19 Introduction

Peter Clarke

Since its introduction in the Arabian peninsula in the early years of the seventh century ce Islam has come to embrace over one-sixth of the world’s population and stretches almost continuously over wide and diverse areas from, for example, Mauretania in the west to China in the east.

One of the most striking aspects of this religion as it has travelled and developed beyond its original homeland is, to use the biological concept of homogenesis, the likeness of the offspring to the parent body, and this sameness is in the words of one scholar ‘all the more puzzling in the theoretical absence of a Church, and hence of a Central authority on Faith and Morals’, for ‘There is no obvious agency which could have enforced this homogeneity.’¹ While this is so, the fact that Islam is a religion of a book, the Qur’an, dictated to the Prophet Muhammad by the Angel Gabriel and which is for Muslims in a most literal sense the word of God, and that it has in Mecca a focal point to which believers throughout the Muslim community are linked by prayer and the hadj or pilgrimage, make for a considerable degree of unity and cohesion.

However, while the idealist portrait of this faith is inclined to leave things there, stating that Islam is one and the same thing wherever it is found, it is also clear, as contributions to this section of the volume show, that the reality is somewhat different. Islam is not some kind of seamless, monochromatic garment-like entity without either variation or division, nor did the Prophet Muhammad ever imagine it would be so.

Although the coverage provided here is by no means comprehensive, several of the case studies enable the reader to glimpse something of the variety and difference as well as the homogeneity in Islam as found in, among other places, North Africa, Iran, the Indian sub-continent, Turkey, China, Indonesia, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, western and eastern Europe, and the United States. Adaptation or assimilation, how­ever, has often given rise to dispute between the ulema, religious experts who may be regarded as the custodians of Muslim values, and those who have ‘mixed’ Islamic practice with local custom, although not all local belief and practice is considered as false and therefore to be rejected. However, very often in the history of Islam what some authors refer to as the smaller jihad or jihad of the sword, as distinct fromgreater jihad which denotes a more spiritual activity like fighting one’s evil inclinations or even studying thefiqh, Islamic jurisprudence, has been waged in response to such syncretism, the stated purpose being to purify Islam.

The idea of‘pure’ Islam from a Muslim perspective consists essentially in submission in faith to God’s will revealed to his prophets and finalised in the series of revelations in Mecca and Medina to the last of the prophets, the Prophet Muhammad (c. 570-632 ce). These revela­tions were collected together soon after Muhammad’s death to form the holy book or scripture of Islam, the Qur’an.

While from very early times Sufism has been part of the Islamic tradition, its position within that tradition has not always been secure. The way in which the quest for a mystical experience of oneness with God has been pursued, and the technical terms such as fana or annihilation which are used to interpret that experience, often wrongly compared to the Buddhist notion of Nirvana, has led on occasion to bitterness and conflict between mystic and scholar, the latter concerned to preserve the doctrine of Tawhid, or the oneness of God, the basis as we have just seen of all the articles of belief of Islam. It was for this reason that al-Husein ibn Mansur al-Hallaj, the Iranian mystic, was executed in 922 ce. There was also, and to an extent still is, the fear amongst the ulema that inherent in Sufism was the tendency to emphasise the importance of the interior or inward path of faith in and submission to God at the expense of outward observance of the Shari'a or sacred law of Islam discussed below.

Of course, not all Sufis have been given to making extravagant claims or equivocal pronouncements, and through the teaching, writing and influence of the Iranian mystic al-Ghazzali (1058-1 111 ce) Sufism and ‘orthodoxy’ were in theory reconciled. This great and highly controver­sial thinker, who became an absolute sceptic to the possibility of any certain knowledge, religious or otherwise, and who eventually appears to have turned whole-heartedly to Sufism, was to argue that it was only through marifa or personal experience that the truth of prophetic revelation could be established and that while their doctrines were correct the systems of the speculative theologians possessed no intellectual certainty.

In addition to the confession of faith already men­tioned, there are four other obligations which make what are known as ‘the Pillars of the Faith’. There is the performance, with sincere and right inten­tion, niya, ofsalat or the five daily prayers, the payment ofzakat, a percentage of annual revenue handed over to the local authorities for the relief of the poor and needy and similar works of charity, sawm or fasting during the month of Ramadan, and the hadj or pilgrimage, providing one has the finances and the health, to the holy mosque and shrine in Mecca during the month of pilgrim­age, Dhul-Hijja. There is also the wider question, of which these obligations form part, of the observance of Shari'a or sacred law which is regarded as mandatory, immutable and universal and, therefore, binding not only on Muslims but on all mankind. The Shari'a has been described as ‘the constitu­tion of the Muslim community, the pattern of its communal order’ and is, Muslims believe, contained in substance in the Qur’an.² It, therefore, requires no supplementing but only clarification and the elaboration of its texts where method, application and interpretation are concerned, and for this resort is made to authentic Tradition, hadith, handed down from the ‘Companions of the Prophet’, otherwise first-generation Muslims, and the Sunna, practice, of the Prophet which supersede any other practice or any form of speculation. There are, however, differences between Sunni Mus­lims, followers of the practice of the Community or umma at large, and the Shi*a Muslims, followers of Ali, son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad, regarding the conditions required for authenticity of Tradition.

In its ‘pure’ form then, Islam is, in the words of Gellner, ‘the blueprint of a social order. It holds that a set of rules exists, eternal, divinely ordained, and independent of the will of men, which defines the proper ordering of society... and thus there is in principle no call or justification for an internal separation of society into two parts, of which one would be closer to the deity than the other.’⁴ There is in theory no clergy, no church structure and no religious virtuosi and for this reason no orthodoxy in the Christian sense, the nearest equivalent being the Sunna, the way of life and practice of the Prophet Muhammad, his companions and immediate succes­sors known as the four rightly guided caliphs.

It can be noted here with reference to the establish­ment of what is authentic and what is not in matters relating to belief and practice, that there is not to be found among Muslim scholars the same ‘critical’ approach to Muslim scripture and early Muslim history as exists among theologians and historians of the Old and New Testaments and early Christianity. Moreover, there is comparatively little in the way of documents for the first five hundred years and more of the history of Islam, although inscriptions and coins to some extent fill this gap. Meanwhile, some Western students of Islam have applied the approach and methods used in examining any historical document or oral tradition to the Qur’an and early biographies of the Prophet Muhammad. As to the Qur’an, attempts have been made to elucidate further, among other things, its structure, on the grounds that the traditional revision into Meccan and Medinan suras, chapters, can no longer be accepted on historical grounds. Moreover, it has been pointed out that the Qur’an contains material about trade, for example, that is taken to be histori­cal fact but which is not easily supported by external evidence.

However, with regard to Muhammad there is no doubt about his existence; both internal and external sources confirm that he was a historical figure, but the latter, if they are right, suggest that Muslim tradition is not entirely accurate on a number of important aspects of his career. These and related matters are taken up in this section; but it is worth pointing out here that the student of Islamic history enters a field where a great deal of basic research still has to be done and that some of those who take this more ‘critical’ approach to Muslim sources are as persuaded as the more conservative historians of the great innovations and achievements of Muhammad, perhaps the most notable being his revival ‘of the radically monotheistic polity enshrined in the story of Moses’.⁵

While Muhammad accomplished this in Arabia, he is recognised today as the last of the prophets in a great many different cultural settings. The contributions to this section, written from a variety of per­spectives including that of the historian, political scientist, sociologist and linguist, show how the message he proclaimed has been widely accepted in its fundamentals, and in other respects developed, extended and if not changed then greatly modified by peoples and generations living at times and in societies and cultures very far distant from his own.

Notes

1. E. Gellner, Muslim Society (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983), p. 99.

2. H. A.R. Gibb, ‘Islam’ in R.C. Zaehner (ed.), The Concise Encyclopaedia of Living Faiths (Hutchinson, London, 1977), p. 171.

3.See for example O. Wright, ‘Science’ in J. Schacht and C.E. Bosworth (eds.), The Legacy of Islam, 2nd edn (The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1974), pp. 425-89.

4. Gellner, Muslim Society, p. 1.

5. Μ. Cook, Muhammad (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983), p. 86.