Laws

You know,

people disagree all the time.

It's part of human nature.

Our variety,

our difference,

is one of the signs of God

mentioned in the Qur'an.

But there are some things

that are more important than others to agree on,

such as 'What are we all here for?'.

Now when Muhammad first began to recite God's Message

it gave an answer to that question

that people disagreed with.

They didn't like it.

But still believers gathered around him,

and soon there were thousands of them

living in their own city,

Yathrib,

with a mosque where the Messenger prayed

and where disagreements about religion

could be brought for him to clarify.

And when people were sent to spread the Message to distant places,

to lead prayer and teach what they knew of the Qur'an and its meanings,

when asked to make judgements in the absence of the Messenger

they did their best to make decisions based on the Qur'an,

and their best understanding of

the way that the Messenger would have acted in any situation,

then asking for the Messenger's ruling

the next time that they met.

Then the Messenger died,

and everything changed.

From that time of disagreement over who would succeed him as leader

up to the present day,

muslims who disagreed with each other have had to learn

how to decide things for themselves.

And in matters of Islam,

those accepted as most knowledgeable

would always be asked to give legal opinions.

But with the Messenger gone

his Companions were so afraid of giving opinions concerning the Will of God

that they tried to avoid making legal rulings.

'Abd al-Rahman ibn Abi Layla said

that in the Mosque of the Messenger in Madinah

he knew 120 Companions,

and there was not one of them who if asked about a saying of the Messenger,

or to give a ruling on an issue,

would not wish that some other Companion would reply instead.

But rulings had to be made for the society to function,

because by the time of Muhammad's death

there were tens of thousands of muslims,

including many that lived far from Madinah,

and including many that up until two years previously

had been the Messenger's sworn enemies

for more than twenty years.

So people had disagreements,

and as we know, they soon became serious enough

to result in assassinations and civil war.

And strife is in the nature of humans

and needs to be restrained,

but warfare was still a familiar part of the culture

for people who had lived most of their lives in jahiliyya,

and concerns for who had leadership of the community,

who had the power to govern,

was soon settled by force

and taken out of any jurists hands.

But those with knowledge still did their best to answer questions

based on what they knew of God's Message,

and sometimes they came to different conclusions.

For instance,

in the Arabic language, some words and phrases can have more than one meaning,

sometimes different even to the point of being opposites,

so there can be disagreement over what something means.

Similarly, in looking to the Messenger's example,

the Companions couldn't all have been with him all the time,

so they did the best with what they knew

and tried to learn from one another.

But for those who knew the living Muhammad

there was no need to draw on collections of his sayings

because they had seen the example of his way of life first hand.

But the Companions also died,

and as muslim society developed and spread,

and the years passed from the time of the Messenger,

those who had to form legal judgements

needed to deal with all sorts of situations

that were never encountered or considered before,

which meant more disagreements.

So they had to find ways to include these new situations within the scope of the law,

and in finding ways of trying to expand the law into different areas

they worked with first principles drawn from the Qur'an

and the example of God's Messenger,

and looked for similarities of kind between situations.

But then

not everyone agreed on the different methods of analysis

and the legal approaches that were used,

so that meant more disagreements.

Yet despite all their disagreements, those best known for making judgements

gave each other the utmost respect,

travelling to learn from each other,

and even in disagreement never doubting the other's sincerity.

And as the Shari'ah was formalised,

so were the ethics of disagreement.

It was not considered acceptable

for a holder of one legal opinion

to condemn a scholar who held another.

It was not acceptable for scholars

to deny the possibility that they were wrong.

Abu Hanifah said

“Ours is no more than an opinion.

We do not oblige or coerce anyone into accepting it.

Whoever has a better judgement, let them advance it.”

But Abu Hanifah's statement is clearly based on the understanding

that others will inevitably have differing opinions and judgements,

as that is the nature of humankind.

It is understood

that others will study the foundations of Islamic knowledge

and consider the nature of muslim law,

and come to their own conclusions,

and that surely has to be the case today.

We know that in the society

into which the Messenger was born

there was nothing much in the way of law as we now think of it.

For a start, a society that thinks it's alright to bury new-born baby girls alive

obviously has some very different ideas about what is right and wrong.

This was a society which understood the world

in a way very different to the way that most of us see the world today.

It had its own view

of honour based on family reputation and power,

where survival was based on the strength to resist

marauding banditry,

and tribal and family feuds.

There were no law courts or police force,

or books of rules and regulations.

After all, hardly anybody could read or write.

The Qur'an changed all that.

Suddenly they were being told to do things

not by some fellow tribesman, but by their Creator.

Of course that idea seemed crazy at first,

but the power of the words of the Qur'an was irresistible,

and as people were drawn to belief,

they agreed to accept a new way of living

which unified the Arab tribes that accepted Islam

and eventually unified muslims around the globe.

But of course the Qur'an doesn't speak of itself as a book of law,

it calls itself a book of guidance,

and it contains very few verses that required specific acts from people,

and even those have been given widely different interpretations by muslim lawyers over the years.

But the Messenger took that guidance

and explained how it was to be implemented in the society in which he lived,

and the muslims around him put his rulings into practice.

And this new way of understanding what was right and what was wrong,

and what was best and what was worse,

may seem little more than the acceptance of much of what we consider normal today,

but at the time the change must have seemed

to be a huge transformation of their lives,

which for those of lesser faith must have seemed unwelcome

and where possible to be resisted.

The handful of people close to the Messenger

may have done their best to spread God's Message across the world,

but the people of the world took that Message and interpreted it

in the ways that they knew best,

the only ways they could,

using their own social and cultural understandings,

and often clearly in ways that suited themselves.

Yet no matter how far it might seem to us

that these interpretations diverge from our own

our own understanding of the meaning of God's Message

and the example of God's Messenger,

we must acknowledge that those of good faith considered their thoughts and actions

to be following the Will of God.

It is not necessary to agree with ideas

to accept the sincerity of those who hold them.

Nonetheless,

from the earliest times

there were always some

who were prepared to use the Qur'an in devious ways.

When Muawiyah rebelled against the Caliphate of Ali ibn Abi Talib,

his forces attached leaves of the Qur'an to their lances

at the battle of Siffin,

so that Ali's forces would refuse to fight them.

And often the attitude of various groups of muslims of that time

can seem quite incredible in retrospect.

Those who assassinated Ali ibn Abu Talib did so because they thought he was no longer muslim.

They looked at the second convert to Islam

only following the Messenger's wife Khadija,

the man who married the Messenger's daughter

and fought as the Messenger's champion,

and they considered themselves to be better muslims than he was.

?*?*?

But after the death of Ali, Muawiyah assumed the Caliphate,

and when he died

the Caliphate was passed on to his son Yazid,

so becoming the equivalent of an inherited kingship,

and the army of this new Caliph then proceeded

to slaughter the Messenger's grandson Hussein and his companions at Kerbala.

The commander of Yazid's army

took the decapitated head of the man

who as an infant had been held in the Messenger's arms while he was making his sala

and presented it to the new ruler,

a man claiming succession to the mantle of Muhammad

and authority over the muslim world,

a title which many would seem to be eager to inherit today,

with apparently even less claim to legitimacy.

Now at the time of Abu Hanifah

there were a myriad different interpretations of the various rulings that might be considered as muslim law,

and although he might disagree with them he did not condemn them as unislamic,

and that approach was followed by many of the greatest scholars in muslim history.

How else could it be in a Deen so requiring of mercy,

forgiveness, loving kindness and tolerance.

Yet all too often it has been the case

that later followers of those scholars could be

more fiercely partisan than rival supporters at an Old Firm match,

and in recent centuries there has arisen a new wave of support

for those who consider it within the bounds of Shari'ah

to kill anyone of a different opinion to themselves.

But now

when those clarion cries ring out for muslims to return to some kind of 'pure' Islam

based on the behaviour of those who lived closer in time to the Messenger

they are carried around the world digitally,

this new hate-filled rhetoric promoted with petro-dollars,

using religious justification for the ruthless slaughter of opponents.

Now more than ever

it would seem to be important to remember

that returning to the time of the companions

not only takes us closer to the Messenger

but also takes us closer to those

whose thinking and understanding of the world

were established in the time of jahiliyya,

a state which the Message was sent to reform and transform.

Of course,

no matter how rigid, corrupt or confining,

the state authorised forms of Islam might be,

there have always been sincere scholars with great minds

prepared to critically re-examine previous opinions,

great minds that shine like stars illuminating muslim history.

And now, in the present day,

the Shari'ah can be seen as a library of all those opinions,

1400 years of muslim scholars trying to define God's will for humankind.

So now it is essential for us to study and re-evaluate this knowledge.

How else can it be seen as relevant to the lives of muslims living in current times.

We need to study this knowledge,

but as with all knowledge we need to find a place to start,

and with most fields of knowledge that isn't easy.

Fortunately, as muslims we can be sure of our starting place,

that point of contact with our Creator

that is the Qur'an.

With the Qur'an as our foundation we can begin our journey of understanding,

and slowly refine our understandings of what is right and true,

by thinking deeply about our world as the Qur'an guides us to do,

always open to new information and opinions,

and constantly questioning our previous conclusions

and prior assumptions as to God's Will for us

where we are in the here and now.

The Shari'ah is by definition

our understanding and interpretation of God's Will for humankind,

and as such is the most important thing that a human can consider.

But if the Shari'ah is to embody the answers

to all our most important questions

it is crucial that we first learn how to ask the right questions,

as the answers we get,

as ever,

will depend on the questions that we ask.