* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
Download "Chaos on the Earth": Subjective Truths versus Communal Unity in
Islam and war wikipedia , lookup
War against Islam wikipedia , lookup
LGBT in Islam wikipedia , lookup
Muslim world wikipedia , lookup
History of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (1928–38) wikipedia , lookup
Usul Fiqh in Ja'fari school wikipedia , lookup
Criticism of Islamism wikipedia , lookup
Islamofascism wikipedia , lookup
Islam in Somalia wikipedia , lookup
Historicity of Muhammad wikipedia , lookup
Islam in Afghanistan wikipedia , lookup
Islamic sexual jurisprudence wikipedia , lookup
Islamic democracy wikipedia , lookup
Islam and violence wikipedia , lookup
Islamic extremism in the 20th-century Egypt wikipedia , lookup
Islamic socialism wikipedia , lookup
Censorship in Islamic societies wikipedia , lookup
Islam in Bangladesh wikipedia , lookup
Islamic Golden Age wikipedia , lookup
Islam and secularism wikipedia , lookup
Schools of Islamic theology wikipedia , lookup
Islamic ethics wikipedia , lookup
Liberalism and progressivism within Islam wikipedia , lookup
Political aspects of Islam wikipedia , lookup
Islam and other religions wikipedia , lookup
Islamic culture wikipedia , lookup
Islamic schools and branches wikipedia , lookup
"Chaos on the Earth": Subjective Truths versus Communal Unity in Islamic Law and the Rise of Militant Islam INDIRA FALK GESINK FOLLOWING THE EVENTS OF SEPTEMBER 11, journalists and political analysts scrambled to come up with an explanation of militant Islam that would render the attack on the United States comprehensible. Often, they resorted to the theory that Islamic culture was stagnant, bound to codes of belief and behavior that were suited better to seventh-century Arabia than to modern life. The conflict between tradition and modernity had thus produced a reactionary trend within the Islamic world: those who rejected modern Western modes of globalized industrial capitalism sought to return the world to simpler, purer ways of life that accorded better with the religious tradition. One key part of this hypothesis of reactionism was the idea that Islamic law had been unable to adapt to contemporary social conditions. For example, a prominent New York Times columnist wrote that the "mullahs, imams, and religious authorities" who ruled the realms of civil society in Arab Muslim countries were all tied to "traditional Koranic interpretations that are not embracing of modernity, pluralism or the equality of women," and that, for centuries, Islam had essentially "stood still" while the rest of the world changed.l This hypothesis that we have so enthusiastically adopted is based on an invented tradition, issuing not as one might expect from European Orientalists but rather from Muslim religious scholars of the nineteenth century. These scholars were themselves utilizing a tradition that had been constructed by scholars and reformers over centuries in order to promote their own agendas of reform, according to which the methods and norms of the Islamic legal tradition (shari 'a) had gradually become immutable, leading to legal and social stagnation. A significant change in the use of this tradition occurred when conservative nineteenth-century scholars in Egypt who were concerned about the divisive effects of Western ideas and imperialist institutions began to insist that this invented stagnation was not only true but beneficial, in that it had resulted in a more or less coherent body of law to which This article is based on research conducted in Egypt with generous support from the National Security Education Program (1995-1996) and the American Research Center in Egypt (1998); a previous version was delivered at the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies annual conference in 2002. I am indebted to conference participants and to the anonymous reviewers for their comments, and especially to Engin Akarli of Brown University, Timothy Parsons of Washington University in St. Louis, and Steven E. Siry of Baldwin-Wallace College. Any errors or omissions are solely mine. 1 Thomas L. Friedman, "Breaking the Circle," New York Times (November 16, 2001), http:// www.nytimes.com/2001/ll/16/opinion/ (November 17, 2001). 710 711 Chaos on the Earth Muslims could adhere in order to strengthen their community. Reformers responded with their own use of the tradition, using it to justify significant "updates" in that body of law through interpretation by individual educated believers. These reformers dominated the emerging Arabic print journalism and contacts with Western government officials and Orientalist scholars, and thus their version of Islamic tradition crept into the Western canon of Islamic history. The reformers' emphasis on individual interpretation of the sources of Islamic law had another effect, however. It extracted the authority to issue legal opinions from the purview of specially trained legal scholars and put that authority into the hands of untrained lay believers. This encouraged radical flexibility in interpretation of legal sourcesrather than the purported inflexibility-as lay believers interpreted the sources in light of their unique political circumstances. Thus the use of the invented tradition of stagnation, and the subsequent spread of lay interpretation, was a significant factor in the rise of twentieth-century militant groups. Prior to the nineteenth century, Muslim religious scholars were in many Islamic countries arguably the most influential figures of authority. Centuries of political theory demanded that rulers consult with them; they served as arbiters of law and religious truth for the public; they could control large public and private endowments; they often elected their own leaders; and, in Egypt in 1805, they played a critical role in selecting the new Ottoman viceroy following the French occupation. The rise of the centralized bureaucratic state, and, later, European imperialism, challenged their authority. For example, in Egypt, subsequent Ottoman viceroys centralized government control, and in the process they restricted the authority of the religious scholars. In the 1860s, new legal codes based on Western models limited the scholars to adjudicating matters of belief and family law, while civil and criminal courts were increasingly staffed by Western-educated lawyers and judges. 2 In the 1870s, a constitutionalist movement swept the Egyptian literati, and many adopted European ideologies of the state. In 1882, Britain occupied Egypt and helped the Ottoman viceroy suppress the constitutionalist movement. This history of state and Western encroachment was mirrored in many ways in other colonized countries, such as India. Muslim intellectuals had to grapple with the supremacy of European ideas and might, and most concluded that the Europeans had been able to exploit some internal weakness in the Islamic community. This general trend produced several different schemes for reforming Islamic society, strengthening its communal unity, and extracting it from the grasp of European imperialism. This article focuses on schemes of resistance and reform as developed in Egypt, which form a more or less coherent thread of intellectual thought connecting contemporary Islamic militancy to these nineteenth-century debates. The debate among nineteenth-century Egyptbased scholars is especially worthy of scrutiny, because it not only offers examples of these schemes of resistance and reform but also introduced key concepts that heavily influenced trends in twentieth-century Islamic thought. Much of this debate focused on schemes to unify an extremely diverse community and to resist or guide state encroachment, which in itself is nothing new. 2 J. N.D. Anderson, "Law Reform in Egypt: 1850-1950," in Political and Social Change in Modem Egypt, P. M. Holt, ed. (Oxford, 1968), 209-30. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2003 712 Indira Falk Gesink Throughout Islamic history, Muslim scholars had sought a means of maintaining a coherent interpretation of Islam that would provide some unity of belief and practice and limit the coercive power of the state. The scholars' efforts were expressed in the guidance they offered to believers, and in a framework of interpretation used to derive that guidance from scriptural sources. Out of this the shari'a (the Islamic legal tradition) emerged. The communities of scholars became custodians of the shari'a, guardians of moral and legal authority. When their authority was threatened by the state, or by sectarian or philosophical divisions, individual scholars would respond by emphasizing the importance of adhering to the shari'a. But the shari'a was not and is not one monolithic code: it is a legal tradition that encompasses revelatory texts, methods of interpretation, and humanly derived texts of rulings, many of which are contradictory or fully comprehensible only within a particular political context. In the nineteenth century, conservative .scholars in Egypt met the challenge of state encroachment and European imperialism by insisting that lay believers follow a consistent body of rulings within the variety offered by the shari'a, and they claimed that these bodies of rulings had been unchanged throughout several previous centuries. This assertion helped satisfy their desire for a consistent body of law in the face of external challenges and internal divisions. In response, another group, generally known today as the Islamic modernists, declared that Islamic society had entered a period of moral and social decline, and that this had produced the divisions in the community that weakened it. The modernist reformers initiated a movement to reinvigorate religious institutions and educational systems. In the process, they played up the invented history of an immutable legal tradition and claimed that this was the cause of moral and social stagnation. They used this argument to justify introducing an epistemological shift in the foundations of law and education away from received knowledge (embodied in a legal method called taqlid, which is similar to following juridical precedents) and toward individual judgment (embodied in a legal method called ijtihad). The modernists claimed that this shift toward individual judgment, once it became widespread among Muslims through an appropriately reformed educational system, would inspire an intellectual revival of Islamic society. Muslims would discover that the "true" Islam accorded with the principles of science and naturallaw. 3 The historical record, however, shows that throughout the supposedly stagnant period (the tenth through nineteenth centuries) legal practitioners had consistently modified the law using degrees of ijtihad (independent reasoning used in deriving judgments from sources of law), and that the law had remained flexible and adaptable to change. But this practice had been limited since the fourteenth century to jurists of the highest rank, in order to preserve the rule of law. 4 Indeed, the modernists' proposal to extend the franchise of ijtihad horrified many nineteenthcentury legal scholars, who had for decades been fighting to preserve an increasingly fractured Muslim community against intellectual and legal divisions. They 3 Malcolm Kerr, Islamic Reform: The Political and Legal Theories of Muhammad 'Abduh and Rashid Rida (Berkeley, Calif., 1966). 4 Muhammad Fadel, "The Social Logic of Taqlid and the Rise of the Mukhatasar," Islamic Law and Society 3, no. 2 (June 1996): 193-233. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2003 Chaos on the Earth 713 raised concerns about the potential of widespread ijtihad to further undermine the Islamic legal tradition and the unity of the Islamic community. However, they too projected a tradition of legal inflexibility, to preserve their authority as interpreters of the shari'a, as repositories of correct religious knowledge, and ultimately as defenders of communal unity. In the end, the modernists' vision of reform prevailed. While they addressed real social ills and made great strides in adapting certain areas of law to changing social circumstances-such as the area of women's education-there was a significant tradeoff. Their epistemological shift in the understanding of legal methodologies fundamentally changed the public's understanding of the meaning and ownership of certain legal methods. Ijtihad, which had generally been understood as the province of specially trained legal scholars, became something any educated Muslim could do. This new understanding of ijtihad was disseminated worldwide by Egypt-based reformers' domination of both an international market for the emerging Arabic press and contacts with Orientalist scholars. What was initially an epistemological shift became a shift in ownership of the law: legal interpretation became a lay practice. This shift facilitated the proliferation of militant Islamic groups in the twentieth century. The Muslim community, already divided, became increasingly fragmented, and the modernists' vision gave rise to the Muslim Brotherhood and other groups that interpreted the law in light of oppressive political conditions. Arab Muslim extremist groups of the twentieth century are thus not reactionaries bound to an inflexible law; rather, they are in part the products of a flexible legal tradition that became more so as a result of nineteenth-century Egyptian modernists' campaigns to encourage individual understanding of legal sources. 5 This article thus makes three arguments: that the telling of Islamic history that informs popular knowledge of Islamic law in the West and in the Middle East is based on an invented tradition, that Egypt-based reformers who engaged in this invention also reimagined key concepts used in legal derivation that have deeply influenced contemporary popular understandings of Islamic law, and that many militant Islamic groups of the twentieth century have roots in those nineteenthcentury reimaginings of Islamic legal methodology. The last argument is based on evidence that has long been present in the works of other scholars, the implications of which have been neglected. 6 AT THE HEART OF THE ISSUE ARE methods of deriving legal judgments from the sources of Islamic laws. Traditionally, most Muslim jurists recognize four main s This is not to ignore the importance of other factors in the rise of militant Islam: resentment of Israel as manifesting European imperialism and of Israeli policies in the occupied territories, reaction to an ever-more prominent commercialism associated with Western cultural and economic influence, and the rise of unitary bureaucratic states and the attempt by some to promulgate state-sanctioned versions of Islam to bolster their nationalist agendas (such as in Egypt and Pakistan) and the subsequent repression of other varieties of politicized Islam. 6 See, for example, Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (1969; rpt. edn., London, 1993); Giles Kepel, Muslim Extremism in Egypt, Jon Rothschild, trans. (1984; rpt. edn., Berkeley, Calif., 1993). AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2003 714 Indira Falk Gesink sources from which legal judgments may be derived. The most authoritative source is the Qur'an, which the majority of Muslims believe to be the word of God as transmitted to the Prophet Muhammad through the angel Gabriel. Unambiguous verses in the Qur'an are held to be absolutely binding on all Muslims, such as the verses that instruct believers to worship one God, pray, offer charity, fast during the month of Ramadan, and, if possibl~, undertake the pilgrimage to Mecca. Ambiguous verses may be interpreted in different ways and are therefore somewhat less authoritative. These verses may be interpreted by reference to the hadith, a body of reports on prophetic sayings and actions and the sayings and actions of the early community of Muslims. Hadith were also classified according to their authoritative status. Those that were reported by multiple, trustworthy transmitters and could be traced back through an unbroken line of transmitters to the Prophet or his Companions were considered "sound," or reliable, and had authoritative status as sources of law. Those with single or unreliable transmitters were considered "weak" and less authoritative. Some scholars rejected the use of weak hadith entirely. If a new issue of law arose that neither of these first two sources addressed, a jurist could derive a judgment based on an analogous situation described in either source. Analogy, or qiyas, is an interpretive method, humanly derived, and so may only reach authoritative legal status if it is accepted by the community of legal scholars. However, if a community of scholars reached consensus (ijma') on the admissibility of a particular ruling, that ruling was considered to have the authoritative status of an unambiguous text in the Qur'an. This was based on a Prophetic hadith in which Muhammad stated that his community could not agree in error. Gradually, "community" came to be understood as the community of scholars in a particular city or region. The idea of communal consensus eventually stabilized into several transregional, internationally accepted schools of legal interpretation, or madhhabs. There are four that remain prominent today in Sunni Islam: these are the Hanbali, Maliki, Shafi'i, and Hanafi madhhabs, each one associated with the methods and rulings of its eponymous founding scholar. The sources and interpretive methods enumerated above are the foundation of the Islamic jurisprudence, or fiqh, the result of which is the shari 'a, the Islamic legal tradition. The shari'a has essentially two levels of application: there are jurisconsults called muftis, who interpret the sources for individual petitioners, and there are judges, or qadis, who use the interpretations derived by muftis and apply them to criminal and civil cases. A petitioner may, for example, request from a mufti a ruling as to whether Muslims are permitted to engage in a particular kind of commercial transaction. The mufti would then consult his sources and tell the petitioner whether that type of transaction is required, recommended, permissible, reprehensible, or forbidden. The mufti's response, or fatwa, contains merely a legal opinion; the petitioner is not required to follow it. However, when a qadi applies a mufti's ruling to a legal case, the qadi's judgment is binding.7 During the first few centuries of Islam's existence, many questions of law and religious belief and practice arose that were not specifically addressed in the Qur'an 7 Wael B. Hallaq, A History of Islamic Legal Theories: An Introduction to Sunni usul al-fiqh (Cambridge, 1997). The distinction between the work of muftis and qadis is not always this clear: throughout history, qadis have performed their own jurisprudence as well as simply applying its results. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2003 Chaos on the Earth 715 or hadith. In this formative period of Islamic law, jurists had exerted themselves to discover general principles that could be applied to these new questions, a process called ijtihad (the root of the word is the same as that of jihad, which means "to struggle," and here means to struggle to understand and offer the best-informed guidance). Ijtihad, since it involved the use of human reasoning, was an inherently subjective process. Its result was merely an opinion that was subject to change and was not binding on other jurists or on petitioners. This meant that, unless the opinion reached the status of a general rule by means of consensus (ijma '), there was no way to ensure that the rulings of individual jurists agreed in any meaningful way. Jurisconsults could not reach a confirmed consensus on which judges could base binding judicial rulings within a reasonable degree of conformity. In other words, there was no way to ensure "regular and predictable legal outcomes," no way to reach the point of rule of law. 8 Thus it was possible to resolve a legal question by using any number of legitimate but mutually contradictory arguments: the unlimited practice of ijtihad threatened the integrity of authoritative law. Muhammad Fadel's study of the Maliki legal school suggests that, by the process of consensus, and by coalescing into madhhabs, the results of generations of legal thought and analysis were whittled down until each madhhab had a more or less cohesive body of authoritative rules from which to derive rulings. Fadel describes this type of compilation, the mukhtasar, as "codified common law." 9 This reduced the problem of legal indeterminacy. However, independent ijtihad continued within each madhhab. Although this permitted accommodation of changing social conditions, it also remained a problem, because rulings of different muftis within a school might still contradict one another, and a single mufti might change his mind on a particular matter. Eventually, there accumulated a body of authoritative rulings on which the influential jurists within the schools agreed, and gradually muftis began to bind themselves and their juniors to these accepted rulings, limiting muftis' rights to perform ijtihad. By the fourteenth century, some jurists had begun to argue that only the most knowledgeable legal scholars should be allowed to perform ijtihad at all, and some held that there were no more legal scholars with the great learning and inspiration required to perform ijtihad beyond certain limits, as the founders of the four main madhhabs had done. While certain modes of ijtihad continued to be practiced, generally within the boundaries of school rules, acceptable rules gradually came to be associated with the consensus of the school rather than the opinion of a mufti. 10 After the thirteenth century, with some exceptions, it came to be expected that the majority of legal scholars as well as ordinary Muslims would adhere to taqlid-that is, that they would base their legal advice, juridical judgments, and personal behavior on the accepted rulings of their legal schools. According to recent scholarship, high-ranking scholars and rebel reformers did continue to perform limited ijtihad in order to adjudicate novel cases.l 1 Neverthes Fadel, "Social Logic," 196. Fadel deals more thoroughly with the social origins of taqlid in his dissertation, "Adjudication in the Maliki Madhhab: A Study of Legal Process in Medieval Islamic Law" (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1995). 9 Fadel, "Social Logic," 196; "Adjudication," 274, 283-84. IO Fadel, "Adjudication," vol. 1, chap. 3; Hallaq, History of Islamic Legal Theories, 153-56, 161. 11 Wael B. Hallaq, "Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?" International Journal of Middle East Studies 16 (1984): 3-41; Hallaq, "On the Origins of the Controversy about the Existence of Mujtahids and the AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2003 716 Indira Falk Gesink less, in some times and places, Sunni jurists would claim that the "gate of ijtihad" was closed, that "independent ijtihad"-ijtihad independent of madhhab rules-was no longer to be performed, and that the community of scholars had achieved consensus on the matter. Several explanations for this claim of consensus have been attempted. According to Fadel, as noted above, Maliki jurists in the fourteenth century wished to solve the problem of legal indeterminacy. According to Frank Vogel, Hanafi jurists under the 'Abbasid Empire were trying to ensure that their interpretations and methods would survive and compete against contending interpretations offered by 'Abbasid authorities.12 Sherman Jackson has shown that jurists could restrict the power of the state by preserving the shari'a's authority over the lives of believers who adhered to madhhab rules. 13 Lutz Wiederhold suggested that some claims of ijtihad's cessation were due to differences of opinion as to what ijtihad actually was. If ijtihad was understood as meaning the jurist's attempt to solve a difficult legal question within the boundaries of madhhab consensus, it might be allowed. On the other hand, if ijtihad was understood as "independent reasoning," it might be condemned.1 4 Twentieth-century historians have come up with these contextual explanations for the limitation of ijtihad only within the last decade or so. One may still find assertions, even in scholarly literature, that ijtihad had ceased completely and that, as a result, Islamic law is rigid and unadaptable to new circumstances. This supposedly explains much of the "reactionism" in the Islamic world today. This misinformation is largely a product of a nineteenth-century debate in which conservative Muslim legal scholars and reformers asserted that the "gate of ijtihad" was completely closed. NINETEENTH-CENTURY EGYPTIAN LEGAL SCHOLARS went beyond restriction of ijtihad to complete interdiction. The Orientalist scholar Snouck Hurgronje cited Shaykh Ibrahim al-Bajuri (1847-1860), chief mufti of the Shafi'i madhhab in Egypt, as Gate of Ijtihad," Studia lslamica 63 (1986): 134-41; Rudolph Peters, "Idjtihad and Taqlid in 18th and 19th Century Islam," Die Welt des /slams 20, nos. 3-4 (1980): 131-45; Judith Tucker, In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (Berkeley, Calif., 1998); on flexibility of Mughal law, see Muhammad Qasim Zaman, The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change (Princeton, N.J., 2002), 20. Compare Baber Johansen, Contingency in a Sacred Law: Legal and Ethical Norms in the Muslim Fiqh (Leiden, 1999), 446-47, which says that while early modern claims to exercise ijtihad did exist, that does not mean that those mujtahid jurists had much effect on the elaboration of new legal doctrines. 12 Frank Vogel, "Closing of the Door of Ijtihad and the Application of the Law," American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 10, no. 3 (Fall 1993): 399. An older line of reasoning held that ijtihad was given up out of opposition to rationalist methodologies (such as the Shi'i principle of 'aql; see Leonard Binder, "Ideological Foundations of Egyptian-Arab Nationalism," in Ideology and Discontent, David Apter, ed. [New York, 1964], 143-44). 13 Sherman Jackson, Islamic Law and the State: The Constitutional Jursiprudence of Shihab al-Din al-Qarafi (Leiden, 1996). 14 Lutz Wiederhold, "Legal Doctrines in Conflict: The Relevance of Madhhab Boundaries to Legal Reasoning in the Light of an Unpublished Treatise on Taqlid and Ijtihad," Islamic Law and Society 3, no. 2 (June 1996): 260; see also jurists' definitions of ijtihad in Hallaq, "Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?" 24-25, 27. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2003 717 Chaos on the Earth having stated that ijtihad ended by the third century after Muhammad's death.1 5 Hurgronje, whose study set the tone for further Western studies of Islamic law, offered no explanation for the cessation; he assumed that the shaykh, who was also the headmaster of al-Azhar, one of the most prominent schools of Sunni jurisprudence in the world, would know his stuff. 16 In the latter part of the twentieth century, the dominant explanation for al-Bajuri's statement was that the community of religious scholars had retreated into a defensive posture as a result of government encroachment on "their" territory. It was true that, throughout the 1860s and 1870s, as the government of Egypt became more centralized, it imposed Western-derived legal codes, and many of the duties once performed by religious scholars, such as adjudication of criminal and commercial cases, were given over to Western-trained lawyers who were familiar with the new codes. According to historian Daniel Crecelius, this produced in the religious scholars an "attitude of entrenchment," in which they clung to static ideals, represented in taqlid, that preserved their own authority as repositories of specialized religious knowledge. Their vast influence over the public allowed them to threaten the government with massive popular opposition if it attempted further to encroach on the domain of the shari'aP However, Egyptian religious scholars were not only affected by issues within their own country, they were connected to a larger world and were responding in part to ideas emanating from other parts of that world. For example, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, Islamic revivalists arose who claimed that the Muslim community had entered a period of moral decay, largely internally rather than externally caused, and that some variety of renewed ijtihad was necessary to revive true Muslim belief. They founded powerful reform communities, including that in North Africa founded by Muhammad 'Ali al-Sanusi, the Wahhabi movement in Arabia founded by Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab (which today dominates the Saudi state), and the Deoband movement in India founded by followers of Shah Wali Allah (progenitor of the Taliban).l 8 Egyptian scholars of the nineteenth century claimed cessation of ijtihad in order to discredit these movements and protect the Islamic community from internal divisions. One of the most famous legal scholars in Egypt to do this was the chief Maliki mufti, Shaykh Muhammad 'Ilish. Over the course of several decades in office, 'Ilish issued hundreds of fatwas, which were published upon his death in 1882. A significant number were framed as explicit criticisms of the "revival" of ijtihad. See Wiederhold, "Legal Doctrines in Conflict," 235, n. 2. See Johansen, Contingency, 43, for an evaluation of Snouck Hurgronje's influence on Western studies of fiqh. Subsequent studies of the shari'a seemed to confirm that the era of ijtihad was over by the beginning of the fourth Islamic century and that, although a few later scholars did claim to practice ijtihad, they did not do so with any significant effect. See, for example, Joseph Schacht, "The 'Closing of the Gate of Independent Reasoning' and the Further Development of Doctrine," in An Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford, 1964), 69-75. This opinion has been only recently revised. 17 Daniel Crecelius, "Nonideological Responses of the Egyptian Ulama to Modernization," in Nikki Keddie, ed., Scholars, Saints and Sufis (Berkeley, Calif., 1972), 184-97. 18 Ahmad Dallal, "Origins and Objectives of Islamic Revivalist Thought, 1750-1850," Journal of the American Oriental Society 113, no. 3 (1993): 341-59. These movements restricted ijtihad to their leaders or those trained in their legal schools; this was not lay ijtihad. For example, the Deoband founder Shah Wali Allah thought unguided speculation could lead the untrained into error. Barbara Daly Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 (Princeton, N.J., 1982), 38. 15 16 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2003 718 Indira Falk Gesink Shaykh 'Ilish viewed taqlid as the mechanism by which the fabric of Sunni Islamic society was held together. According to him, the very definition of "Sunni," ahl al-sunnah wal-jama 'ah, implied that Sunnis followed the examplt:! of the Prophet (sunnah) and agreed to general principles of law that bound them together. Consensus on those principles defined the community. Anyone who did not recognize the overall validity of those principles threatened its unity.l 9 Among 'Ilish's fatwas is a response to an inquiry about the Wahhabis (referred to as the Muhammadiyyah sect). According to the petition, the Wahhabis' leader (Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab) believed that there were errors in the collections of legal rulings that judges used in applying the law. Yet, said the petitioner, those books had been elevated (by consensus) to the status of scripture. In order to return to true principles of Islam, this leader had wanted to abandon the books of accepted rulings and to adopt only those rulings that had been based on unambiguous statements in the Qur'an and the sound hadith. He therefore claimed to be a mujtahid, someone who is qualified to perform ijtihad. Some members of this group had even claimed that this leader was the Mahdi or a prophet. The petitioner asked for Shaykh 'Ilish's opinion. 'Ilish's response was unequivocal: "It is not permissible for a layman to abandon taqlid ... and adopt rulings from the Qur'an and the hadith ... [T]he Sunnis have unanimously agreed that taqlid is incumbent upon the one who does not possess the qualifications for ijtihad." This, he said, was so well known that it had become "an article of faith." 20 According to 'Ilish, the language of the Qur'an could be misleading; the literal meaning apparent to one upon first glance could even be blasphemous. Therefore, no one was capable of interpreting it correctly "but God and those who were thoroughly versed in religion." Of those who were "thoroughly versed," only the Prophet, his Companions from the early Islamic community, and the founders of the four legal schools (Imams) had been able to interpret the Qur'an without danger of falling into error. This was because, according to 'Ilish, the Companions had had direct access to the opinion of the Prophet, and the Imams had been saints inspired by the Prophet through mystical illumination. No one after the founders had possessed both the level of knowledge and the mystical connection to the Prophet to elevate their own interpretation of the Qur'an and other sources of law over those of the founders themselves; thus no one after the founders could legitimately claim the rank of independent ijtihad (al-ijtihad al-mutlaq). 21 Further19 'Ilish's fatwas on taqlid are a hodge-podge of quoted material from earlier scholars, but 'Ilish's point throughout is that jurists must follow the consensus of a legal school whenever possible, and, if contradictory rulings exist, they must follow that preferred by the majority of scholars. Muhammad 'Ilish, Fath at- 'ali al-malik fil-fatwa 'ala madhhab at-imam Malik, vol. 1 (1882; rpt. edn., Cairo, 1958), 60-111, esp. 86. According to Wael Hallaq, "No person could reject any of these constants [theories of language used in determining the epistemological value of scriptural statements, consensus, principles of reasoning] ... and still claim affiliation with Sunnism. Consensus and qiyas have become the defining features of Sunnism no less than the Quran and the Sunna" (History of Islamic Legal Theories, 125-26). 20 'Ilish, Fath, 89-93. 2 1 'Ilish follows the opinion of 'Abd al-Wahhab al-Sha'rani that the four founders had confirmed their interpretations of the law by speaking with the Prophet while in a state of mystical illumination. 'Ilish also held out the possibility that contemporary saints of his own Sufi order, the Shadhili order, might also possess this kind of mystical connection, although he asserted that no one since the four founders had legitimately performed independent ijtihad. All those who claimed to have done so had really been performing ijtihad within the confines of their madhhab rules. 'Ilish, Fath, 90, 92, 93, 96; AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2003 Chaos on the Earth 719 more, few scholars possessed the qualifications even for limited ijtihad, especially "in this recent age, in which Islam has become foreign fgharib ]." 22 More important, the texts of Maliki jurisprudence contained rulings that had been upheld throughout centuries of scholarly investigation and debate, and on which the community of scholars within the Maliki school had achieved consensus. In accordance with hadith reports that the Prophet had said his community could not agree unanimously in error, juridical consensus on behalf of the community rendered these rulings as epistemologically certain as an unambiguous statement in the Our' an. 'Abd al-Wahhab's challenge to Maliki jurisprudence therefore negated the validity of consensus-sanctioned rulings. This effectively rendered him a heretic, someone who did not accept the fundamental assumptions that defined one as Sunni. 23 'Ilish himself adhered strictly to taqlid; instead of constructing original arguments to back up his point, he cited the authorities whose works he had consulted. 'Ilish's opinion emerges in his selection of authorities and brief comments of approval or criticism, and in the implied analogy between the legal rulings of these authorities and 'Ilish's own historical context. For example, 'Ilish argued that untrained laymen who took up independent ijtihad threatened the integrity of the law, for their rulings would conform to no standard and might contradict the rules of the established legal schools. He cited 'Abd al-Wahhab al-Sha'rani, a sixteenthcentury Egyptian scholar associated with the Shadhili Sufi order ('Ilish's own order), to the effect that people who were incapable of studying the sources for themselves had to be restricted to a single legal school, so that they did not lead themselves and others into error. When the unqualified took up ijtihad, their results might conform to those of the "sound" legal schools, but sometimes they would conform to "deviant" legal schools or violate the consensus of the community. 24 Muftis had to adhere to the established hermeneutic of legal theory, for an alternative hermeneutic, such as one that challenged the authority of consensus, would invalidate much of the corpus of accepted rulings. 25 One problem that 'Ilish had to deal with was that the verb qallada, from which taqlid is derived, appears in the Qur'an in a negative context. God condemns those who follow (qallada) their forefathers' ways rather than opening themselves to the truth of Islam. 26 'Ilish therefore had to draw a clear distinction between the kind of taqlid described in the Qur'an and that used by Maliki jurists. For example, 'Ilish reported an opinion by the fourteenth-century Maliki jurist Abu Ishaq al-Shatibi that clearly defined the Qur'anic taqlid as different from the taqlid of legal methodology: "Abu Ishaq said that insistence upon following [ittiba '] customs has Kahhala, Mu'iam al-mu'allifin, vols. 9-10 in 1 (Beirut, n.d.), 12; 'Ali Pasha Mubarak, Al-Khitat al-tawfiqiyyah al-jadidah li-Misr al-qahirah (1887; rpt. edn., Cairo, 1983), 4: 42-43. 22 'Ilish, Fath, 89-93. 23 'Ilish, Fath, 90, 92. 'Ilish's argument could not accommodate examples in which consensus failed. Communal unity was an absolute necessity; he may not have wanted to mention exceptions in which the community was shown to be "in error" in a fatwa, which was after all a prescriptive form, the audience of which consisted of laymen in a divided community. 24 'Ilish, Fath, 104. zs Hallaq, History of Islamic Legal Theories, 207-09. 26 Qur'an 2: 170-71, 5: 104-05, 7: 70-72. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2003 720 Indira Falk Gesink corrupted or contradicted the Truth. Following what one's forefathers and shaykhs and so forth did, that is objectionable taqlid [al-taqlid al-madhmum ]." 27 In contrast, the legal mechanism of taqlid prevented jurists from following "whims" and "worldly objectives" in judging cases and issuingfatwas. Taqlid of one's mufti was therefore a religious obligation. The role of the mufti-'Ilish's own role-was thus extremely important. He was responsible for the moral guidance of his petitioners. What if the mufti discovered a case in which he believed the correct ruling was that of another legal school rather than his own? Could he base his fatwa on a ruling established in a different legal school, or on an opinion that contradicted the opinions accepted by his legal school? Once again, 'llish marshaled the arguments of his predecessors. The fourteenth-century jurist al-Shatibi addressed the dilemma of a mufti who, upon investigating a client's question, found more than one possible answer. Was the mufti required to present his client with both answers? Or should he make an attempt to value one answer over the other so that he could present his client with an unambiguous answer? Al-Shatibi replied: "When a commoner presents his case to a mufti and says to him, 'Extract me from my whims and set me to following the Truth,' it is not possible at this time to say to him, 'There are two reports on your issue, so choose according to your desire either of them you wish.' The meaning of that is legitimation of whim without law." The mufti who did this debased his advice, and, by implication, he damaged the integrity of the law itself. 28 For example, if a mufti were to report to a client that his question had more than one possible answer, and then he were to cite the various arguments and precedents in order to allow the client to make an informed choice, the client might not understand. 'Ilish related a story in which one Shaykh al-Isfahani received a petition from a female client whose husband refused to divorce her even though he did not have relations with her. AI-lsfahani's fatwa explained to the woman that jurists had a difference of opinion on that matter, and he referred her to their various opinions. She did not understand the fatwa and returned to him sometime later with the same question. The shaykh refused to further clarify the matter for her, saying that he had already answered her question, and so she sought an opinion from another mufti. 29 Since the primary duty of the mufti was to provide legal advice to the public, that advice must be readily comprehensible to them. Thus it was beneficial to society for a mufti to simply practice taqlid of his madhhab and represent the law to his clients as a coherent body of precedent.. 'Ilish, Fath, 66. 'Ilish, Fath, 61. It is interesting that 'Ilish used ai-Shatibi's work in a manner that was consistent with ai-Shatibi's own intent, while modern reformers misconstrued ai-Shatibi's arguments as an attempt to introduce flexibility into the law. According to Hallaq, ai-Shatibi was trying to preserve madhhab consistency and public authority of the law by "navigating a course" between two extremes of legal practice existing at his time (Hallaq, History of Islamic Legal Theories, 161, 174, 202-04). At the time, muftis performed ijtihad without adequate training, leading to illegitimate rulings (204 ), and jurists did not adhere to their own rulings, which undermined the belief of the populace in the authority of the law (205). 29 'Ilish, Fath, 70. See also Hallaq, History of Islamic Legal Theories, 181; and Baber Johansen, "Legal Literature and the Problem of Change: The Case of the Land Rent," in Islam and Public Law, Chibli Mallat, ed. (London, 1993), 32-36, in which an Ottoman mufti's choice to follow a particular opinion constitutes an action that is legally binding on judges and thus is not merely relevant to the petitioners but also a decisive element in the continual evolution of Hanafi doctrine. 27 28 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2003 721 Chaos on the Earth Another reason for muftis to restrict themselves to taqlid of a single school was to protect themselves from the corruptions of power. Al-Shatibi reported that, in his age, "many of the jurists who [used to] practice taqlid have begun to give fa twas to this relative or that friend that he would not give to others ... following his objective and desire, or the objective of this relative or that friend." Likewise, Shihab al-Din al-Qarafi (d. 1285) had stated that muftis must follow the ruling established by their legal schools, and, in cases where there was doubt as to what the accepted ruling was, muftis were required to rule according to the opinion preferred by their Imams. "As for the following of whims, it is forbidden completely." Al-Qarafi argued that if muftis were allowed to exercise their own judgment in evaluating the rulings of their legal schools, they would come under increased pressure to give favorable weight to bribes or political advantage. 30 Such preferential practices would undermine public perception of the law's neutrality. Once again, the mufti's advice had to adhere to the valid opinions set forth in the texts of the legal school.31 'llish held the Maliki position on the cessation of independent ijtihad and the social importance of taqlid to be of paramount importance. The preponderance of opinion among the Maliki scholars he cited fell on the side of preserving the integrity of legal school rulings-for the sake of individual Muslims. The legal school, or each mufti in relation to his petitioners, had to endeavor to provide clear and consistent rulings on similar cases or questions. If not, the rule of law would break down. Two criminals charged with similar crimes could get different sentences, or two petitioners asking similar questions could receive contradictory answers. 32 If the public perceived that the legal system could not provide consistency in trying legal cases, this would damage the legitimacy of the law itself, or of the government providing legal personnel. According to prevailing notions of social order, public faith in the ruler and in the law surrounding and protecting society was a necessary part of a "circle of justice." If any one part of the circle was broken, society would dissolve into injustice and disorder. The challenge to taqlid threatened to break that circle. Furthermore, 'Ilish's defense was an attempt to preserve the authority of the mufti. In a legal system based on taqlid, the muftis would remain crucial as providers of legal and religious advice. A system based on widespread ijtihad (by either state-trained legal officials or laymen) obviated the public's reliance on the scholars. Yet clearly, 'Ilish was not motivated solely by concerns of power; the authority of the mufti was a means to an end, the preservation of communal unity. 'Ilish appears to have been genuinely concerned about the relation of the legal system to public welfare. Given the context, the assumption that the "real motivations" for conservative defense of Sunni Islam were primarily materialist or 'Ilish, Fath, 68. See Jackson, Islamic Law and the State. Hallaq's argument that taqlid was integral to the functioning of the legal system (History of Islamic Legal Theories, 207-09) supports my contention that 'Ilish was primarily concerned with legal determinacy, as does Fadel's general rule that the legitimacy of rulings on private matters (al-qada') depended on public perceptions of the decisions' fairness and neutrality, so that each legal school had an interest in ensuring that judges and muftis applied the same rules to similar cases. Fadel, "Adjudication," 212, 234, 236, 266-67, 353-57. 32 'Ilish, Fath, 67, 77; Fadel, "Adjudication," vol. 2, passim. 3° 31 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2003 722 Indira Falk Gesink power-based appears to be a projection of late twentieth-century Western secularism onto an alien religious landscape, which has distorted the resulting view of the actors populating that landscape. 3 3 Contextual information about 'Ilish seems to bear this out: 'Ilish's contemporaries attested to his concern for maintaining religious morality. For example, the reformer 'Ali Pasha Mubarak, who was extremely critical of the religious scholars in general and rejected taqlid as a cause of social stagnation, praised 'Ilish for his uncompromising commitment to moral purity: He has a majesty that terrifies the black-hearted one, and [his] lectures curdle the blood .. . It is probable that he never, from his childhood to his old age, missed the Friday prayers .. . Truly, he has overcome those loathsome things with which Paradise is encircled. Out of his respect for God, upon entering a mosque, he puts his sandals into a bag, fearing that he might defile the mosque ... he never drinks coffee and will not bear even the scent of smoke; he never wears expensive clothing nor anything made of silk, and he avoids the tassel of the tarboosh and stays away from kings, princes, and their ilk. 34 'Ilish's appointment to the office of chief Maliki mufti came during a series of disturbances among Maliki students in Cairo's schools, and his severity and insistence that others adhere to his high standards of moral behavior were likely considered positive traits at the time. The appointment also placed 'Ilish on the front line of the intellectual defense of Islam during the rapid westernization of the Egyptian legal system under Khedive Isma'il, the imposition of French and British financial controllers in the wake of Egypt's bankruptcy in 1876, and the quasinationalist 'Urabi Revolt in 1879-1882-in which 'Ilish was a key participant. 'Ilish's era saw individual morality and social stability threatened by customs and laws imported from foreign, non-Muslim countries and by rebellions within Islam itself. To him, taqlid became even more crucial as a mechanism of ensuring the continuity and internal consistency of the Islamic legal tradition. Laymen who practiced taqlid of a single established legal school and received unequivocal direction from their muftis would not suffer uncertainty about their religious duties, nor would they be led into error by self-styled mujtahids who were insufficiently trained to interpret the law. They would continue to have confidence in the religious law and believe in a coherent body of religious truths. And perhaps if the integrity of the law and confidence in the mufti's office were maintained, Muslims would be less inclined to accept the ways of the foreigners. Thus society's strength lay in the coherence of the law and in the practice of taqlid. Today, Muslim legal scholars echo 'Ilish's concerns, if not his defense of taqlid. At present, individuals and organizations may style themselves muftis and issue fatwas without regard to the rigorous methods used by muftis in the past. 35 33 See John 0. Voll, "Foreword," in Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (London, 1993), xii. Michel Foucault helped rid us of one set of Orientalist blinders; did he slip us another set in exchange? 34 Mubarak, Al-Khitat, 4: 43. 35 Khaled Abou El Fadl, "Text and Authority," and "The Fatwa," in The Authoritative and the Authoritarian in Islamic Discourses: A Contemporary Case Study, 2d edn. (Austin, Tex., 1997), 33-45. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2003 723 Chaos on the Earth 'lusH's COMPLEX ARGUMENT about the legal and consensual basis for a stable, moral society would be reduced to a straw man by his political opponents. Throughout the nineteenth century, ijtihad-based reform movements gained adherents and influence in the Middle East and South Asia. These reformers were inspired chiefly by the advance of Western imperialism, and they claimed that Europeans had been able to take advantage of internal weaknesses in Muslim society. Whereas conservative legal scholars such as 'Ilish had championed taqlid as the means to strengthen Islamic society and claimed that independent ijtihad had ceased and should not be revived, the reformers saw taqlid as the cause of weakness and independent ijtihad as the means of reinvigoration. The Egypt-based reformers took this a key step further: they stripped taqlid and ijtihad of their legal, technical meanings and recast them as epistemological concepts with social meanings. Sayyid Jamal al-Din "al-Afghani" was chief among those who redefined taqlid and ijtihad. Al-Afghani was a Persian-born traveling scholar and political agitator whose experiences in Qajar Persia and British colonial India convinced him that imperialism and tyranny were threats to the strength and unity of the Muslim community. In 1869 and 1871-1879, al-Afghani lived and taught in Egypt. He had no formal teaching position but proved to be an incredibly charismatic teacher nevertheless and attracted a significant following among the brightest minds in Egypt. Students from al-Azhar madrasa (college of religion and legal tradition) and civil colleges came regularly to his house in Cairo for extracurricular lectures on science and political philosophy. There, the students imbibed al-Afghani's peculiar philosophy of progress and his call to arms. 36 In al-Afghani's philosophy, Islamic revival was synonymous with scientific and political revival. According to al-Afghani, the first step in fomenting an Islamic revival was to persuade Muslims to understand their religion correctly and live according to its teachings. Key among these teachings were the Qur'anic commandments to seek wisdom, to investigate, to seek evidence and proof for one's beliefs, and to avoid accepting others' beliefs uncritically. Al-Afghani told his students that Islam enjoined upon all Muslims a spirit of inquiry, which was necessary to promote a personal understanding of the basic tenets of Islam and the acquisition of learning. Once the population was imbued with the proper spirit of inquiry, Muslims would progress naturally to the investigation of both spiritual and scientific matters. Inquiry into spiritual matters would lead to a revitalization of personal morality and communal strength. Then, because the inquiry into scientific knowledge could be directly applied to the military arts, the society would be strengthened militarily. Muslim society, having achieved moral, military, and material strength, could then free itself from foreign tutelage and domination. According to al-Afghani's European authorities, scientifically derived empirical knowledge held the secrets of social progress. Al-Afghani held knowledge of the world to be discoverable through observation of phenomena, via the scientific method, and expressible as positive laws. He wrote that humanity would benefit by 3 6 For details of al-Mghani's biography and political activities outside Egypt, see Edward G. Browne, Persian Revolution of 1905-1909 (New York, 1966); Nikki Keddie, Religion and Rebellion in Iran: The Tobacco Protest of 1891-1892 (London, 1966); and Keddie, Sayyid Jamal ad-Din "at-Afghani": A Political Biography (Berkeley, Calif., 1972); and Elie Kedourie, Afghani and 'Abduh: An Essay on Religious Unbelief and Political Activism in Modem Islam (1966; rpt. edn., London, 1997). AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2003 724 Indira Falk Gesink extension of the scientific method to all fields of human endeavor. This he viewed as completely compatible with an Islamic worldview. In fact, in his book Radd-inaichiriyyah (Reply to the Naturists), he cited European history texts to show that scientific inquiry had been sparked in Europe by the Protestant Reformation and had resulted there in progress: We must acquaint ourselves with the words of the European, [Fran~ois] Guizot, the French author of the history of civilization, that is, of the European civilization. He said that one of the most significant causes influencing Europe in its path to civilization was the appearance of a sect in this country that said: we have the right to investigate the sources of our beliefs, and demand proof for them ... And when this sect gained power and its ideas spread, the minds of the Europeans were freed from the malady of ignorance and stupidity, and they were stimulated into an intellectual circuit and returned to [the study of] scientific subjects and worked hard to acquire the elements of civilization. 37 According to al-Afghani, this model of advancement was appropriate, even natural, for Islamic society, because the religion itself promoted individual investigation: Islam is almost unique among religions in censuring belief without proof, rebuking those who follow suppositions, reproaching those who act randomly in the darkness of ignorance, and chiding them for their conduct. This religion demands that the pious seek proof [for their beliefs] in the sources of their religion ... Its lessons articulate that happiness results from reason and insight, and that wretchedness and error accompany ignorance, neglect of reason, and the snuffing of insight's light. 38 Islam thus prom<;>ted the required spirit of rational inquiry, as well as the assimilation of new ideas and the advancement of culture and civilization. The problem, according to al-Afghani, was that the cultivation of this spirit of rational inquiry and progress was entrusted to the religious scholars. The scholars, by insisting that believers had to adhere to taqlid of a legal school, were preventing them from "seeking proof for their beliefs" in the primary sources of their religion, keeping the people in "the darkness of ignorance," and thereby holding in abeyance the progress of Islamic countries. Although al-Afghani and Shaykh 'Ilish both participated in the 'Urabi Revolt, resisted European encroachment, and desired greater communal unity, al-Afghani and other reformers believed that scholars like 'Ilish, as conservators of the religious/legal tradition, preferred to risk perpetuating errors inherent in taqlid, in following their forebears' judgments, to the possibility of introducing new errors into the tradition via ijtihad. 'Ilish and those who held to 37 Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Radd-i-naichiriyyah [Reply to the Naturists], translated into Arabic by Muhammad 'Abduh under the title al-Radd 'ala al-dahriyin [Refutation of the Materialists], in Al-A 'mal al-kamilah li-Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad 'Imarah, ed. (Cairo, n.d.), 176-77. The Naturists were followers of the Indian thinker Sayyid Ahmad Khan, who proposed that the acts of God, in his view laws of nature, were the same as the will of God ("Ahmad Khan," Encyclopedia of Islam, 2d edn., CD-ROM, 1: 287b). The Naturists were not opposed to science, but al-Afghani believed that their British-influenced founder had imbibed too much of positivist prejudices against Islam, which included the idea that Islam's central doctrines were contradictory to the principles of positive knowledge. AI-Afghani's argument emphasized the importance of using ijtihad to reinforce religious faith. 38 AI-Afghani, Radd, 177. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2003 Chaos on the Earth 725 juridical taqlid were implicated in the stagnation of their country. Some reformers went so far as to label them al-jamidun, the stagnant ones. 39 Al-Afghani's definitions of taqlid and ijtihad were subtly different from those used by the legal scholar 'Ilish. Whereas 'Ilish defined taqlid strictly as a method for providing legal guidance, in which someone who did not have the knowledge and training to interpret religious sources followed the opinion of an authority on legal matters, al-Afghani defined it as a violation of the Qur'anic injunction to seek out proof for one's beliefs rather than doing as one's forefathers did. Al-Afghani's interpretation of taqlid was based on verses of the Qur'an in which ignorant or stubborn peoples refused to abandon the corrupt ways of their forefathers for the religion of the prophets. For example: When it is said to them: "Follow what God has revealed," they say "No, we shall follow the ways of our fathers," even though their fathers were void of wisdom and guidance. The parable of those who reject faith is as if one were to shout like a goatherd to things that listen to nothing but calls and cries: Deaf, dumb, and blind, they are devoid of wisdom. 40 'Ilish had distinguished between legal and reprehensible taqlid, but at-Afghani chose to confiate the two. Al-Afghani therefore stripped taqlid of its technical, legal meaning and recast it as "blind imitation" of others' beliefs. This redefined taqlid came to the forefront in at-Afghani's philosophy as the primary cause and constant of social stagnation and decay: the beliefs of the religion should be the first thing engraven on people's souls, built on solid evidence and sound proofs, so that their beliefs do not rest upon the opinions of others. They must disdain contentedness with following [taqlid] their forefathers on these matters. If a tenet of faith is held in a person's imagination without proof and without evidence, he may not be convinced, and will not be a believer. Also, the mind of one who accepts beliefs on the basis of supposition becomes accustomed to following suppositions, and he who is content to believe as did his forefathers suffers from the same harm [as did his forefathers] from foolish notions and divergences of opinion. The minds of those who follow supposition and are content with taqlid are prevented from moving beyond that to which their perception is accustomed; they do not follow the schools of thought and they do not walk along the paths of thoughtful speculation. If they continue like this, ignorance will gradually deceive them. Stupidity ties their arms behind their backs so that their minds are prevented from performing any rational function at all. They become incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, and they are surrounded by wretchedness. 41 So whereas 'Ilish's scheme of communal unity had been threatened by the independent ijtihad of the revivalists, at-Afghani's scheme to rouse Islamic society from stagnation relied on renewed independent ijtihad. First, the jurists had to be convinced that independent ijtihad would be beneficial for the Islamic community. Then, ijtihad would be used to reevaluate the sources of religion and reinterpret them in light of contemporary conditions, which would result in the gradual adaptation of the legal tradition to the needs and concerns of contemporary Muslims. 39 See, for example, Muhammad al-Ahmadi al-Zawahiri, Al- 'Ilm wal- 'ulama' wa al-nizam al-ta 'lim, 2d edn., Fakhr al-Din Zawahiri, intro. (1904; rpt. edn., n.p., 1955), 89. 4 0 Qur'an 2: 170-71. 41 Al-Mghani, Radd, 176. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2003 726 Indira Falk Gesink However, it was not enough for ijtihad to be revived as a legal method; that was simply a first step. Ordinary Muslims had to be taught to read and understand the sources of their religion themselves, to develop critical acumen, and to form their own opinions. Al-Afghani made the following comment during an informal gathering: "What does it mean that the gate of ijtihad is closed? By what textual authority was it closed? Which Imam said that no Muslim should do ijtihad for the purposes of jurisprudence, or derive guidance from the Qur'an and the sound hadith and struggle to renew and widen his understanding of them, or infer by means of analogy things that accord with the contemporary sciences?" Al-Afghani quoted the Qur'an to suggest that it had been sent down to be understood and interpreted by humans using their own powers of reasoning. This did not mean that all humans could interpret it but that anyone with a reasonable degree of religious learning could. In order to derive rulings for oneself, one would still have to master the Arabic language, be sane, and be familiar with the sound hadiths, the stories of the Companions, the rulings approved by consensus, the rulings derived from unambiguous verses of the Qur'an or from analogy. 42 This kind of knowledge was, however, more widely available than it had been in the past, and so expanding the franchise of ijtihad would result in a more informed, more committed, and therefore stronger Muslim community. Moreover, ideally, the principle of ijtihad should be applied to all kinds of knowledge, not just to religious sources. Al-Afghani used the term ijtihad in his writings not just to designate a legal methodology but also to intimate an attitude toward knowledge itself, an attitude of critical curiosity and individual inquiry. Therefore, the term ijtihad could be applied to any Muslim male's exercise of his critical faculty and scholarship to arrive at an answer to a question, even a scientific question. 43 Al-Afghani furthermore argued that, in order to widen the scope of ijtihad and bring the methodology of ijtihad to bear on more avenues of knowledge, existing educational systems would have to be changed. According to al-Afghani, the old Islamic madrasa system was imbued with institutions that supported the practice of taqlid; it encouraged excessive deference to the opinions of instructors, as if the instructors were the ultimate arbiters of truth. Some teachers had fallen into the practice of teaching commentaries (shuruh) on texts rather than the original texts themselves. This was common because some original texts were densely written, often in archaic language, regional dialects, or had tightly structured logical arguments, and the commentaries were easier for students to comprehend. However, the commentaries themselves often required explanation, and so some42 Muhammad al-Makhzumi, Khatirat Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani al-Husayni (Beirut, 1931), 176-79. Al-Afghani claimed that had the Imams still been alive they would still have been performing ijtihad and updating the law, and that contemporary interpretations might be "closer to the truth" than ancient ones (176, 178-79). Contemporary scientific information would not have been revealed in the Qur'an because the people who received it in the seventh century would have regarded it as a lie (161-62). 43 According to Hallaq, mid to late twentieth-century reformers exercised their own version of ijtihad, "this in no way being akin ... to the traditional form of ijtihad." Hallaq traces the beginnings of reformulation of legal theory to Muhammad 'Abduh (History of Islamic Legal Theories, 210-12, 220), but 'Abduh's redefinition of ijtihad was absorbed from al-Afghani and other reformers such as Rifa'ah al-Tahtawi. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2003 Chaos on the Earth 727 times super-commentaries were written in the margins of the commentaries, and sometimes marginal glosses were written about other super-commentaries. When scholars taught the commentaries rather than the original texts, students were no longer exposed to the ideas of the original authors but only to others' interpretations, and the interpretations became the object of knowledge to be memorized and reproduced. According to al-Afghani, this method of teaching, as well as the attitude of taqlid-bound scholars like 'Ilish, encouraged students to believe that they must accept the interpretations of the commentators or their instructors-if they attempted to interpret the original texts, they might in their ignorance pervert the author's meaning. Thus was the practice of taqlid entrenched in the minds of students, and thus were their critical faculties weakened. Al-Afghani attracted a large number of followers from among both madrasa students and the students of civil schools. Al-Afghani also encouraged his followers to take advantage of the emerging Arabic print media to enlighten the public. Some of at-Afghani's followers, like al-Afghani himself, became Pan-Islamists, who sought to strengthen and unify the worldwide Muslim community in order to enable Muslims to throw off the yoke of European domination. Some of his followers were Christians, Jews, and secular nationalists, who were less interested in Muslim unity than in strengthening the Arab or Egyptian nations. 44 However, all carried with them al-Afghani's campaign for a new type of ijtihad, an ijtihad to be practiced not just by jurists but by any properly educated Muslim. Today, popular manifestos on Islamic law and the duties of Muslims often promote the same agenda: ijtihad is now not just the province of the legal specialist, it is a duty of all Muslims. OVER THE DECADES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, conservatives like 'Ilish WhO had defended taqlid slipped into obscurity, their efforts at first ridiculed as reactionary, then discarded as survivals of a stagnant past. 45 But many of al-Afghani's followers took up his call for ijtihad-based reform; several became pioneers of Arabic editorial journalism and dominated the early market for editorials. Arabic journals, many based in Egypt, had international audiences. As a consequence, al-Afghani's ideas came to dominate the international public discourse on reform, religious interpretation, and law in Muslim countries. Seven of the eight most popular newspapers and journals published in Egypt between 1870 and 1911 unabashedly supported some version of al-Afghani's program and utilized at-Afghani's populist concept of ijtihad. These included two official government periodicals, al-Waqa'i' al-Misriyyah (Egyptian Events) and Rawdat al-madaris (Garden of Schools); al- 'Urwah al-wuthqah (The Indissoluble Bond), a revolutionary journal published in Paris by al-Afghani and his disciples in exile; al-Mu 'ayyad (The Confirmed), Egypt's 44 See Charles C. Adams, Islam and Modernism in Egypt: A Study of the Modem Reform Movement Inaugurated by Muhammad 'Abduh (New York, 1933); Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (1962; rpt. edn., Cambridge, 1983); Mitchell, Society of the Muslim Brothers; Irene Gendzier, Practical Visions of Ya'qub Sanu' (Cambridge, Mass., 1966). 45 Muhammad Rashid Rida, Tarikh al-ustadh al-imam al-shaykh Muhammad 'Abduh, 2 vols. (1908; rpt. ed11., Cairo, 1931, 1947), 1: 133-35, 2: 425; Jurji Zaydan, Tarajim mashahir al-sharq fil-qam al-tasi' 'ashar, 2 vols., 2d rev. edn. (Cairo, 1910), 1: 305-06; Adams, Islam and Modernism, 30, 42-43, 97. Adams described 'Ilish as a "violent reactionary." AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2003 728 Indira Falk Gesink most popular daily newspaper, run by Azhar-trained Shaykh 'Ali Yusuf; Misbah al-sharq (Lantern of the East), a weekly run by Ibrahim al-Muwaylhi, personal secretary to the exiled khedive (hereditary viceroy); al-Hayat (Life), a daily run by a second-generation disciple, Muhammad Farid Wagdy; and the intrepid modernist mouthpiece, Muhammad Rashid Rida's monthly journal al-Manar (The Lighthouse).46 Six of these were owned or controlled by al-Afghani himself, the pro-ijtihad reformer Rifa'ah al-Tahtawi, or at-Afghani's disciples. The views of the latter two journals have had an enormous impact on the twentieth century, not least because of their considerable influence on the ideas of Hasan al-Banna', founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.47 More than being simply pro-ijtihad, however, these periodicals promulgated the idea that the religious scholars were stagnating, that they had to be convinced that contemporary scientific discoveries and foreign political events were relevant to the lives of ordinary Egyptians, and that they were primarily responsible for preventing Muslims from reclaiming their lost glories. For example, one of the editors of Rawdat al-madaris, 'Ali Pasha Mubarak, accused the scholars of al-Azhar of teaching "books ... not knowledge." 48 Al-Mu'ayyad's Azhar-trained owner even criticized his former teachers: "our scholars work today writing treatises in answer to [ancient philosophical controversies]; it is necessary that they work on things that are relevant to the current state of things and answer those who today are against lslam." 49 Likewise, al-Manar's stated main objectives were to reform education, rewrite textbooks, and eradicate imitation of obsolete traditions: "until that which is broken is made whole and the blind imitation [al-taqlid al-a 'rna] of all who went before us is made into knowledge and certainty." 50 Journals did exist in which those who opposed the revival of ijtihad published articles, but they never achieved international prominence. Over the course of the twentieth century, they languished in dusty archives, virtually untouched by historians, until even their names were forgotten.s1 Moreover, it was the reformers who were likely to know European languages and travel in international circles, it was the reformers who were tapped by members of the Egyptian and, later, the British government to lead various government efforts at reform, and it was the reformers who met and instructed Orientalist scholars and laid their journals in Western hands. 52 At-Afghani's 46 Al-Waqa'i' al-Misriyyah (Cairo, 1828-1942), Dawriyyat nos. 71, 545, Dar ai-Kutub (hereafter, DK), Cairo; Rawdat al-madaris al-Misriyyah (Cairo, 1870-77), Dawriyyat nos. 506-09, DK, Cairo; al-Mu'ayyad (Cairo, 1889-1915), Dawriyyat no. 60, DK, Cairo; Misbah al-sharq (Cairo, 1898-1903), Dawriyyat no. 1194, DK, Cairo; al-Manar (Cairo, 1897-1935), Arabic periodicals, American University in Cairo. See also Sami 'Abd al-'Aziz ai-Kumi, Al-Sihafah al-islamiyyah fi Misr fil-qam al-tasi' 'ashar (Mansurah, Egypt, 1992). 47 Mitchell, Society of the Muslim Brothers, 5, 322. 48 Ahmad Amin, "'Ali Pasha Mubarak," Zu'ama' al-islah fil-'asr al-hadith (Beirut, 1979), 195. 49 'Ali Yusuf, "Ta'mim al-ta'lim," al-Adab 3, no. 96 (November 22, 1889): 485. 50 Muhammad Rashid Rida, al-Manar 1 (March 15, 1898); al-Kumi, Al-Sihafah al-islamiyyah, 92. 51 Biographers of the influential reformer Muhammad 'Abduh mentioned that he had once sued several newspapers for libel, but the names of the offending papers were misquoted in the single source that mentioned them. Ahmad Shafiq Pasha, Mudhakkirati fi nisf qam, vol. 2, book 2 (Cairo, 1934-36), 40; Indira F. Gesink, "Beyond Modernisms" (PhD dissertation, Washington University in St. Louis, 2000). 52 The most oft-quoted source on Islamic modernism is Charles C. Adams's work Islam and Modernism in Egypt and its Arabic translation. Adams used modernist sources almost exclusively, most AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2003 Chaos on the Earth 729 followers became the intellectual and political elite of the early twentieth century, including Sa'd Zaghlul, chief architect of the Egyptian independence movement, and Muhammad 'Abduh, chief mufti of Egypt from 1898-1905 and initiator of modernist philosophies that traveled the globe. 'Abduh's ideas in particular inspired Islamic nationalist movements in the Ottoman Empire, the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, and Palestinianjihadist organizations in the 1930s.s3 'Abduh and his follower Muhammad Rashid Rida were largely responsible for spreading the idea that ijtihad was an essential duty required of all Muslims. 'Abduh spent his life trying to eliminate the vestiges of taqlid from the legal and educational systems of Egypt. Rida wrote in al-Manar that taqlid had lulled the Muslim community into intellectual laziness, which undermined their faith and weakened their commitment to Islam. In order to "cure" this weakness, taqlid of the founding Imams would have to be replaced by a kind of ijtihad based on the Qur'an and the practice of the early community (salaf), which could be performed by all who were educated in Arabic; this would help strengthen their beliefs and unify the community. 54 For the insufficiently educated, 'Abduh and Rida did permit ittiba', which meant following someone else's ruling with knowledge of the sources and reasoning used.ss Opponents of the new definition of ijtihad reacted with horror. One pointed out that what al-Afghani's followers "imagined to be religious reform" would lead to "religious anarchy" by "destroying trust in the religious law." He exclaimed, "My heart constricts from hearing your argument for abandoning taqlid . . . for I anticipate chaos in religion for the common Muslims." Revival of unbridled ijtihad would only result in further. divisions in the religious community: "what I think of this hell-spawned reform is that there will be afitnah [chaos or civil warfare] on the earth and a great corruption." Another complained that he feared "the proliferation of madhhabs from the proliferation of opinions." 56 These were the same concerns raised by 'Ilish in 1882: abrogating taqlid and extending the franchise for ijtihad would undermine the rule of law and threaten the stability of beliefs that underlay the social order and imposed some unity on the Sunni Muslim community. Division and uncertainty would result. Even 'Abduh, as one of the most prominent advocates of revived ijtihad, said that a layman's ijtihad should be applied only to notably Muhammad Rashid Rida's journal al-Manar and his Tarikh al-ustadh at-imam, and Jurji Zaydan's Tarajim mashahir al-sharq fil-qam al-tasi' 'ashar [Biographies of the celebrities of the East in the nineteenth century]. 53 See, for example, William L. Cleveland, Islam against the West: Shakib Arslan and the Campaign for Islamic Nationalism (Austin, Tex., 1985); Mitchell, Society of the Muslim Brothers, 5, 14, 23, 237,321, 325; Abdullah Schleifer, "Izz al-Din al-Qassam: Preacher and Mujahid," in Struggle and Survival in the Modem Middle East, Edmund Burke III, ed. (Berkeley, Calif., 1993), 166-67. 54 "Al-Muhawirat bayna al-musallih wal-muqallid: Al-muhawirah al-thaniyyah," al-Manar 3, no. 29 (December 23, 1900): 677; "Al-Muhawirat bayna al-musallih wal-muqallid: Al-muhawirah al-rabi'ah," al-Manar 3, no. 32 (February 6, 1901): 895, 897, 903; "Al-Muhawirah al-khamisah ... al-jafr wal-zayirjah," al-Manar 4 (March 7, 1901): 53, 54; "Al-Muhawirah al-sadisah ... al-ijtihad wal-taqlid," al-Manar 4, no. 5 (May 5, 1901): 165-69; "Al-Muhawirah al-sabi'ah ... al-ijtihad wal-wihdah al-islamiyyah," al-Manar 4 (May 19, 1901): 206, 208, 215-16; "Al-Muhawirah al-tasi'ah ... al-taqlid wal-talfiq wal-ijma'," al-Manar 4, no. 10 (July 17, 1901): 362. 55 Daniel Brown, Re-thinking Tradition in Modem Islamic Thought (Cambridge, 1996), 31. 5 6 "Al-Muhawirah al-sadisah," 169; and "Al-Muhawirah al-sabi'ah," 212; Muhammad Rashid Rida, "Irad 'ala tark al-taqlid," al-Manar 8 (June 19, 1905): 294. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2003 730 Indira Falk Gesink matters of personal belief and not to matters of law. 57 But the Egyptian public, increasingly socialized into late nineteenth-century Western notions of progress, and encouraged by modernist historians' portrayals of their history, glossed over the warnings and rejected conservatives' objections as stale and reactionary. And through the international market for reprints of Egyptian modernist journals ("from Fez to Peking") and the graduates of schools influenced by modernist reforms, lay ijtihad was accepted by an international audience. 58 The interpretation of taqlid as a cause of social stagnation, and the redefinition of ijtihad as the cure, came to dominate both paradigms of "modern" Islam and Western Orientalist descriptions of Islamic law. By the early twentieth century, Orientalists had picked up the rhetoric about the closure of the gate of ijtihad and were instructing the next generation of Western scholars in the centuries of legal stagnation under Islamic law. By the end of the twentieth century, modernist prejudices toward the intellectual superiority of the redefined ijtihad had become so rooted in intellectual Islamic thought that many considered taqlid a perversion of Truth, a reification of a text that is open to multiple interpretations. 59 Ijtihad had become the hallmark of modern attitudes, taqlid a vestige of an embarrassing past. IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, the redefined ijtihad was accepted as the intellectually preferred mode of legal interpretation, among not only revivalist and militant groups but also many "orthodox" Sunnis. While Islamic components of the judicial systems in countries such as Egypt and Pakistan still cling to the legal stability inherent in taqlid, they are increasingly challenged by governments and intellectuals who seek legal change via renewed ijtihad. 60 Likewise, assertions that the "gate of ijtihad" had been closed, and that taqlid was responsible for Islam's political subordination, are common. The historical reality in which ijtihad continued to be used to bring rulings into conformity with contemporary practices has only been uncovered in the last decade, and the rationale behind taqlid still remains buried under a century of polemical fallout. The redefinition of ijtihad and taqlid has had a transformative effect on the political landscape of the Islamic world. The reformers' extension of the right of ijtihad to lay believers contributed to the rise of many divergent sects, from secularists to relativists to militant groups. The emergence of twentieth-century sects from Egypt-based modernist movements and these sects' adoption of lay ijtihad has already been well established by other scholars. For example, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna', the Brotherhood's chief theorist of the 1960s, Sayyid Qutb, and members of the Brotherhood's more militant splinter groups all trace their philosophies to Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and the early Islamic modernists' popularization of ijtihad. Most Rida, "Irad 'ala tark al-taqlid," 295. International circulation figures and influence from Ami Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East: A History (London, 1995), 50, 53, 54, 55, 57, 59. 59 Representative of this perspective are works of Islamic modernists such as Muhammad Arkoun, "Postivism and Tradition in an Islamic Perspective," Diogenes, no. 127 (Fall 1984): esp. 86 and 89; and Taha J. 'Aiwani, "Taqlid and the Stagnation of the Muslim Mind," American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 8, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 513-24. 60 John Esposito, Women in Muslim Family Law (Syracuse, N.Y., 1982), 105. 57 58 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2003 731 Chaos on the Earth follow elaborations of al-Afghani's philosophies by Muhammad 'Abduh's and Muhammad Rashid Rida, both of whom tended to assume that ijtihad would lead believers to the essence of a "true" Islam. 61 According to Shukri Mustafa, executed leader of the militant splinter group Jama'at al-Muslimin (al-Takfir wa al-Hijra), "Islam has been in decline ever since men have ceased to draw their lessons directly from the Koran and the Sunna, and have instead followed the tradition of other men, those who call themselves imams." Shukri Mustafa's own interpretation of Qur'anic verses 2: 216 and 2: 232 indicated to him that God possesses knowledge and we do not, and that therefore everything outside of the Qur'an and hadith is based on uncertain knowledge-including the rulings and methods generated by centuries of jurisprudence. In his opinion, the Qur'an is clear Arabic and understandable by anyone who has a good dictionary, and so there is no need to be bound by texts of antique interpretations. 62 This, however, leaves the leaders of groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood with a paradox: they want believers to engage in ijtihad to strengthen their faith, to understand the sources of their religion and "inscribe their beliefs on their souls" in the manner al-Afghani described, and yet they want believers to reach the same conclusions about the principles of their faith as their leaders do-especially regarding the types of action necessary to achieve the group's social and political goals. They have therefore tended to restrict members' ijtihad to results they approve. Like al-Afghani's follower Muhammad 'Abduh, twentieth-century groups did this by distinguishing between taqlid, which they defined as ignorant imitation, and ittiba ', which means following a ruling with full knowledge of its sources and method of reasoning. However, ittiba' does not serve legal consistency in the same way taqlid once did. Ittiba' only ensures consistency if everyone uses the same sources and reaches the same conclusions as the author of the ruling in question. Hence it is still an imperfect solution, and disagreements over interpretation still produce disgruntled radicals and more splinter groups.63 Thus the groups that embrace individual ijtihad cannot prevent their own dissolution without modifying the principles that gave rise to them in the first place. Governments also have to deal with the ijtihad paradox. The proliferation of individual ijtihad prevents any significant degree of uniformity in legal interpretation: thus it is difficult to establish definitively recognized rules on the status of women, or on the admissibility of violence against other Muslims, or on criminal or even commercial regulations-unless the government imposes a hegemonic legal code. Such an imposition can have negative consequences, such as for example when Gamal 'Abd al-Nasir, president of Egypt (1954-1970), began in the 1960s to promote a state-sanctioned articulation of Islam. That action alienated the Muslim Brotherhood and contributed to the formation of various militant splinter groups, including Hamas (which employed ijtihad to respond to political circumstances in Israel's occupied territories), al-Takfir wa al-Hijra (responsible for the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat), and al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya (the "Islamic Group" responsible Mitchell, Society of the Muslim Brothers, 5, 14, 23, 186, 237-39, 321; Kepel, Muslim Extremism, 79. Quoted in Kepel, Muslim Extremism, 79. See also Gregory Starrett, Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt (Berkeley, Calif., 1998), 231. 63 Mitchell, Society of the Muslim Brothers, 326, 327. 61 62 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2003 732 Indira Falk Gesink for the 1997 attack on tourists at Luxor and for producing key personnel in al-Qaida, such as Ayman al-Zawahiri), among others. Egypt's state interpretation of Islam was also ridiculed by Muslims from the secularist end of the spectrum, one of whom claimed that an organ of state Islam was a "fake" engineered to undermine Islamist popularity. 64 The proliferation of independent ijtihad gives any faction within society a readily available weapon with which to challenge the government's religious legitimacy-much as taqlid was wielded by the scholars in previous centuries, but with less stabilizing effects. The paradox persists even if a government declares that it will establish legal norms based on the shari'a, as for example in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government still faces criticism from religious scholars who embrace different sets of interpretations, and from laymen who wish to discredit the Saudi family, both of whom claim that the government is not truly Islamic. When the Saudi regime imprisoned the scholars Salman al-Awdah and Safar al-Hawali for speaking out against the regime, one of their lay followers, Osama bin Ladin, called up his contacts from the Afghan war for a campaign against the government and their American supporters. Bin Ladin said: the Saudi regime imposed on the people a life that does not appeal to the free believer. They wanted the people to eat and drink and celebrate the praise of God, but if the people wanted to encourage what is right and forbid what is wrong [a duty enjoined upon them by the Qur'an], they can't. Rather, the regime dismisses them from their jobs and ... they are detained in prisons. I have rejected to live this submissive life ... I found myself forced ... to carry out a small part of my duty. 65 Bin Ladin, whose formal education consists of college degrees in business and engineering, has carried out his "duty" in part by issuing fatwas, or legal advice, previously the prerogative of the specially trained legal scholars, the muftis. Indeed, the issuing of "lay fatwas" has proliferated to such an extent that almost any authority figure can claim that privilege and be accepted, despite the fact that such fatwas are often reached using simplistic methods of legal derivation that ignore contrary evidence and effectively replace an authoritative text with an authoritarian interpreter. 66 In countries where trained muftis generally serve a state-sanctioned version of Islam, such as Egypt, muftis insist that lay fatwas are invalid. But the mufti's fatwa has never been more than an opinion anyway, and petitioners may prefer the politics of lay muftis. Indeed, widespread acceptance of lay ijtihad justifies differences of opinion on the sectarian, political, or individual level and can delegitimize governments' attempts to establish legal norms within their own countries. The ijtihad paradox also clouds the possibility for greater political unity among Islamic countries, an ideal that political analysts often assume to be the goal of militant organizations such as al-Qaida. Islamic law in Saudi Arabia may be quite different from Islamic law as practiced by the Sudanese or the Taliban. In fact, 64 Kepel, Muslim Extremism, 37-67, 70-102; Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam (1985; rpt. edn., New Haven, Conn., 1990), 50-56; Starrett, Putting Islam to Work, 245. 65 Osama bin Ladin, interviewed by Peter Arnett, CNN (March 1997), available at www.anusha.com/osamaint.htm (May 11, 2003). 66 Abou El Fadl, "Text and Authority," and "Construction of the Authoritarian," in Authoritative and the Authoritarian, 33-38, 89-99. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2003 Chaos on the Earth 733 some scholars now say that there is no such thing as "Islamic law" per se, since there are as many possibilities for variant interpretations of some issues as there are interpreters. As one famous contemporary Muslim scientist, speaking of the Qur'an, said: "the text is mute," and only its interpreters give it voice. 67 This renders the theoretical "ideal" of a great Islamic empire, unified by adherence to the shari'a, problematic to say the least. The redefinition of ijtihad as a lay rather than restricted practice has facilitated radical transformations in the ways Muslims define Islam's unifying ethical ideals. Communities of Muslims became bound by the search for a "true" Islam, and a set of hermeneutical tools for that search, but the hermeneutics of "true" Islam only produce multiple truths and multiple communities. I do not argue that this independence of thought and religious diversity is inherently dangerous, or that law must be as rigid as the nineteenth-century conservatives claimed it was in order to preserve social order. Indeed, the search for religious truth is part of human existence, and legal systems must be able to adapt to changing social circumstances. Although those who sought to preserve the unity of their community by restricting ijtihad predicted the contemporary upheaval in public belief, this "chaos on the earth," a return to taqlid would probably not provide the flexibility needed to maintain a legitimate legal system today. Some sort of synthesis of traditional sources and methodologies that restricts ijtihad and provision of fatwas to specialists, to encourage some measure of social consensus on the definition of the community, and its legal basis, is needed. Attempts so far to create such a synthesis have been given little popular attention. 68 Journalistic attempts to explain Islamic militancy as reactionary adherence to an outdated and inflexible legal system are informed by an invented history. Islamic extremism is partly a result of the radical flexibility of twentieth-century Islam, not its purported rigidity. The Islamic legal tradition was in past practice adaptable to contemporary social conditions, and attempts to claim that it was not were largely political in nature and rhetorical in effect. However, a debate in the nineteenth century over its very flexibility fostered both an invented tradition of legal inflexibility, which continues to influence Western and Muslim views, and a subsequent dramatic move toward lay interpretation. Widespread lay interpretation has allowed individuals to read their own purposes into legal sources and manipulate them to serve various political agendas-producing the "chaos on the earth" that nineteenth-century "reactionaries" had tried to prevent. 67 Abdolkarim Soroosh, "Islam, Pluralism and Democracy," paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, Saturday, December 5, 1998. 68 For examples of and suggestions for new syntheses, see Wael Hallaq, "Crises of Modernity," in History of Islamic Legal Theories, 207-54; and Abou El Fad!, Authoritative and the Authoritarian. Indira Falk Gesink is an assistant professor of Middle Eastern history at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, where she has been teaching since receiving her doctorate from Washington University in St. Louis in 2000. This article generated itself from her current project, a book on nineteenth-century debates between conservative and reformist scholars on reform of Islamic law and education at the Azhar madrasa in Cairo. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2003