Laws

You know,

when the Messenger was alive,

the Deen that he offered people was so attractive,

the belief required so easy yet so rewarding,

that the community of believers quickly grew.

From its initial rejection and persecution,

just a handful of believers

and then a few dozen in a city of thousands,

the Message spread across that part of the Arabian Peninsula we call the Hijaz.

This was the beginning of what is known as the Futuhat,

the opening up of the world to the Message,

the spreading of the acceptance of the belief in the Oneness of God,

a God with no companion and no comparison,

just simply

No God if not The God.

And accepting that a man named Muhammad

was being used by this One God

to pass on a Message to the rest of humankind.

And the Message was in a language of extraordinary beauty,

which stunned and enchanted those who heard it

suddenly voiced by a man who had never shown any great way with words before.

And that Message expressed

a simple yet infinitely subtle

way of understanding our lives

and the worlds we live in.

For thirteen years in Makkah the Messenger's community grew

despite the hardships heaped upon them

by those who stood to lose most by people's belief in the Message,

until that time when the people of Yathrib

asked the Messenger to establish his community there.

And with the community of believers

now many thousands

gathering together in Yathrib,

the Makkans finally decided to try to kill the Messenger.

But he escaped,

and when he reached Yathrib

at last it became possible

to show the world what became of a community

when they put the Message into practice,

when people lived the Deen.

Finally the believers could stand up

against those who would destroy them,

and the peace and harmony,

the justice and prosperity

that the muslim Way of Life offered to the world

could be seen.

Tens of thousands strong by now

and steadily increasing across the Hijaz,

the size of the community continued to grow.

And the spread of the Deen

did not stop with the death of the Messenger,

but actually grew even faster,

spreading at a breakneck pace around the globe.

North to al-Quds, the Holy City, Jerusalem,

and the areas of Palestine, and Syria

and forays against the Byzantines further north.

West through Egypt and Libya

across North Africa

as far as Kairouan in Tunisia.

East through Iraq,

overwhelming the Persian Empire.

From the time that the Messenger entered Yathrib,

it took just thirty years

for the world of Islam to reach

from Tunisia's Kairouan

to Kabul in Afghanistan.

In 100 years the world of Islam reached

from Spain and the West Coast of Africa,

east across the Sahara and North Africa,

across Egypt,

past two little towns called Makkah and Madinah,

away east crossing Persia,

on to the mountains of the Silk Road,

across Afghanistan and into China.

In 100 years the world of Islam

was bigger than the Roman Empire at its most extensive.

And problems with rapid expansion were obvious very early on,

as the Qur'an started to become

open to repetition by people in distant parts

with questionable memories,

and some people worried that the Qur'an could become corrupted.

So after consultation, Uthman arranged for those scribes who had been closest to the Messenger

to agree on a definitive text,

And four copies of this text were sent to the further reaches of the muslim world

to be used as reference copies against which other memories could be compared.

No longer any discussion as to whether or not

something someone was reciting

was truly the original Message

or not.

And that text recorded then is the same as we have today,

with no difference

apart from a greater subtlety in the calligraphy in which it is written.

Similarly, as time passed,

the living Sunnah

that could be observed in the way of life of the Messenger,

became spoken memories.

In the beginning, of course, it was forbidden

to write down the words of the Messenger

in case people confused them with the Qur'an itself,

and even when it did become the practise

still many Companions disapproved.

But with nothing more than

a few unwritten scraps of memory

to capture that whole way of life,

the example of the Messenger,

many people felt free to imagine,

to invent,

to tell children's stories,

or perhaps to vaguely remember

something that might support their arguments

or suit their purposes.

From well-meant piety to playful da'wa,

from slight self-service to the depths of hypocrisy,

like chinese whispers around the world of Islam,

memories of the Messenger grew to be

a vast sea of questionable ahadith.

But scholars still looked to the Messenger's example

to help them in their judgements,

and had to work out for themselves what could be trusted.

And the great scholars, Sunni and Shi'a

studied with each other

to learn from what the others knew,

and Malik ibn Anas,

who laid particular stress on the use of ahadith in forming judgements,

collected his own set of traditions that he considered trustworthy,

the Muwatta.

But by the time that 200 years had passed since the death of the Messenger

and the muslim world spanned more than 7,000 kilometres,

4,500 miles, from one end to the other,

it was estimated that there were well over a million suggested ahadith in circulation.

Al-Bukhari said that he personally considered more than 600,000 traditions

before reducing them to just over 7,000.

And the next 200 years

saw the development of hadith sciences

and several more collections of traditions considered genuine,

from both Sunni and Shi'a scholars.

And so, over the years, the living Sunnah of the Messenger

with all its constantly changing subtlety and complexity,

its personality, its lived in context,

the everyday life in which it was set,

became more and more distant,

just glimpses across history.

But at least we do have those few precious sentences

gathered and fixed in those collections,

drawn together by the scholars of the time

for legal reference and study.

But eventually, inevitably, the Sunnah of the Messenger,

the example that inspired such awe and affection in those around him,

was fixed,

reduced to books of quotations.

And as with the sources of the Law,

so with the Law itself.

With the muslim world covering such vast distances,

in the beginning local judgements,

far from the centre of power,

showed great breadth of interpretation

within the principles of Shari'ah,

and the ethics of disagreement,

known amongst muslim lawyers, as ikhtilaf

meant those judgements could not be overturned.

But eventually the law as it was,

the Shariah,

the main road,

the road leading to the watering place,

came to be seen as something fixed,

something written down in libraries,

needing experts to search and understand.

And if you are wanting to question the experts,

perhaps it's time you gained some expertise yourself,

as that way you are more likely to ask

the right questions.

Anyway,

if you are going to go searching through Shari'ah

you'd better get to know some of the language.

How can we extend the Shari'ah into new areas of experience?

How can we prevent self-serving views from becoming law?

How do we deal with texts that affect each other?