of al-Ghazzali, 386, 300 
 
 Ihya al-mawast, 354 
 
 Ijara, 851 
 
 I'jaz, 151 
 
 Al-'Iji, 241, 369 
 
 Ijmo', 57, 58, 73, 94, 101, 105, 309, 
 
 393, 338, 351 
 limoli, 316 
 Ikhtilaf , 116 
 
 Dthtiyar, 193, 310, 339, 345 
 Ikhwffln as-safa, 167, 169, 194, 196, 
 
 199 
 Iktisab, 380 ; cf . kasb 
 Iktisabi, 309 
 Jla, 355 
 Tlhad, 314 
 Ilham, 281, 309 
 Djam al-'awanuu'an 'ilm al-kalam 
 
 of al-Ghazzali, 260 
 'Ula, 107, 319, 337 ; of. ta'W 
 'Dm, 301, 294, 333 
 'Ilwau, the Shaykh, 268 
 Imom, 36, 29, 81, 36-38, 41-43, 46, 
 
 54, 57, 143, 155, 165, 167, 188, 
 
 197, 313, 234, 286, 293, 393, 397- 
 
 299, 811, 313, 318, 350 
 Imam al-^aramayn, 212, 213, 817, 
 
 330, 317 
 Imamites, 87, 57, 59, 116, 136, 142, 
 
 347 
 iman, 126, 137, 292-296, 311, 313. 
 
 318, 350 
 Imata, 338 
 Imdadot, 330 
 ImtiAan, 148; cf. miAna 
 India, 51, 55, 56, 59, 61 
 India, Emperor of, 55 
 Indian Mii'tazilism, 386 
 Injil, 304 
 In sha' Allah, 373 
 Iqrar, 313, 854 
 
 Irada, 830 
 
 Al-'Iroq, 209 
 
 'Iraq, Arab, 44 
 
 Txda, 355 
 
 Irja, 392 ; cf. Murii'itea 
 
 '/sa ; see Jesus 
 
 Islam, 7, 13-15, 19-37, 37, 40-48, 
 53-55, 58, 59, 68, 71-74, 118- 
 130, 124, 130, 136, 141, 143, 
 149, 151-154, 158-161, 167, 173, 
 176, 177, 180-183, 186, 190, 191, 
 306, 212-215, 218, 226, 238, 330, 
 281, 283, 335, 338-244, 348, 261, 
 363, 370, 378, 282-284, 393, 396, 
 313 
 
 ■Isma, 247, 393, 314, 347 
 
 Isma'il, 41, 42, 43 
 
 Isma'iUans, 43, 44, 57, 59, 169, 170, 
 196 
 
 Isnad, 75, 78, 79 
 
 Ispahan, 195 
 
 Istawa, Istiwa, 186, 394, 301 
 
 Istidlali, 308 
 
 IstiAsan, 87, 94, 96 
 
 Istislaft, 87, 100, 101 
 
 Istiia'a, 310 
 
 Istiwa ; see Istawo 
 
 I'tazala 'anna, 130 
 
 Ithna 'Asharjya, 38 
 
 I'tibar, 201, 841 
 
 I'tibarikhtira'i, 343 
 
 I'tibar intiza'i, 343 
 
 I'tidal, 221 
 
 I'tikaf, 353 
 
 'Itq, 357 
 
 IttiAad, 328, 377 
 
 Ja'ala, 854 
 
 Jabarites, 293, 344 
 
 Jabr, 291, 344 
 
 Jacob, 350 
 
 Jadliya, 359 
 
 Ja'far as-jSadiq, 43, 173 
 
 Al-Jafr, 249 
 
INDEX OF NAMES AND AEABIO WORDS 379 
 
 Jahannam, 306 
 
 Al-Jahiliya, the Barbarism, cr the 
 
 Ignorance, 8, 74, 77, 173 
 Al-Jahiz, 160, 161 
 Jahl, 340 
 
 Jahm ibn Safwosn, 136, 138, 146, 150 
 Jahmites, 394, 399 
 Ja'iz, 73, 316, 348 
 Jalal ad-Din ar-R«mi, 267 
 Jami', 80 
 Jarabab, 63 
 Jawhar, 159, 309 
 Jawhar luhani, 331 
 Jerusalem, 14, 40, 42, 146, 226 
 Jesus, 'Isa, 43, 146, 315, 345 
 Jews, 34, 47, 68, 70, 133, 134, 144, 
 
 194 
 Jibril, 393, 393, 335, 336 
 Jihad, 55, 63, 246, 356 
 Jinaya, 355 
 Jinn, Jinnj, Jann, 76, 381, 383, 386, 
 
 399, 304, 305, 334 
 Jirm, 317, 320 
 Jism, 143, 309 
 Jizya, 15, 356 
 John of Damascus, 89, 131, 133, 
 
 137, 146 
 Al-Jubba'j, 159, 160, 173, 188-190 
 Al-Junayd, 176, 177, 183, 187, 335, 
 
 383 
 Jurisprudentes, 85, 86 
 Juththa, 334 
 Al-Juwayni ; see Imam al-jHara- 
 
 mayn 
 
 Ka'ba, 149, 268, 278 
 
 Kabtra, 127, 396, 311, 349 
 
 Kafala, 354 
 
 Kafir, 295, 316, 328, 350 ; cf. kufr, 
 
 takfir 
 " Kalila and Dimna," 150 
 Kahin, 314 
 Kalam, 147, 149, 151, 157, 175, 186, 
 
 188, 193, 200, 306, 208, 314, 316, 
 
 241, 243, 245, 276, 378, 386, 394, 
 
 309, 315, 335 
 ECalfflm Allah, 146 
 Ealam nafst, Aadtth fi-n-naf s, 373, 
 
 336 
 Kalimato-sh-shahada, 300 
 Al-kalimaton, 30 
 Kallima-Uahn Musa taklima, 149 
 Kamm munf asil, 335 
 Kamm mnttasil, 335 
 Kant, 191, 300, 201 
 Al-Karabisi, 187 
 Karaha, 339 
 Karama, 174, 313, 228, 230, 374, 281, 
 
 282, 313 
 Karbala, 28 
 
 Karramites, 170, 191, 195, 391, 393 
 Kasb, 179, 193, 393 ; cf . iktisob 
 Kashf, 130, 172, 179, 315, 369 
 Kashshaf of az-Zamakhshari, 195 
 Kawn, 309 ; cf . takwin 
 Kawn 'ajiz, 340 
 Kawn johil, 340 
 Kawn karih, 340 
 Kawn mayyit, 340 
 Kawn murid, 337 
 Kawn qadir, 336 
 Al-Kawthar, 306, 349 
 Kayfa, 397 
 Kayfiya, 309, 334 
 Kempis, Thomas a, 177, 180 
 Khabar, 308 
 Khadija, 347 
 Al-Khadir, 381, 383 
 Khalifa, Khalifate, 13-38, 32-38, 
 
 45, 47, 51-58, 397, 313 ; cf . al- 
 
 Khulafa 
 Khalq, 338 
 Khanqah, 339, 366 
 Kharaj, 15 
 Kharas, 340, 341 
 Khorijites, 33-37, 33, 40, 44, 57, 59, 
 
 133-136, 131, 173, 212, 393, 394, 
 
 296 
 
380 INDEX OF NAMES AND ARABIC WORDS 
 
 Kha<arat, 331 
 
 Khitebiya, 359 
 
 KhUba, 355 
 
 Khiyana, 347 
 
 Khuffs, 298, 314, 347, 353, 355 
 
 Khur, 355 
 
 Al-Khulaf o-ar-rashidMn, 33, 87, 99, 
 
 ia5, 114 
 Khurasan, 171, 174, 177 
 Khuiba, 56 
 Khuzistan, 35, 134 
 Kibr, 349 
 Kidhb, 347 
 
 Al-Kindi, 155, 161, 187 
 Kitaba, 357 
 Kitman, 347 
 Kubra of as-Sanwsi, 316 
 Al-KMfa, 18, 33, 38, 83 
 Kufr, 157, 296, 311, 333, 349 ; cf. 
 
 takfir, kafir 
 
 Labid, 149 
 
 Lafz, 147, 335 
 
 Laqab, 847 
 
 Laqit, 354 
 
 ha shay', 338 
 
 Al-lawA !L\-iaa,htuz, 335 
 
 Laylata-1-qadr, 335 
 
 Lebanon, 48 
 
 Leibnitz, 193, 200, 303 
 
 Li'an, 355 
 
 Logos, 146-148, 151 
 
 Lucretius, 200 
 
 Luq^a, 354 
 
 Lu«f, 293 
 
 Ma'bad al-JuAani, 138 
 
 Al-Madina, 7, 8, 18, 35, 56, 67, 69- 
 71, 72, 83, 87, 88, 99, 101, 102, 
 165, 313, 316, 336, 378, 384, 346 
 
 Madrasa, 329 
 
 Ma'dam, 159, 314, 319; of. 'adam 
 
 MafatiA al-ghayb of ar-Eazi, 341 
 
 Magians, 144 
 
 Al-Maghrib, 343 
 
 MaAaU, 317, 335 
 
 Mahall (fi), 137 
 
 Al-Mahdi, 37, 34, 45, 63, 114, 344- 
 
 349 
 Al-Mahdi, the 'Abbasid Khalifa, 
 
 35, 134 
 Al-Mahdiya, 165, 344 
 Mahjya, 309 
 
 Maftmad of Ghazna, 170, 195, 197 
 Mahr, 355 
 Maimonides, 237 
 Maine, Sir Henry, 65, 85, 114 
 Majazi, 329 
 MaJMJ, 315 
 MakhlMqat, 324 
 Makrwh, 73, 347 
 Malay Archipelago, 68 
 Malik ibn Anas, 35, 78, 99-103, 
 
 106, 147, 186, 245, 346 
 MaUMtes, 115 
 Ma'mar ibn 'Abbad, 143 
 Mamluks, 53, 54, 375 
 Al-Ma'm?<n, 50, 110, 140, 144, 154- 
 
 159, 162, 166, 377 
 Mandwb, 73, 347 
 Manichaeans, 133, 134 
 Mansel, H. L., 237 
 Al-Mansur, 'Abbasid Kh., 38, 34, 
 
 50, 134, 153, 154 
 Maqama, 176 
 Al-Maqosid, 346 
 Maqbwlat, 359 
 Mar'an, 314 
 Ma'rifa, 201, 350 
 Man'ya the Copt, 347 
 Ma'rMf of al-Karkh, 176 
 Marwan II., 33 
 Marwan ibn al-Sakam, 17 
 Masahih as-sunna of al-Bsghawt, 
 
 81 
 MasA, 298, 314 
 Mashhurat, 259 
 Mashya, 294 
 
INBEX OF NAMES AND ARABIC W0ED8 381 
 
 MaslaAa, 101 
 Hasyaf, 49 
 
 Al-Motaridj, 187, 193, 207, 808 
 Mataridites, 200, 207, 337, 338 
 Matn, 75, 78 
 Mawaqif of al 'I]i, 341 
 Mawjwb, 347 ; of. wajib 
 Mawj«d, 159, 191, 814, 319; cf. 
 
 WUJMd 
 
 Mawlawite darwishes, 267 
 
 Mawqif , 296, 349 
 
 Mawsil, 267 
 
 Mawt, 340 
 
 Maymun, 40 
 
 Maznunat, 259 
 
 Mecca, 9, 17, 23, 35, 33, 46, 56, 62, 
 68, 174, 184, 213, 217, 226, 265, 
 285, 296, 346 
 
 Merv, 217 
 
 Meanevi, The, 267 
 
 Mesopotamia, 23, 44, 82, 131, 187 
 
 Miftna, 156, 157 
 
 Minister of Justice, 114 
 
 Mi'roj, 298, 813 
 
 Mongols, 49, 52, 53, 169 
 
 Monophysites, 181 
 
 Morocco, 35, 62 
 
 Moses, 43, 149, 192, 395, 396, 304, 
 336, 345 
 
 Mu'awiya, 31-33, 38, 88 
 
 Maba;i, 73, 348 
 
 Mabtadi', 307 ; cf. bid'a 
 
 Mufti, 115 ; cf. fatwa 
 
 Muhajirs, 8, 13, SO 
 
 MuAammad, the Prophet, 7-13, 16- 
 32, 28, 30, 35, 37, 42-45, 56, 57, 
 58, 67-75, 83, 86-89, 95, 104- 
 106, 112, 130-133, 140-150, 155, 
 160, 161, 164, 165, 171, 173, 175- 
 180, 188, 310, 237-231, 243, 345, 
 349, 253, 254, 263, 270, 375-378, 
 284, 285, 292-294, 398, 305, 308, 
 312, 335, 336, 345, 346, 349, 350, 
 351 
 
 MuAammad H, Ottoman Sulton, 
 
 113 
 MuAammad al-'AUaf; see Abw 
 
 Hudhayl 
 MuAammad al-Muntazar, 187 
 MuAammad an-Naqshbandi, 367 
 MuAammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab, 
 
 60,283 
 MuAammad ibn Abi Bakr, 18 
 MuAammad ibn al-.&anafiya, 29, 
 
 31 
 MuAammad ibn al-.5asan, 38, 96, 
 
 102 
 MuAammad ibn 'Alt as-Sanusi; 
 
 see as-SauMsi 
 MuAammad ibn Isma'il, 43, 43, 45 
 MuAarram, 347 
 Al-MuAasibi ; see Al--Harith 
 MuAdath, 809 ; cf . Aadith, Auduth 
 MuAdith, 309, 321 
 MuAsan, 355 
 MuAyi ad-Din ibn 'Arabi ; see Ibn 
 
 'Arabi 
 Al-Mu'izz, Paiimid Khalifa, 170 
 Mujassim, 191, 291 ; cf. jismi 
 
 tajsim 
 M«jid, 325 
 
 Mu'jiza, 141, 151, 313, 845 
 Mujtahid, 38, 116, 375, 287, 315 
 Mujtahidun bil-fatwa, 113 
 Mujtahidun fi-1-madhahib, 113 
 Mujtahidun muilaq, 112 
 MukaUaf, 380, 317, 318, 331, 333, 
 
 343, 345 ; cf. taklif 
 Mnkashafa, 227 
 Mukhabara, 354 
 Mukhalafa lil-Aawadith, 205, 310, 
 
 333, 280, 334 
 Mukhassis, 335 
 Mumathala, 838 
 Mu'min, 136, 130, 850 
 Mumkinat, 830 
 Munkar, 396, 398, 305, 311 
 Munazzah, 824 
 
382 INDEX OF NAMES AND ARABIC WORDS 
 
 Muntaaar, 313 ; see, too, MuAam- 
 
 mad al-Muntasar 
 Muqallad, 316, 350; cf. taqlid 
 Al-Muqanna', 30 
 Munqidh min a,d-da,lal ot al-Ghaz- 
 
 za\i, 216, 235, 339 
 Muqarrab, 306. 
 
 Al-Muqtadir, 'Abbasid Kh., 184 
 Murabi^s, 346, 351 
 Muiji'ites, 133-127, 139, 131, 133, 
 
 171, 193, 214, 392 
 Murtadd, 24, 297 
 Musa, see Hoses 
 Musa al-Qazam, 43 
 Maeaqat, 354 
 MusaUamat, 259 
 Masannaf, 79 
 Musaylima, 150 
 
 Mushabbib, 191 ; cf. bila kayfa 
 Mushahada, 337 
 Mushrik, 384, 399; of. shirk, 
 
 shaiik 
 Muslim, 80 
 Musnad, 79, 110 
 Al-Mus«afa, 300 
 MustaAabb, 73 
 MustaAil, 316 
 
 Mustansir, Faiimid Kh., 170 
 Mutakallima, 147, 186, 193-196, 
 
 215, 231, 263, 376, 337 
 Al-Mu'tasim, 'Abbasid Kh., 157, 
 
 158, 163, 163 
 Mntaqabilal, 330 
 Al-Mutawakkil, 'Abbasid Kb., 
 
 157, 162 
 Mutawatir, 308 
 Mu'tazilites, 37, 57, 130, 130, 135- 
 
 138, 140, 143-146, 151-159, 166, 
 
 168, 171, 173, 175, 176, 184^-196, 
 
 200, 207, 308, 311-214, 330-336, 
 
 341, 248, 291-294, 398, 399, 311, 
 
 336, 337, 343, 344. 
 MuwaAMds, 179, 207, 346-357, 361- 
 
 265, 284, 296, 307 
 
 Mawa^^a' of Malik ibn Anas, 78, 
 
 83, 101, 103 
 Al-Muzdar, 151 
 Mzab in Algeria, 36, 59 
 
 Nabateans, 44 
 
 Nabt, 363, 313, 345 
 
 Nabidh, 314 
 
 Nadhr, 356 
 
 Nafaqa, 355 
 
 Naf isa. The Lady, 173 
 
 Nafs, 334, 273, 334 
 
 Nahawand, 14, 133 
 
 Najasat, 352 
 
 Najd, 60 
 
 Najjarites, 292 
 
 Nakir, 396, 398, 305, 311 
 
 Naqib, 368 
 
 Naql, 130, 148, 157, 314, 369, 397, 310 
 
 Naqshbandite darwishes, 367 
 
 Narbonne, 83 
 
 An-Nasaf J, 193, 207, 377, 308 
 
 An-Nasa'i, 81, 153 
 
 Nasir ibn Khusraw, 170 
 
 An-Naiir, Mamliik Sulten, 377 
 
 An-Nasr al-Manbt'ji, 377 
 
 Na«s, 39, 95, 292 
 
 Naysabwr, 317, 3*^9 
 
 Nazr, 308 
 
 An-Nazzam, 140, 143, 152 
 
 Neo-Platonism, 163, 164, 168, 180, 
 
 181, 196, 333, 235, 236, 353, 
 
 355, 264, 372 
 NikaA, 354 
 Nisba, 337 
 
 Nkam al-Mulk, 213, 217, 218 
 Nizamite Academy, 213, 317 
 Noah, or Suh, 43, 43, 345 
 Nusayrites, 59 
 
 Old Man of the Mountain, Shaykh 
 
 al-jabal, 49 
 Ottoman Sulton, 10, 56, 58, 59 
 Ottoman Turks, 36, 52, 53, 54, 60 
 
INDEX OP NAMES AND AKABIO WORDS 383 
 
 Pan-Islamio movement, 59 
 
 Parseee, 194 
 
 People of ParaidiBe, 139 
 
 People of the Simna, 336, 337 
 
 Persia, Persian, 14, 33, 31, 36-41, 
 
 44, 49, 50, 51, 83, 131-134, 150, 
 
 155, 157, 184 
 Persian Gulf, 60 
 Persian mysticism, 5 
 Plato, 134, 162-165, 335 
 Plotinus, Plotinian, 163-165, 183, 
 
 231, 356, 369, 380 
 Porphyrius, 163 
 Fseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, 
 
 181, 183 
 Ptolemaic system, 333 
 Ptolemy, 134 
 Pythagoreanism, 168, 170 
 
 Qada, 391, 395, 342, 356 
 
 Qadar, 138, 135-137, 343, 391, 393, 
 
 295,343 
 Qadarites, 123, 137-133, 135, 137, 
 
 140, 393, 344 
 Qadi, 115, 156, 345, 356 
 Qadim, 143, 300, 333, 343 
 AI-Qadir, 'AbbasidKh., 193-195 
 Qadir, 819 
 
 Qadirite darwishes, 367, 269 
 Al-Qadisiya, 14, 133 
 Qanuns, 114 
 
 Qarmattans, 44, 46, 170, 184, 188 
 Qasm, 356 
 Qattat, 350 
 Qawl, 396 
 Qidam, 333 
 Qirat?, 354 
 Qisas, 355 
 
 Al-Qiyama, 349 ; cf. Yawm 
 Qiyam bin-nafs, 335 
 Qiyas, 87, 94, 309, 347, 347 
 Qubda, 329 
 Qudra, 193, 334, 294, 310, 319, 323, 
 
 328, 344 
 
 Al-Qudra al-azaliya, 834 
 
 Qur'ffln, 34, 42, 62, 69-71, 76, 77, 85, 
 94r-96, 99, 103-106, 109, 117, 
 131, 128-130, 135, 138-141, 145- 
 152, 155-158, 161-163, ITL, 178, 
 188, 190, 195-198, 206, 209, 310, 
 231, 335, 338, 341, 245-349, 252, 
 253, 357-359, 263, 271, 273-375, 
 283-384, 295, 297, 303, 304, 310, 
 335, 345, 346 
 
 Quraysh, 10, 57, 305, 313 
 
 Al-Qushayii, 313 
 
 Qu(b, 368, 383 
 
 QMwa, 338 
 
 Rabelais, 199 
 
 Rabi'a, 173 
 
 Bafidites, 313 
 
 Rahib, 135, 173 
 
 Rahn, 354 
 
 Rama<2an, 188, 393, 393 
 
 Ar-Rashid, the MuwaAAia, 363, 
 
 364 
 Raaa'il ikhwan as-safa, 168 
 Rasul, 363, 308, 312, 845 
 Ra'y, 86, 94 
 Razq, 338 
 Red Sea, 60 
 
 Responsa prndentium, 85 
 mda, 310 
 
 Rifo'ite darwishes, 367, 268 
 Risala, 393 
 
 Risala of al-Qushayii, 213 
 Ritschl, 338 
 
 Rizq, 179, 398, 399, 311, 317 
 Huh, 141, 231, 272 
 Rukhsa, 283 
 Ru'ya, 310, 344 
 
 Aa-sa'a, 293, 394, 315 
 Sabil Allah, 18 
 Sab'inite darwishes, 367 
 Sab'iya, 43 
 Sa'da, 36 
 
384 INDEX OF NAMES AND ARABIC WORDS 
 
 Sa'd ad-Din ; see at-Taftazoni 
 
 Sa.ia.vddB, 38 
 
 As-SaffaA, 'AbbasidKh., 33 
 
 <Saghira, 137, 311, 349 
 
 Sahara, 62 
 
 SaMba, 294 
 
 Sahiha, 9, 16, 19, 71, 73, 75, 79, 88, 
 
 101, 105, 147, 180, 375, 276, 283, 
 
 383, 393, 397, 307, 314, 346 
 Sjih'U, 75, 77, 335 
 A'aftifa of al-Bakhari, 35, 79-81 
 Sahih of Muslim, 80, ff. 
 Sa'id ibn Aftmad ibn 'Abd Allah, 
 
 45 
 Sa'lAs, 173 
 
 Saladin ; see SaXah ad-Din 
 As-salaf , 157, 190, 397 
 Sa.\ah, 393, 343 ; cf. Aslaft 
 SaXah ad-Din, 49, 341 
 Salam, 353 
 Salaman, 353, f. 
 Salamiya, 44 
 
 A'alat, 5alawat, 178, 392, 393, 353 
 Salih, the prophet, 346 
 8alim, Ottoman Sultan, 56 
 SalJMqs, 207 
 ySaluAi qadim, 328 
 Sam', 393, 294, 333 
 Sama' ad-Dunya, 297 
 /S'araam, 340 
 Samanids, 36 
 Samarqand, 82, 187, 207 
 Sami', 337, 349 
 .S'an'a, 36 
 As-Sanusi, MuAammad ibn 'Ali, 
 
 61, 120, 344. 369, 373, 384 
 As-SanMsi, Mu^mmad ibn T?*- 
 
 Buf, 315-318, 333, 323, 338, 334, 
 
 341, 347 
 Sari aa-Saqa«i, 175-177, 268 
 Satan, 298, 399 ; of. shayten 
 /Sawm, 393 ; of. Siyam. 
 Sayf ad-Dawla, the Hamdanid, 
 
 163, 165 
 Sayyid Murtada, 285, 300 
 
 Semites, Semitic, 5, 51, 135, 136, 
 183 
 
 Sergius, father of John of Damas- 
 cus, 131 
 
 Seth, 43 
 
 Ash-Shadhili, 267, 369 
 
 Bhadhilite darwishes, 267 
 
 Shahada, 356 
 
 Shafa'a, 174, 296, 307, 311, 349 
 
 Ash-Shafi'i, 67, 103-111, 173, 187 
 
 Shafiltes, 110, 115 
 
 Shahs of Persia, 38 
 
 Shakk, 332 
 
 Shar', 345 
 
 Ash-Sha'rani, 279, 381, 383, 385 
 
 Ash-Shahrastani, 313, 334, 391, 393 
 
 Shari'a, 382 
 
 Shari/s of Mecca, 58, 265 
 
 Sharifs of Morocco, 35, 59, 347 
 
 Sharik, 300, 331,326; of. shirk, 
 mushrik 
 
 Shay', 159, 314, 322 
 
 Shaykh, 177 
 
 Shaykh al-Islam, 113 
 
 Shaykh'/lwan, 268 
 
 Shaytons, 304 
 
 Shem, 43 
 
 Ash-Shibli, 176, 177, 335 
 
 Shihab ad-Din as-Suhrawardi, 341 
 
 Shi'ites, Shi'a, 5, 13, 19, 26-36, 39- 
 41, 48, 51, 52, 56, 59, 115, 116, 
 131, 133, 131, 159, 165, 184, 185, 
 193-195, 313, 247, 349, 393, 29S 
 
 Shirk, 123, 127 ; of. sharik, mush- 
 rik 
 
 Shirka, 354 
 
 Shu'ayb, 346 
 
 Shuf' a, 354 
 
 As-Siddiq, 313 
 
 Sidq, 347 
 
 Sif a naf siya, 319 
 
 .Sifat, 136, 151, 291, 309 
 
 /Sif at adh-dhat, 391 
 
 5'ifat al-fi'l, 291, 338 
 
 iSifat al-ma'oni, 837 
 
INDEX OF >"AME3 AND ARABIC WORDS 3So 
 
 Mf.!t aqliya, 190 
 
 ^'ifiit at-ta'thix, 3o3 
 
 ^iltrt ma'nawiya, oo7 
 
 6iftit salal'iya, o2S 
 
 Sijist<m, 171 
 
 A.<-^ir,.,', 29(5, 306, Sll, 349 
 
 Solomon, JStj 
 
 Spain. 33, SJ, lyj, 194, 209, 246 
 
 Spanish Isliuu. 1S2 
 
 Stephen bar Sudaili, ISl 
 
 Stewart ,B;Uiour1 and Tait, 2So 
 
 Lord Stratford de Redoliffe, +S 
 
 5!.i. lai 
 
 ^'.<i;, ^'.fiism, ISO, 170. ITS, ITS- 
 ITS. 1S.1. 213, 216-21V1, i.\\ 225- 
 229, 232, iio. 236. 239, 24S. 
 250. 252, 253, 261. 2(52. 264. 2liT, 
 26S, 274. 2Ttl-2TS. 2S2, 2S4, 309 
 
 ^!/lis/iq(]r3. oOS 
 
 ^\'aiya, 17o 
 
 Snn-im ath-Thawrt", 97. OS 
 
 5ughra of as-San'* ?/. :>41 
 
 Ai-Suhi»wardi; see ^hihnb ad-Din 
 
 Sula^Tntin the Great. 54 
 
 .s'lil'i. 354 
 
 Suima, 74. 75, SS. 190, 2S2, 29:3. ■297, 
 A^ 3i'7. 345 
 
 Stman. 75. SI 
 
 Suunites. 19. 35, 3S. 51, 52. 59, 116, 
 194. 247. 29S 
 
 5',r3, 2o2 
 
 Saso. the mTstic. ISO 
 
 S.^-ria, 21-2:. 2S. 4.5, 46, 49, 50, S2, 
 S4. 98, 131,220 
 
 Taaddnd, 330 
 Ta'aUaqa, 32? 
 Ta'aUnqn-l-qalxfati, 329 
 Tab', S2S, 339 
 Tabarist-m. 36 
 Tabi'iT-m, 161, 221. 298, 346 
 Tab!.gh,347 
 Tabor, Mount. 1 7S 
 Tadb;r, 357 
 
 Tadia, ■2P2 
 Tafsili, 316 
 At-Taftaznni, 242, 260, SOS, 818, 
 
 345, 346 
 Tahafntof ai-Ghazziili, 229, 237, 
 
 240. 2:.T 2S6 
 JWiura, 351 
 A<-35iAawi, 1ST. 193 
 T?. Mil. 276 
 Ta/isin, ■2>,>2 
 Tajsim. 2k 9, 246 
 TakaUam, 147 
 Takfir, 292 
 Taklit 137. 310 
 Takwin, 310, 33S 
 lyaq, 355 
 2alAa. 21. 25 
 Taia, 339 
 Ta-lim, 197 
 
 Ta-limites. 197, 219. 224, -X'S 
 Tani.zi. 32S 
 TaqbiA, 293 
 Taqiya. 126 
 Taqlid. 2I.9, 217, 246. ^l. 270, CSti 
 
 316, olS. 333. 350 
 r;ir.q.i. 2S2 
 Tasalsul. 201. S-22 
 Ta.^iq. 313. 350 
 Tawalltid. 142. 144 
 Tawakknl, 1T9. t 
 Tawba. 292. 349 
 TawAid. 156. 175. 17ri. 24tl 291, 300. 
 
 315, 349; cf. muwaAAid 
 Ta'wil, a46 
 Tawl.d, 142 
 T.<iwr<it. 303 
 TaTammum, 353 
 Theodortis Abr.oivra. 133 
 Thiqa, 293, 296 
 The Thousand and One Nights. 97, 
 
 2Sr! 
 Thumnma ibn Ashras, 144 
 Tigris, 50. 133 
 At-Tinnidhi. SI 
 Toledo. S-2 
 
386 INDEX OF NAMES AND ARABIC WOEDS 
 
 Toots, 83, f. 
 
 Tripolis, 62 
 
 Tutan, 339, f. 
 
 Tughril Beg, 53, 207, 313, f. 
 
 Turkish mysticism, 5 
 
 Tub, 316, 229, 330, 267 
 
 The Twelve Tables, 85 
 
 'Ubayd AUah al-Mahdi, 45, 46, 344 
 
 TJdhija., 356 
 
 'Ulama, 54, 333, 307 
 
 Ulwhiya, 326 
 
 TJlw-l-'azm, 345 
 
 'Uman, 24, 26, 59 
 
 'Umar ibn 'Abd al-'Aziz, Umayyad 
 
 Kh.,104 
 *TTmar ibn al-Khai^ab, 2nd Kh., 
 
 13-19, 23, 34, 36, 44, 56, 86, 93, 
 
 165, 275, 297, 307, 313, 346 
 'Umar al-Khayyam, 198, 199 
 'Umar ibn al-Farid, 266 
 Uraayya, 10, 16 
 Umayyads, 9, 17-19, 23, 25, 27, 32, 
 
 33, 53, 77, 78, 88-93, 104, 123, 
 
 131, 133, 153, 209 
 Umayyads of Cordova, 45 
 Umm walad, 357 
 'Urf , 94, 113 
 'Uthman ibn ' Affan, 3rd Kh., 17- 
 
 22, 25, 36, 71, 297, 307, 313, 346 
 
 Vincent of Lerins, 101 
 Volubilis, 35 
 
 Wa'd, 293 
 
 Wadi'a, 354 
 
 Wa^daniya, 325 
 
 Al-Wahhab, 211 
 
 Wahhabites, 60-62, 109, 113, 115, 
 
 120, 273, 278, 279, 383-385 
 Al-Wabib, 311 
 WaAy, 381 
 
 Wa'id, Wa'idites, 129, 292 
 Wajib, 73, 316, 318 
 Wakffila, 354 
 Wala, 357 
 
 Walad, 394, 330 
 
 Wali, 139, 173, 363, 267, 268, 274, 
 
 275, 381-385, 313, 33b 
 "Walima, 355 
 Waljya, 173 
 Waqf, 3.54 
 Warith, 354 
 Wa.ril ibn 'Ata, 37, 129, 135, 136, 
 
 150 
 Wasiya, 354 
 
 Wasiya of Ibn Sma, 198, 228 
 Al-Wathlq, 'Abbasid Kh., 157 
 Wndu, 318, 352 
 WuJMd, 159, 191, 316-319, 353 
 Wusul, 238 
 
 YojMj, 315 
 
 Al-Yaman, 60, 384 
 
 Yam in, 356 
 
 Ya'q7tb ; see Jacob 
 
 Yathrib, 67 
 
 Yawm al-qiyama, 295, 349 
 
 Yazid, 19, 38 
 
 Yehuda Halevi, 237 
 
 Zabbwr, 304 
 
 Zabid in Tihama, 285 
 
 Zahid, 173, 180 
 
 Zahida, 173 
 
 Zahii, 314 
 
 Zahirites, 110, 112, 208, 209, 247, 
 
 249, 252, 261, 264, 287 
 Zahr, 42 
 
 Zakat, 393, 293, 353 
 Az-Zamakhshari, 195 
 Zann, 333 
 
 Zanzibar, 36, 59, 115 
 Zaydites, 36, 37, 46, 57, 59, 116, 
 
 188 
 Zihar, 355 
 Zina, 355 
 Zindiqs, 134 
 
 Zoroastrianism, 133, 134, 183 
 Az-Zubayr, 21, 25 
 Az-Zuhri, 91 
 
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 By Prof. James Henry Breasted, By F ' 
 
 Ph. D. , of the University of Chicago. Ph.D. 
 
 10 volumes. lamo, $1.25 each, net (postage 12c.) 
 
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