20 Early Islam

Julian Baldick

The subject of early Islam is both extremely impor­tant and extremely fascinating. It is important because hundreds of millions of Muslims believe, or are supposed to believe, that every detail of their lives should be determined in accordance with what was allegedly said or done in Arabia in the seventh century ce.

Let us look, first of all, at the background to the rise of Islam, at the Near and Middle East in the 620s and 630s, when the activities of a preacher, called Muhammad, and his Arab followers first enter history. The world, as it concerns us here, was divided between two superpowers: in the West, the later Roman (or early Byzantine) Empire, and in the East the Persian (or Iranian) Empire.

The Roman Empire had for long possessed Egypt, Syria, Palestine and what is now Turkey. Its main religion was Christianity. In the previous hundred years it had been badly weakened: by over-expansion in the western Mediterranean, by overtaxation in the eastern Mediterranean, by plague, by war, by autocracy, by internal struggle and, most significantly, by religious persecution. This last had been aimed at the vigorous and independent Christian traditions of Egypt and Syria, often branded as ‘hereti­cal’, as well as at the Jewish and Samaritan minorities in Palestine. The Roman Empire’s rich eastern provinces were ripe for revolt from within or easy conquest from without, ripe for a new solution of sectarian differences and quarrels between religious communities.

The Persian Empire had for long consisted mainly of Iran and Iraq. Its main religion was Mazdaism (‘Zoroastrianism’), a faith weakened by the persecuting, archaic, inward-looking and class-bound character which it had assumed by that time.

In the first three decades of the seventh century dramatic events took place on a large scale, as the forces of the Persian Empire swept into the eastern provinces of its Roman adversary, only to suffer defeat and invasion in their own turn. As the holy places of the Near East changed hands literature was composed which spoke of messianic hopes and even more cataclysmic occurrences.

In sum, then, we can say that conditions had never been so propitious for the advent of a new religion, or at least a religion that has been seen as new, and never so propitious for a military explosion and expansion often viewed as little short of miraculous. The impetus was to come from another quarter: the Arabian peninsula.

Very little is known of the Arabs before Islam. The literary materials are late and open to the charge that they represent Islamic preoccupations, attempts, for doctrinal purposes, to create a certain image of the society in which Islam appeared. The northern Arabs, the ‘Saracens’, were wanderers of the desert, ‘Bedouin’, often used by the superpowers for military purposes. In the south lay the ancient sedentary civilisation of the ‘happy’ Arabs, conquered for Iran in the sixth century ce. In Arabia there were some Christians and Jews, some partly Christianised and Judaicised Arabs, and, for the most part, worshippers of many indigenous Arabian gods.

An older generation of Western scholars still con­tinues to concentrate on the specifically Arabian evidence as important for the study of the origins of Islam. They stress the value of examining present-day Arabian tribes, and the archaeological materials, notably in southern Arabia.

It is with this in mind that we must now consider the traditional version, given by the Muslims themselves, of the rise of Islam. Of this historical tradition it must be said from the outset that it is found in late works, not considered reliable by some contemporary Islamicists. For example, the earliest and most-used biography of Muhammad dates from the mid-eighth century, and is preserved in a recension of the early ninth.

According to this traditional account Muhammad would have been bom around 570 in the city of Mecca, in central western Arabia. An orphan, he would have engaged in trade, received revelations, acquired followers, been persecuted, fled to Medina, some two hundred miles to the north, formed an alliance of Arabs and Jews there, engaged in local warfare, conquered Mecca and died in 632 in Medina. In the meantime, in addition to the revelations received, and quickly collected as the Qur’an (Recitation), he uttered an enormous number of important sayings, and gave an enormous number of examples of conduct, while approving others by his silence. These sayings and examples were remembered by his Companions and transmitted by them in oral form to succeeding generations (as ‘Tradi­tions’). Taken together with the Qur’an, they formed the basis of Islam: a complete guide to all human activity. In sum, the Prophet Muhammad would, with the help of divine intervention, have instituted a religion in a remarkably short period of time.

After this, the Islamic historical tradition continues to relate, the Muslim community was ruled by a ‘caliph’ (deputy), called Abu Bakr, from 632 to 634. It would have been his successor, Umar (634—44), who began the conquest of Palestine, which was quickly accompanied by that of Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Iran.

At this point we might remark, first of all, that since the history books were written under the Abbasid dynasty it is not surprising that their predecessors should receive a rather hostile treatment. Then we have to consider the whole nature of the Islamic historical tradition in the same way. It is late, biased and, in its portrayal of early religious develop­ments, difficult to accept for anyone experienced in the comparison of historical and literary materials. That it should have been largely accepted for so long by orientialists is an extreme example of the results of over­specialisation in universities after the First World War.

The standard Muslim biography of Muhammad, composed well over a hundred years after his death, and edited in the ninth century, is the earliest extended narrative that we possess. Today no serious student of early Christianity would imagine that its beginnings could be reconstructed, or the life ofjesus convincingly retold, if so lengthy an interval existed between our sources and the period to which they refer. Although lives of other alleged founders of religions, such as the Buddha and Zarathushtra, still continue to appear, based on tardy and legendary materials of the same kind, the historian can only smile. As for ‘modern’ portraits of Muhammad, in which Marxist sociological surveys rest on the flimsiest tatters of historical ‘fact’, and Freudian psychoanalysis is brought to bear on a personality who remains a shadow, the less said the better. Ironically, such productions tend to come not from those who speak at the greatest length of

‘methodology’.

Thus the Sira, or standard biography of Muham­mad, composed by one Ibn Ishaq in the middle of the eighth century, produces, as one might imagine, a justification of the new, Abbasid dynasty and a reflection of Jewish and Christian traditional lore about what a prophet should be like. It represents the results of long processes of sectarian and regional rivalries. Not only does it project back into the life of Muhammad developments that must have taken much longer than a single life-span; it also projects back into Arabia a vast array of elements that belong to Pales­tine, Syria and Iraq.

It is at this point that we must consider sources outside the Islamic historical tradition. Not much can be gleaned from the surviving inscriptions, papyri, coins and archaeological evidence relating to early Islam. That leaves us with Christian and Jewish sources, in practice almost entirely the former. These sources are often much earlier than the Islamic ones, and, when they are not so old, can be seen as preserving very old traditions, owing to the fossilising character of the Christian minorities of the Near and Middle East. Now these materials have recently been used, with very great talent, to offer a speculative reconstruction of the course taken by Muhammad and the Arabs after him. Here it must be said that such attempts are in themselves admirable and very long overdue. For them to be con­ducted more successfully, however, it is necessary first of all to examine the Christian writings more closely, in order to determine as accurately as possible not only when they were written, but from what sectarian positions in relation to others, and in order to judge how the various statements, made from differing perspectives, stand with reference to one another.

Another view would be that these Christian sources for the life of Muhammad and the activities of his successors are, like the Muslim ones, so fragmentary, biased and ill-informed that no reconstruction of the events is possible, and we should confine ourselves to purely literary analyses of both these and the Islamic materials: we should study only the games which authors play, and texts play unbeknownst to them, in the pursuit of attacks upon religious adversaries.

In the perspectives of the Christian sources the origins of Islam appear in a very different light. They seem to be situated on a Palestine-north Arabia axis, instead of a Mecca—Medina one in central west Arabia. Here corroboration is afforded by the geographical indications of the Qur’an itself and the orientation of the earliest mosques. As for the alliance with the Jews, it seems to have lasted for some time after Muhammad’s death, and not to have been dissolved in his lifetime, as the Islamic tradition claims. The orientation of worship towards Mecca, ascribed by the Muslim sources to the Prophet himself, would appear to be much later. As for the death of Muhammad, placed by Islamic historians in 632 in Medina, there is much evidence to suggest that he was alive and leading the conquest of Palestine in 634.

In a way, there is a common thread to the standard Muslim version of Muhammad’s life on the one hand and what has been reconstructed of the rise of Islam on the basis of the Christian sources on the other. In both, there is an initial preaching on Muhammad’s part; then there is an alliance with the Jews; then there is a break with the Jews, followed by an orientation of worship towards Mecca. We can suspect what anyone might naturally have suspected: a compression of events into one man’s career as they are projected backwards into the past. From this we can now proceed to a consideration of the Qur’an.

Islamic tradition gives different and contradictory accounts about how the Qur’an was put together. They unite in agreeing that this was done very early on, at the latest within a quarter-century of Muhammad’s death. This the modern specialist may doubt. The external indications, as we have seen, point to a prolonged period of development for the germination of the new creed. The internal evidence of the Qur’an is one of the most marked confusion. Widely disparate teachings, at considerable variance with one another, again point to a long period of development. As for the chronology furnished by Muslim tradition, it seems largely to answer the demands of moral edification and the lawyers’ doctrine that some verses were ‘abrogated’ by others. It goes along with the biography discussed above. As for the practice of assigning some parts of the Qur’an to a Meccan period, and others to a Medinan one, often on the basis that poetic, ‘inspired’ passages must be early and Meccan, and that prosaic legal ones must be late and Medinan, it must be said that some contemporary scholars would find this procedure somewhat arbitrary.

The field of Qur’anic studies, until recently virtually untouched by the methods applied by modern biblical criticism, is now a very open one, in which the most widely divergent interpretations can easily be offered. In form the Qur’an is extremely disjointed. It switches rapidly from one subject to another. It is repetitive, often telling the same story in variant versions and in content markedly multivoiced. Dominated by the praise of God, it gives biblical stories, attacks on opponents, references to contemporary events and legal prescriptions, all very much mixed together. It does not tell us much about Muhammad, unless one combines it with the traditional biography and chronology already discussed.

The Qur’an is immensely important for Muslims, but primarily as what it is held to be, namely the speech of God, rather than for what it says and in its immediate presence to the believer, memorised in his heart. But its actual words do not appear, in themselves, to have had a great influence on the early growth of Islamic beliefs and institutions. Muslim theologians, like Jewish and Christian ones, seem to have constructed their doctrines largely independently of scripture, doing so often in response to Christian theology, as both adversary and model. Some Muslim lawyers have bypassed the Qur’an in the founding of Islamic jurisprudence, which rests mainly on Jewish elements in the form of‘Traditions’. Muslim mystics have preserved Eastern Christian spirituality without overt assistance from the Qur’an, which on the surface at least gave them little encouragement. All these classes of thinkers refer constantly to the Qur’an: none of them owe much of their historical genesis to it. Indeed, recent research indicates that in the eighth century ce the Qur’an and the Traditions were considered to be on the same level, equal in authority. In some of these Traditions God speaks in the first person: divine speech is not restricted to the Qur’an alone.

Proceeding now to what has been attributed to Muhammad’s successors, we find that here again the sources are determined by literary and doctrinal considerations. As for the First Civil War of656-61, the sectarian interpretations and accounts of the ensuing period preclude any confident reconstruction. It was desperately important for later Muslims to decide which side one should have supported, that of Ali on the one hand or that of the Umayyads on the other, or what further alternative or com­promise would have been correct. The various sects of Islam largely defined themselves by their retrospective positions in this complicated tale of inter­necine disarray, as they applauded the noble stands attributed to their pre­decessors. Our present hopes of disentangling the consequent reworking of ‘history’ are slim.

It is only later in the seventh century ce that the proto-Muslims seem to begin to produce the actual framework of an inde­pendent Islam. Muslim coinage, Muslim inscriptions and Muslim architec­ture, along with the reconstruction of the beginnings of Islamic theology and Tradition-collecting, all point to the 690s and 700s as the period in which the emergent faith finally blossomed. It is at this time too that real historical events come into focus. But it is not until late Umayyad times that detailed reconstruction of the religious developments becomes at all possible (and some would doubt that) and even after the Abbasid take-over in 750 the sources continue to blind the observer with mirror-like reduplications of earlier narratives.

At this point we must turn our attention to the rise of the Muslim Traditions and the closely allied field of Islamic law. The word hadith, usually rendered in English as ‘Tradition’, means a report of some­thing said, done or tacitly accepted by a leading figure of early Islam. Eventually it was to mean, for most Muslims, a report about Muhammad, or, for the minority Shi'ite sect characterised by its extreme devotion to his family, a report about one of the early ‘leaders’ (imams) therein. Now main-line Islam accepts the authenticity of a large number of canonically established Traditions about Muhammad. Upon these Islamic law, doctrine and practice are largely based. Western scholars, however, have challenged the authenticity of these Traditions. They have argued that the content reflects the social, economic, political and doctrinal history of the first three centuries of Islam. They have also argued that originally Traditions were reports about persons other than Muhammad, and that these reports were then transformed into ones about the Prophet himself. They have attacked the ‘pedigrees’ which precede the Traditions as guarantees of authenticity. In these A says that he has heard from B, who heard from C, and so on, that Muhammad said or did this or that.

Now it is obviously easy to forge a pedigree, just as it is easy to forge a Tradition. It is also easy to extend a pedigree backwards a bit to reach Muhammad. The Muslim exponents of the discipline in which the Traditions are studied concentrate on the pedigrees. They try to deter­mine whether B and C could have met, and whether they were reliable transmitters. These Muslim scholars have accepted that forgery, backward extension and other ‘improvements’ of pedigrees were practised on a large scale. None the less, they have maintained that, especially given the apparent confirmation of authenticity by multiple pedigrees for some Traditions, a reasonably extensive bed-rock of sound materials remains.

Recent study in the West has pointed to the begin­ning of the eighth century ce as the period in which the majority of the most ancient Traditions originated, and to Iraq as the region of their first major expansion. Thus it was in Iraq that the greatest effort was made in developing Islam in the eighth century, and it seems reasonable to connect this, as far as law is concerned, with the important Jewish minority there, which showed considerable vigour (unlike thejews of Palestine, who were largely cowed by persecution). From this comes the Jewish character of many of the Muslim Traditions which relate to jurisprudence. Traditions of a mystical character, on the other hand, seem to reflect the work of the Christians of Iraq, and notably the Nestorians, who were close to and on good terms with the Muslims, and the authors of a rich literature of spirituality. As for the men mentioned in the pedigrees, the large number of people alleged to have had the same unusual name, coupled with the same father’s name, and studying with the same master is such as to raise considerable doubt. As for what was eventually to become main-line Muslim dogma, namely, that all of the Prophet’s Companions were truthful in transmitting Traditions, this is not directly contradicted by recent Western research, in which it does not appear that they were transmitting at all. Here again, one must regret the naive and literalistic acceptance of materials by previous Western writers, who failed to recognise the complicated interplay of the factors involved.

When we turn to the rise of Islamic law, we may first of all remark that this has usually been considered an extremely tedious subject. It is indeed true that the books about this field are distinctly dry. But Muslim jurisprudence could be studied in a lively manner, and deserves to be, since it includes not just what is usually understood as ‘law’, but also politics and ethics. The Iranian Revolution of 1978-9, dominated by the figure of a jurist, the Ayatollah Khomeini, amply demonstrates Islamic law’s impor­tance. Law has always been the main discipline within Islam, however much it has been despised by those who saw themselves as the mystical elite.

As regards the early history of Islamic law, we are largely dependent upon the reconstruction put forward by the late Joseph Schacht, whose work is also fundamental to the study of the Traditions. According to him law would appear to have been based originally upon local, provincial custom, and upon a judge’s appeal to his own common sense. Later on it is principally in Iraq that the development of jurisprudence, in a specifically Islamic way, takes place, in the course of the eighth century ce. In this development the Traditions are brought in, and eventually it is decided that only Traditions going back to Muhammad himself have authority, along with the Qur’an. By the middle of the ninth century the ancient provincial ‘schools of law’ had been transformed into new, Islamic schools of law, consisting of the followers of individual masters, not regions. In the ninth century the old theory of‘consensus’, according to which the local, regional agreement of legal experts was considered binding in a given question, was renewed in the same way, as the consensus of each new school of law. These schools were to differ in their theories of how ‘personal discretion’ was to be used alongside the Qur’an, the Traditions and consensus: whether one should use ‘analogy’, ‘personal preference’, or ‘having regard for the public interest’, or avoid using one’s own discretion at all. Eventually, as some schools of law died out, only four remained among the great majority of main-line (Sunni) Muslims, each recognising the perfect respectability of the others.

Now the localisation of early Islamic jurisprudence in Iraq, and the similarity of Islamic law to Jewish law, in their common universality, in their recognition of individual scholars as having authority and in a vast number of individual details, undoubtedly point to the Babylo­nian Jewish community of Iraq, with its rich independent culture, as the source. Indeed, it is a noteworthy example of self-criticism in Islam that Muslim lawyers are considered to have erred by being too like the Jews, while Muslim mystics are considered to have erred by being too like the Christians.

By the end of the ninth century ce it was felt that the main problems of Islamic jurisprudence had been answered. From now on, in mainstream (Sunni) Islam, it was considered that independent, personal discretion should be abandoned in favour of the decisions of the old masters. An unthinking and pedantic attitude prevailed, doubtless increased by the circumstance that Islamic law, in criminal matters at any rate, was usually found too liberal to be applied in practice. In the minority Sh‘ite sect, however, characterised by its extreme devotion to the family of Muhammad, the freedom to interpret and decide anew remained. The actual details of Shi'ite law, none the less, are extremely similar to those of the Sunni major­ity, in spite of the differences in theory. The important distinguishing factor in Sh'ite jurisprudence is not so much its emphasis on Muhammad’s family, constituting the source of law, as the independence in political action which it bestows upon the qualified jurist. Here the contemporary significance emerges when one considers the Iranian Revolution of 1978-9 and the ensuing exercise of power by prominent legal experts.

We must now turn to the rise of Muslim theology, and the early divisions into sects. Here too our sources are extremely obscure. The student must be warned that some of the Arabic materials on which European studies are based have been attacked as forgeries, and that the difficulties of authentication and chronology are enormous. In general it would seem that Islamic theology grew up largely in imitation of, and in hostile response to, Christian theology. The central debates, as to whether God determined human actions, whether God’s speech was created and whether God’s attributes were identical with his essence, had their roots in Christianity and followed Christian patterns. But theology was never to have in Islam the pre-eminence that it assumed in Christianity. The lawyers and the mystics, not the theologians, were to dominate the Muslim community.

As for the various sects or sub-sects presented by our sources, many of them are doubtless fictitious, invented in a sustained effort of personal literary creation. This is often the case with the multiple varieties attributed to Islam’s principal minority, the Shi‘a, literally the ‘Party’ of Muhammad’s family. Now this Party is not only distinguished by its venera­tion for, and loyalty to, Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter, and Ali, seen as her husband, along with their descendants; it is also noted for its belief in the infallibility of AH and other ‘leaders’ (imams), who, the Shi'ites consider, should be the rulers both spiritual and temporal of Islam.

Thus the Shi'a, the Party, bears a resemblance to the Roman Catholic Church, with its belief in papal infallibility. It is a sect of mediations, unlike the Sunni majority, which resembles Protestantism, plac­ing the individual believer alone and immediately before his Maker. The Shi'a also is characterised by, among other things, its sophisticated develop­ment of theory and its political aspects, notably its messianic appeal to an ideal of justice, and its hostility to the established authorities.

The Shi'a’s two most significant sub-sects are the ‘Twelvers’ and the Ismailis. The Twelvers are so called because they recog­nise twelve ‘leaders’ in succession to Muhammad. Of these the last is thought to have disappeared and to be waiting for the right moment to come back as an ideal ruler, the Mahdi or ‘divinely guided one’. The concept of such an ideal ruler exists in mainstream Islam as well, but in Twelver Shi'ism he assumes an overriding contemporary psychological, political and cosmic importance, present in the hearts of the faithful, guiding the political deci­sions of the leading jurists and holding the life of the universe together. The Twelvers are also largely concerned with the subject of martyrdom, and notably the killing of Ali’s son Husein. This event is commemorated in annual festivals, in which popular emotion is mobilised against the unjust temporal powers of this world.

As for the Ismailis, they are much less numerous, and indeed by their very nature constitute a severely restricted elite. Named after a figure in an early dynastic split, which cuts them off from the Twelvers, they recognise a continuing line of‘leaders’ up to the present day, the best-known claimant being the Aga Khan. They were celebrated in early Islam for their clandestine propaganda and jealously guarded esoteric lore, both preserved in a tightly knit hierarchical organisation. Their dramatic view of history as a series of cycles, their emphasis on the value of different civilisations and their boldness in political adventures made them an exciting and serious challenge to mainstream Islam.

Similarly adventurous, but outside Shi'ism and in contrast to it, were the Kharijites, literally the ‘Goers-out’, who would ‘go out’ of the Muslim community and start armed rebellions. The sources present them as extremely democratic, notably in their elections of leaders, who could be deposed for the most trivial of sins, owing to the sect’s marked puritanism. Not surprisingly, they ended up as a marginal force in outlying areas. Their discussions of who is and who is not a Muslim remain of prime importance, as this issue is debated today with burning vigour.

More prudent were the Murjiites, the ‘Suspension- ists’, who cautiously suspended judgement on difficult theological and politi­cal questions, leaving them to the ultimate decision of the Deity. This lack of confidence in human reason may represent a continuation of the Sceptical/ Empirical tradition of philosophy in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Little is known of this sect, and its apparent ineffectiveness was soon followed by its disappearance.

Equally doomed were the Qadarites, called after the term Qadar, which denotes the ‘decree’ of God. They, however, held that man could decree and decide his own acts, a position which seems to come from Christianity, and was rejected by mainstream Islam. Also maintaining the doctrine of man’s free will, but more important, were the Mutazilites, the ‘Withdrawers’, who did indeed cut themselves off from the rest of the Muslim community in their arrogant intellectual conceit. They borrowed the arguments and methods of Greek philosophy to attack main-line views which they saw as vulgar, such as the belief that the faithful will actually see God in the next world, and the opinion that the Qur’an, as God’s speech, is eternal and uncreated. Some European writers have seen them as ‘liberal’, enlightened rationalists. In reality they were bigoted persecutors who used the apparatus of the State to torture their opponents into recantation. They were to give way to a new school of theology, which brought about a compromise between them and their opponents.

This school was that of the Asharites, named after their founder, al-Ashari (d. 935). It adopted a series of half-way positions, in which God creates men’s actions but men acquire responsibility for them, the Qur’an is uncreated speech in one aspect but created in another, and so on. The believer has to accept these combinations ‘without asking how’. The Asharite school thus acquired a reputation of safe if not profound respect­ability. It must be borne in mind, however, that many Muslims were against the use of theology completely, and Muslim mystics were to hold it in low esteem.

It is indeed time for us to consider the principal movement of Islamic mysticism, Sufism. Recent research has emphasised the existence of mystical currents outside Sufism, notably in Sh'ism and Islamic philosophy, but old-fashioned writers continue to speak of the main move­ment as the sole manifestation of Muslim spirituality.

The Arabic word Sufi, meaning an adherent of the movement, is derived from the Arabic for wool, suf. This is because the early members wore wool, in the manner of Christian ascetics. Here we have the first of many indications that Sufism is mainly a continuation of Eastern Christian elements. Other explanations of the word can be rejected as philologically unsound.

It was in Syrian Christianity that the mortification of the flesh was carried to its greatest extremes—carrying heavy weights, living off roots and so on, without the intellectual and academic superiority of Iraq. Thus in Syrian Islam the beginnings of the spiritual life are naturally represented in our sources as marked by asceticism: voluntary poverty, ‘weeping’, vigils and fasting.

This world-denying tendency, accompanied by the fear of God, is indeed shown by the sources as dominating the beginnings of Sufism everywhere. But we must be aware of the legendary and fragmentary character of the materials, and the constructions erected upon them by early Western orientalists. The latter have, for example, tended to dismiss the Traditions most used by Sufis as ninth-century creations, and Sufism itself as coming into Islam after the latter had already been established as a severe religion without the prospect of love and intimate communion between God and man. Indeed, recent research has shown that there are no good grounds for believing that the Traditions used by the Sufis in the ninth century are any later in origin than the rest. But the student need not take as historical the claims that Muhammad himself started the movement, secretly initiating founders who then began ‘pedigrees’ of successors. These pedigrees are not to be taken as genuine for the earliest period. Nor need the student accept the view, often repeated, that Sufism grew up naturally out of a Qur’anic revelation to Muhammad and his own teachings.

It is rather in Iraq, under the shadow ofthe Nestorian Christian Church, and doubtless in the minds of converts to Islam who preserved their original culture, that we are to find the continuation of ideas. In Iraq, in the ninth century, we find historical Sufi individuals with texts to their credit, exposing the themes of repentance, poverty and the love of God. A rich anecdotal literature attests to early Sufi interest in Christian practices and institutions, and Sufi contacts with and conversions from Christianity.

It is against this background that we must consider also the possibility of Indian influences. Over the centuries there was undoubtedly considerable borrowing in the form of meditational techniques, but at the level of doctrine there does not appear to have been any significant effect. An exception is the case of the Iranian Abu Yazid (d. c. 874), whose unmistakably Indian utterances, such as ‘Glory be to me!’, and ‘I sloughed off my self as a snake sloughs off its skin: then I looked into my self and lo! I was He’, along with the rejection of this world, seen in the form of a tree, as a deceitful illusion, undoubtedly point to the teaching of an Indian master. This has been powerfully demonstrated by the late R.C. Zaehner. It is beyond the bounds of possibility that such an accumulation of Indian expressions could have occurred without a direct historical influence.

Zaehner errs, however, in imagining that Abu Yazid completely changed the course of development of Islamic mysticism, and brought it from being theistic, oriented towards God, into monism, the doctrine that there is only one Being in all existence. If one examines the works of the sophisticated Sufi leaders in Baghdad, it is clear that they were certainly interested in this somewhat eccentric provincial, but did not want what he had to offer. They continued on their own path, aim­ing at the restoration of a primordial union of the mystic with God, expressed in a pre-etemal covenant between God and man. Thus the Sufi’s aim was to become once more an idea in the mind of God, as one was before one’s temporal creation. This is achieved by ‘annihilation’, in which the mystic experiences the passing-away of his separate, earthly existence.

The dangers inherent in Islam’s uneasy blend of Christian spirituality and Judaic legalism were strikingly demonstrated in the execution of Sufism’s most famous martyr, Hallaj (d. 922). His name has always been associated with the unwise popular divulging of secret Sufi doctrine, and in particular a supposed claim of being identical with God, although Sufism in fact denies that it has any such teaching. Whatever really happened in his colourful career, and whatever his ideas may actually have been, the Muslims certainly believed that in his case there had been an alarming lurch towards alien belief, one that could not be allowed to happen again, since it threatened the delicate balance achieved in Islam through careful compromise.

Equally dangerous in the eyes of the Muslims was the menace posed by Greek philosophy. We must now consider the begin­nings of the Islamic philosophical tradition in its Hellenised background. For this tradition is really the continuation of a number of sciences, ranging from astronomy to logic, from ethics to medicine, from music to alchemy, inherited from the world of late antiquity.

Now it has been fashionable in the past, and it is still common among some writers, to view Islamic philosophy as a brief episode of transition, from ancient Greek philosophy on the one hand to medieval European thought on the other. This narrow perspective has naturally led to dull and uninspiring studies, in which the rich flowering of later Muslim thinking has been ignored. But in the present survey we are limited to the consideration of early Islam, and are therefore prevented from analysing the manifold achievement and profusion of Islamic thought.

The process of translating Greek philosophical litera­ture out of Syriac, the language of Christians under Muslim rule, into Arabic was naturally dominated by the Christians themselves, who were also the masters of philosophical teaching in the first centuries of Islam, and notably in the first half of the ninth century, when the Abbasid caliphs patronised a wide range ofinter-cultural activities. Not surprisingly, philosophy was seen as alien to and hostile to Islam. This was not without good cause. A variety of thinkers with bizarre, impious or sceptical ideas came into view, but one line dominated, that of Neoplatonism, defined in Islamic terms in the tenth century, and constituting the basis of most subsequent Islamic philosophy. In this God’s creation of the world was denied: the universe was rather deemed to ‘emanate’ from him in a process of overflowing. God’s intimate know­ledge of particular things was also denied: he was said to know things only in a ‘universal’ way. His future bodily resurrection of the dead, also a corner­stone of mainstream Muslim belief, was furthermore denied by the philosophers of the Islamic world.

Thus the philosophers would be denounced as non-Muslims, as unbelievers, by the theologians and jurists, who were supported by the violence of the populace. As they were to turn for protec­tion to the rulers of the day they were naturally to be identified with tyranny. But their ideas continued to be taken over, adapted and used by their enemies, notably the Sufis. A tiny and marginal minority, the philosophers none the less exerted enormous influence.

Our consideration of the patronage given to philosophers brings us briefly to review the progress of the Abbasid line of caliphs, who reigned from 750 onwards, making Baghdad their capital. After their grand period of splendour in the first half of the ninth century, in which they favoured both the translation of philosophical works and the Mutazilite school of theology, they declined as local, provincial rulers came to the fore, and also as the slave soldiers on whom they came to depend turned into their masters. From the tenth century, as Shi'ite dynasties temporarily took over in much of the Muslim world, the Abbasid caliphs continued as religious, rather than as temporal leaders.

With this short historical sketch behind us we can now examine the main lines of Muslim belief and practice, as they emerge from the early development, in the majority grouping, the Sunnis, so called because they concentrate on what they see as the ‘established custom’ (sunna) of Muhammad. We shall use the traditional headings of the ‘five pillars’ of Islam, although they do not really reflect the variety of Muslim doctrines and institutions.

First, there is the attestation of belief, that there is no god except God and Muhammad is his Messenger. In fact the Muslim has to believe much more, notably that there is no Trinity and that God has no Son; that Muhammad is the last of a line of prophets, which includes Jesus, accepted as the Christ but not as divine, and that there will be a bodily resurrection, heaven and hell.

Secondly, there is the ritual worship, five times a day, performed either where one happens to be or in a place set aside for worship, a mosque. The worship consists of a series of bodily movements, along with the recitation of given formulas. It gave the Muslims a discipline of the body that European Christians, outside the monastic orders, were not to find until modem times. It does not exhaust the category of‘prayer’, or indeed of religious exercises in general, which were much developed by the Sufis.

Thirdly, there is the alms-tax, the zakat. Recently Michael Cook has done well to point out the decisively overwhelming evidence for the Judaic character of this term, in which the acquiring of merit for oneself is indissoluble from the act of giving away a proportion of one’s wealth for the poor.

Fourthly, there is the fasting during daylight in the month of Ramadan. This has been noted as in fact much more important than the ritual worship, since in traditional Muslim societies in which the latter has been largely neglected the fast, at least in public, has been observed by all.

Fifthly and finally, there is the pilgrimage to Mecca. This is rather less important for the ordinary Muslim, since only a small minority of Muslims have in practice been able to perform it. Thus, although it demands the suppression of social differences and class distinctions during its actual performance, it serves to reinforce such barriers through the added prestige which it confers on those wealthy enough to afford its accomplishment.

Sometimes added to these five is the duty of holy war, a perpetual obligation incumbent on the Muslim community as a whole. However, it is important to avoid the popular myth that conversion to Islam was universally imposed and achieved at the point of the sword. In practice it appears to have been brought about largely through taxation, which discriminated in favour of the Muslims. It grew doubtless also through dissatisfaction with existing creeds.

Such, then, are some of the main aspects, divisions and movements of Islam as it emerged up to the mid-tenth century. This early period is usually called the ‘formative’ one, wrongly, since an early period of germination is by no means necessarily more ‘formative’ than a later one of structuring, systematisation and definitive codification. Thus it is only later that we encounter in Islam the important institution of the college, the madrasah, which was everywhere to dominate legal life. It is only later that we find the appearance of organised brotherhoods in Sufism, operating as political forces, and above all the extreme veneration accorded to leading Sufis, alive or dead. It is this last feature which casts its shadow over the succeeding centuries, and which, from the thirteenth century onwards, constitutes a kind of‘Counter-Reformation’ in Islam. For the veneration of these figures to some extent resembles that of the saints in Catholicism.

This leads us to consider the parallel often drawn between the Protestant Reformation and the rise of Islam. To be sure, the Sunni majority has much in common with Protestantism. Islam does not actually present itself as a new religion, but as the restoration of an old one, freed from the corruptions brought in by Jews and Christians. So it sees itself as the restored religion of Jesus, accepted as the Christ.

But along with the comparison with the Reforma­tion we can make another one, which at first sight may seem surprising: with the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. For Islam has no Church and no clergy (although Western writers often, and wrongly, so designate the Muslim jurists). It has no Trinity, no Incarnation, no Redemp­tion, no Original Sin. Thus it avoids certain main features of Christianity which the deists of the eighteenth century ridiculed. Perhaps we can see in early Islam the same attempt as that made in the Enlightenment, to produce a simple, lowest-common-denominator religion. Just as the commercial inter­ests of Europe were to demand a simplification of religious belief, so that sectarian squabbles over non-essentials would not impede the progress of trade, so too we may perhaps discern, in the activities of the proto-Muslims and their successors, a similar accommodation to mercantile imperatives. Early Christian and Muslim sources agree that Muhammad himself was a trader; the early Muslim literature is full of the vocabulary and preoccupa­tions of merchants. But here the field is full of traps and technical terms that defy comprehension: the analysis cannot, for the moment, be taken further.

Early Islam, then, is a complex mixture of varied elements, brought together over a long period of time. The mere cataloguing of these elements, however, and the identification of their provenance, indispensable though that is, cannot provide either an ‘explanation’ or an understanding of a religion. Nor, for that matter, can the delineation of a ‘structure’. What one must do is try to appreciate the nature and functioning of the various articulations by which contrary elements in Islam work together: thejewish and the Christian, the legal and the mystical, the monar­chical and the tribal, the urban and the nomadic. Therein lie the mysteries of Islam. The word Islam itself, alongside the usual translation of‘submission’, has been seen as having different original meanings, such as ‘entering into a state of peace’. It is doubtless in the ambiguous and ambivalent character of Islam, both as religion and as society and civilisation, that its capacity for radically new initiatives resides.

Further Reading

Arberry, Arthur John (tr.) The Koran Interpreted (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983)

Cook, Michael Muhammad (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1985)

Coulson, Noel J. A History of Islamic Law (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1978)

Smith, Margaret Studies in Early Mysticism in the Near and Middle East (London, 1930), reprinted as The Way of the Mystics (Sheldon Press, London, 1976)

Sourdel, Dominique Medieval Islam (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1983) Watt, William Montgomery Islamic Philosophy and Theology (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1979)

Zaehner, Robert Charles Hindu and Muslim Mysticism (Shocken, New York, 1970)