God’s Speech

Muslims have had many furious debates about the nature of God’s Speech and its relation to the Quran, including a famous one about whether the Quran is the created or uncreated Speech of God.

IA Abu al-Layth al-Samarqandi, Tafslr al-Samarqandl (Beirut: Dar al-kutub al-'ilmiyya, 1993), 3:280; see also Abu MansUr al-Maturidi, Sharh al-Fiqh al-akbar (Beirut: al-Maktaba al-'asriyya, 1983), 10 -11.

disconnected from the individual words and sounds that are being recited. The uncreated Speech of God, they said, is found in the act of recitation, but not in the words that comprise recitation. The actual words that are recited are them­selves based on the Arabic language, and languages are created. So, once the Quran is recited and an audience hears it in the Arabic language, it is no longer the uncreated Speech of God.^{[34] [35] [36] [37]}

Thus, when the Quran is read by eyes and heard by ears it is only an earthly reflection of that uncreated Speech of Godd⁶ When humans try to understand the uncreated Speech of God through their human language, they necessarily have to use their limited human brains to decipher that Speech. Once they do so, they immediately lose access to the uncreated Speech of God. Since the human mind cannot possibly fathom the uncreated Speech of God, which is itself be­yond time and space, the human mind can never fathom the true content of rev­elation.

What this means is that any interpretation of the Quran is a fallible, human attempt to approximate meaning, and almost certainly fails to reflect God’s exact message. When one interprets the Quran to derive law, then, one is never certain of having arrived upon the Divine Truth (haqq). Of course, there are things that have an extremely high degree of certainty, like that God commands humans to believe in monotheism, to worship God, and to abstain from behavior like lying and stealing. Those commands and prohibitions are such highly probable reflec­tions of God’s Will that they do not admit reasonable doubt. But most everything else is open to interpretation and debated⁷ Hanafis therefore felt comfortable reading the text in multiple ways, as in the above example of Quran 51:56. Since no one can definitively say which interpretation corresponds to the Divine Truth, different and competing interpretations can only ever claim relative au­thority.

This view of the Quran as open to interpretation was captured in the Hanaf i distinction between tafsιr, by which Hanafis meant something close to ‘transla­tion’, and ta’wil, by which they meant ‘speculative interpretation’. Early Hanafis were uncomfortable with tafsir,^υi since translation implies that one knows the meaning of an original text so well that one can translate it into another lan­guage, but were quite comfortable with ta’wil, in which explanations of the Quran are recognised as fallible interpretations.

Early Hanafis embraced the radical indeterminacy of Quranic laws, and in­deed embraced indeterminacy as a hallmark of their legal school. Their approach to law is characterised by disagreement, multiple opinions, and conflicting inter­pretations. The school may be named after the scholar Abu Hanifa, but his views comprise only one part of the Hanafi legacy. The school is actually grounded in the thought of five patriarchs, of whom Abu Hanifa was one, and the patriarchs regularly debated and disagreed with one another about Islamic laws.

The early Hanafi approach to both God’s Rationality and God’s Speech leaves us wondering about the point of Islamic law. If there are multiple laws, all of which might have value and none of which can be independently verified, then how does one know which laws lead to justice? If one can never know which laws are correct, then how can law determine correct behavior? If laws cannot definitively point toward justice and morality, then what is the point of religious law?

One might answer that religious laws are not meant to lead to justice in this world, but in the next. Perhaps following laws, however flawed they might be, is primarily about achieving salvation. In that case, justice in this life is irrelevant, and perhaps impossible. But by claiming to have tried to determine and follow the correct law, believers can argue that they deserve to be saved from the con­sequences of their erroneous actions on the Day of Judgment. Early Hanafis, however, rejected the idea that following Islamic law leads to salvation in the hereafter. They maintained a doctrine that kept people’s actions separate from their beliefs, effectively ensuring that religious laws would have neither meta­physical nor salvific content. Appreciating why and how they thought this will help us better understand both their distinctive answers to the questions posed in the previous paragraph and their unique approach to Islamic legal jus­tice.