Abdal Hakim Murad – Ahmad bin Hanbal Paradigms of Leadership
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
So we're once again embarked on, one of
these stories about,
men and women who represent in what turns
out to be a huge kaleidoscope
of different
ways,
represents the principle of leadership.
We began with the fairly obvious observation that
in Islam leadership is not something that we
seek, because the ego
tends to be attached to it. But
that nonetheless,
people may accept when it is thrust upon
them, if it is used for the benefit
of
mankind and the spreading of the deen.
What I want the individual that I want
to talk about, this evening,
is one of the great 4 Imams of,
the fiqh, according to the Ahlus Sunnah wal
Jama'ah.
This is Imam Ahmad Ben Hanbal,
Sheybani.
We need to preface our remarks with the
reflection
that even though nowadays it's second nature to
us as Muslims to assume that, yes, there
are 4 Imams,
Just as there are 4 Akhtar,
and
4 seems to be a particular
number,
4 of the great Rus'l
and so forth.
4 of the perfect women.
But,
nonetheless,
the emergence of Islamic law was a much
less methodical
principle and process that that tidy number might
suggest.
The great catastrophe in the history of the
Ummah
happens, of course,
in the year 632,
when the holy prophet dies
unexpectedly,
he returns to his lord.
Passes on to Al Rafiq al-'A'allah,
leaving the community in
consternation,
confusion.
Suddenly,
the principle
that had been amongst them,
resolving their disputes,
providing them with blessing and holiness,
speaking to them of the meaning of life
and what is before life and what is
after life, the oracle of everything
that they needed to know about this world
and the next,
suddenly was no longer there.
But continuity
was essential
if the individual Muslim souls
and the conveyance of the Dawah
and the great Amr, the
politics
of the early community,
its unity against
the polytheistic
tribal
jahili rivals, was to be preserved.
In a sense, all of the great olema
of Islam, all of the great leaders of
Islam,
are great insofar as they recognize
that what they are doing is
attempting to mitigate
that initial catastrophe.
The great disaster of Al Wafert and Nabawiyah,
the prophetic
death, which left some of the Sahaba
unable to speak, unable to walk. They were
suddenly
and calamitously
bereaved.
But the Ummah had to continue.
And the 4 Khalifa
were the ones who held the torch
and provided
the context
for the spiritual
continuity
and the Fiqh continuity
and the political stability and legitimacy of the
Ummah
to ride those storms, and they were very
grave storms,
in order that the message would not be
lost.
Subsequently, we find all of these great leaders,
men and women,
saints,
scholars,
Sufis,
intellectuals,
Quran experts,
Mujahideen,
princes,
Khalifa.
Their greatness in the sight of
Allah
is measured entirely in terms of their
success in reducing and mitigating
that catastrophe,
the prophetic demise.
And in conserving,
not just in the forms of people's lives,
but in the hearts
of the Ummah,
the principle of the Sonnah.
There was ever for you in Allah's messenger
an excellent example.
Not the ego based chest thumping of Abu
Lahab and Abu Jahal.
Nor the mindless pride
of the ignorant
imperial rulers of the time,
nor the wild vengeance based
code of the
Bedouin Arabs,
but something completely different and completely new.
Something in line with the fitra,
and hence something in which human beings found
peace.
So this life and this peace which he
brought to the Ummah
is what
the leader of the Ummah
always seeks to maintain.
Not doing it for his own self,
but for Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala.
And it is said that unlike
in
the modern academy,
where the purpose of the teacher,
if it's not just to serve the economy,
but is to serve the student,
that in the Islamic vision,
the function of a scholar is not to
serve the student,
but to serve truth.
And with the students,
the teacher preserves the knowledge
that has been conserved from the age of
prophecy.
That is what we serve, we serve truth.
And it is the privilege
of the bearers of truth
to be a link in that chain, and
safely
to take it through the storms of our
generation, and to pass it on unaltered,
unpolluted,
uncontaminated
to the next generation of believers.
But the scholar is not the servant of
the student. The scholar is the servant of
truth.
So these 4 Imams emerge in the context
of an Ummah that has demonstrated
extraordinary
intellectual vitality,
while being restrained
in various ways
by the need to remain loyal to the
prophetic vision, to the sunnah.
And the people of the sunnah are called
Ahlus Sunnah wal Jamara,
the people of the sunnah and of the
community.
And so a scholar is a scholar for
the sunnah, for the truth of the sunnah,
and for the community.
And in that sense, he is a public
figure.
The 4 Imams represent different ways in which
the Sahaba, Ridwanullahhim,
heard and understood and conveyed
the multifaceted
brilliance
of the prophetic excellence.
Of he who,
was described as Allah Khulukin Azim.
Verily, you are on a mighty trait of
character, the immensity of the prophetic
personality,
the immensity of the word which he carried,
the immense size and profundity and complexity
of the legacy of Hadith,
the extraordinary transformation which he brought to the
depths of people's hearts,
turning wild
men into saints.
All of that immensity
was understood differently by the Sahaba who stood
humbly around that great mountain
and tried to
record it as much as they could.
And so the 4 madhhabs represent not random
accumulations of early rulings, but rather different visions,
different fragrances, different bandwidths in the spectrum
cast by the prophetic refraction.
And, of course, even in the time of
the 4 imams, it was not clear that
there were to be 4 imams. There were
others.
Imam Alleth bin Saad,
Imam Sufyan,
Imam Tabari,
I guess, Imam al Auzari,
Abu Thawr, and others who had madhubs of
their own.
Continuing in this way, the fact that amongst
the Sahaba, radhilahu anhum, there were madhubs.
The imam that, it is our privilege to
speak about this evening,
is the imam
who was reached by
a particular
possibility amongst the Salaf
that was
intensely concerned
to maintain
the plainness
of the revelation
without the possibility of contamination
by human deduction.
And this reflects a necessary argument.
To what extent can the mind autonomously
determine truth, values, ethics, laws?
To what extent is it something that can
only be known safely
through revelation?
The Adha Sunnah,
by being the Adha Sunnah, conclude that the
source of knowledge is revelation.
But they take different views on the extent
to which reason
can interpret that revelation.
What if there are difficulties in understanding a
hadith?
What if there are difficulties in reconciling different
hadiths that seem to be saying different things?
What if there are difficulties involved
in squaring the reports of the Sahaba
with what seems to be in the Hadith?
What if there are linguistic arguments? There's plenty
of ways in which the mind is indispensable.
The scholar is not some kind of database.
The scholar is a complete human being with
a great processing capacity.
So, Al Imam Ahmad Radilahu Anhu
and the Hanabi'lah who followed him,
were amongst those scholars
who took the view that one needs to
be,
skeptical
about the capacity of reason to work things
out unaided,
and to try and follow the scripture
to the extent that one can by looking
at its outward
plain sense.
This turned out to be a minority interpretation
amongst the olema.
It's part of the greatness of the Ahlul
Sunnah wal Jama'ah,
that unlike other religions where there was an
insistence on following just one interpretation.
At one point in the Christian middle ages,
there were 3 different popes fighting each other.
But in Islam, the Imams
don't fight each other, but respect each other.
The Ikhtilaf
is regarded as something that is
due to the intensity of their sincerity in
following the sunnah according to their understanding of
the sunnah.
So,
al
Imam Ahmad
has not been followed by as many as
have followed Imam Malik, or Imam Al Shafa'i,
or Imam Abu Hanifa.
But nonetheless, because of the breadth and wisdom
of the Sonni tradition,
his position
has always been uncontroversially
regarded as a valid one,
and this is part of the greatness
of Islam.
Ahlul 'alm. Ahlul Tawseaha. The people of scholarship
are people who try to make things broad.
So there has always been this possibility in
Islam of following,
we wouldn't call it a fundamentalism, which is
a loaded term, but rather
a firm determination
to follow the plain sense of scripture,
irrespective
of what ratiocination
might determine.
Another thing that we find with the madhab
of Imam Ahmad, and it's related to this,
is that he took immense care
to maintain
not only the Athar,
the Akbar, the Hadiths and the sayings of
the early Muslims,
but also the spirit of those texts.
This is not a superficial interpretation of Islam.
And as we'll see as we progress through
the story of this great imam, he was,
of all of the 4 imams, the one
who is closest to the Sufis,
and the one who loved to keep their
company.
And also of the 4 imams, the one
of whom we have most
reports preserved of his,
awareness of the sanctity of anything connected with
the holy prophet, sallallahu
alaihi wasallam.
So when he was buried, he insisted that
the 3 hairs from the holy prophet's head,
which he had conserved
for their blessing,
would be buried with him, 1 on each
eye, 1 on his lips.
And his son
conserved many very moving accounts of his tremendous
reverence
for anything that was a relic of the
holy prophet,
So not some kind of superficial,
latter day fundamentalist with no idea of holiness,
but somebody who conserved the Hadith because he
knew the spiritual greatness of the one,
who the Hadith is describing.
We have plenty of information about his life.
We know that he was born in the
year 164,
that's pretty well known, and died in the
year 241.
We know that his mother was from the
town of Marl, which is in Central Asia,
and came to Baghdad when she was pregnant
with al Imam
Ahmad.
And on both sides of his family, he
is of Arab stock, unlike say, Imam Abu
Hanifa, who is of Persian
origin.
From,
the Sheibani tribe, a tribe well known for
their
martial virtues and for their high aspiration
for their Himma.
The home of the family was
somewhere around what's now
Basra, but probably a bit south of it.
So sometimes you heard Kuwaitis boasting of the
fact that Ahmed bin Hanbal grew up in
Kuwait,
which is not unlikely. Of course, the name
and the country
were not in existence at the time. But
that's the kind of
region,
Saidna Umar
had built, the great city of Basra.
The Sahaba and the Ali Khalifa were great
civilizers, builders of cities.
Kufa,
Fostat,
and and Basra,
Wasat, other places.
So sometimes, Imam Ahmed is called al Basri,
because that's the kind of area where he
grew up. And certainly, when he went to
Basra, he would always make sure that he
would pray in the mosque of
of Merzin
in Basra.
He was asked about that, and he said,
it's the mosque of my ancestors.
His father,
Muhammad,
was a
soldier.
Some say an officer, so he remembers
how he would see his father sometimes wearing
kind of military clothes or armor.
But he never really
saw him,
because his father died young at the age
of about 30.
But his father manages to leave the family,
a small property in Baghdad, which generates an
income, which,
covers
the family's needs.
Subsequently, although, as we'll see, Imam Ahmad was
one of the Imams who have really preferred
asceticism
and and a simple life of poverty.
So being an orphan in this way gave
him a kind of sense of self reliance
and accustomed him to a life of poverty.
And,
he's similar in this respect to Imam al
Shefey.
Good lineage
combined with poverty lead to a certain type
of human nobility.
And this is probably one reason why in
later life, he was so intensely drawn to
the company of the Zohad, the ascetics, and
of the Sufis.
Moves to Baghdad. Baghdad is really the center
of the Islamic world, the greatest city in
the world at the time.
Every tendency, of course, is present.
Every possible sect and denomination, every possible religion
is there. It's a kind of
microcosm of the of of the planet.
He engages in the usual traditional studies, so
he memorizes the Holy Quran.
He is a master of the Arabic language,
and would spend a certain amount of time
in the, kind of, royal
bureaucratic offices, the Diwan,
the scriptorium.
One of his tasks, quite often there, was
to
read soldiers letters to their wives and write
down their replies. These are the soldiers who
are not able to read and write. And
one of the things we find in the
lives of all of the 4 imams,
is that they were very connected to the
reality of ordinary people's lives. These are not
ivory tower,
academics. These are people who are really determined
to understand the reality of the people for
whom they're giving fatwas.
One of the senior scribes
said, we're told,
If this young man lives long enough, he
will be a proof for the whole people
of of of his age. It was clear
that there was
a tremendous future
in wait for him.
So many things could be studied in Baghdad,
from astronomy to mathematics,
to inheritance law, to royal administration,
irrigation,
but he chose Deen.
And in din, of course, there were different
tracks.
There was the track of fiqh
and also the track of hadith. You could
say those are the 2 main,
subdivisions.
And Iraq, of course, already contained the madhab
of,
Abu Yusuf and Sheibani, the 2 great inheritors
of Abu Hanifa.
And it's said sometimes that his first teacher
was,
Abu Yusuf.
But soon he switches and prefers hadith, and
he becomes known particularly,
as a great,
scholar and
assessor and compiler of Hadith.
Sometimes people say he's just a Muhadith
and doesn't know Fek, but that's wrong. We
have plenty of accounts from his contemporaries indicating
that,
he did study firq. His pupil, Al Khalal,
for instance, said he studied firq. Walakindam yatafit
ilay. He didn't give it much attention, but
but he knew it.
Until the year 18 6, he continues writing
the Hadiths that are available in the Hadith
circles of Baghdad.
Then he goes to Basra,
to learn more hadiths there. And in the
following year, he goes to the Hejaz,
and then to Yemen. And all of this
is the traditional rekhnefitolobil
hadith,
the traveling in search of hadith.
And then returns to Baghdad,
3 more years,
and make further trips to the Hajj. We're
told that he made
the Hajj 5 times altogether. Three times he
went walking.
In the Hejaz, he meets, Imam al Shefa'i,
whom he sees in
Baghdad as well. Remember these 4 Imams, they're
kind of, even though the
generations, it's a stretch period, more than a
100 years, but still they are part of
the same intellectual
community. And Imam Shefirai
respected his views absolutely in Hadith, and would
frequently consult him.
So he would say to Imam Ahmed, if
you think a hadith is sound,
teach it to me.
So we have this image of this
enthusiast for Hadith, this lover of Hadith.
And you can only really understand that when
you think that hadith is
a difficult discipline based on long isnaads and
the memorization of inconceivable quantities of material.
How could a young man be so
focused just on that?
That he he through the hadith, he saw
the chosen one
Each hadith
fills in a piece of the jigsaw,
and the more of the jigsaw you
have, you see the face of the Mustafa
It's the holy prophet that they're seeking. They
want to overcome that catastrophe of the prophetic
death, and to help the Ummah as much
as possible,
and to serve the aim, to serve the
knowledge. So this accounts for the extraordinary enthusiasm.
He wanted to go to some other places,
to the east he wanted to go to
Rai, but he simply couldn't afford
it. We're told that on some of his
journeys, he would sleep on a brick.
He went to
Yemen because he needed some hadiths from there.
He couldn't afford any kind of even a
donkey, and he walked all the way to
Yemen.
On the way, and while he was there,
he ran out of money and had to
look for work.
So he was working with some porters, people
who were just carrying
things.
The historians say, He just hired himself out
to some porters
until he reached Saint Art. So he's just
carrying whatever
for a few coins just to keep him
going.
He did this because it was his principle
out of his,
sense of
dignity
and appropriateness in deen.
That because he was doing these things for
scholarship, he didn't want anybody to pay him
or subsidized him. So even if he was
traveling with a group of people, and they
saw that he was hungry, he wouldn't accept
any money from them. He would go off
and find a job of some kind.
He goes to Saint Ath
to get hadith from the great Imam Abdulrazaq,
one of the great early hadith
narrators, the author of the Musanaf.
And again,
Abdulazizi's
disguise in rags.
He's thin,
and the imam wants to help him with
some money.
So, Abdul Azak says to this
starving student,
take this thing
and benefit from it,
because our land is not a land in
which people can easily earn or trade.
And he handed him some coins,
but Ahmad just said, I'm fine. I'm alright.
So in San'a, he stays in intense poverty
for 2 years, hearing hadiths
from Ibn al Musaiah,
from Imam al Zohari,
from that line, and from Imam Abdul Azak.
And he continues
to travel,
and he is said to have had a
box.
And he would travel, walk these huge distances,
with a box on his back, which had
his books in it.
And people would comment on this.
And he never
stopped
studying
and taking his books with him, even when
he became the great imam of Baghdad, Imam
Ahmed Ben Hanbal.
He was asked why he just couldn't stop
ever writing down hadith, and he said,
ma'al Mahbbara,
il al Mahbbara.
I'm with my
ink pot
until I go to the hole in the
grounds, the the grave. It rhymes in Arabic.
He's living in what's called the Asratedwin,
the age in which
the writing down of hadith is becoming a
huge flourishing
activity of the civilization.
Even though he'd memorized his hadiths,
he would only teach them from a physical
text, from a book.
Even if he knew something
and didn't have the book,
he would write the hadith down,
and then teach from that piece of writing.
This was his style of teaching.
He
got to meet all kinds of different people,
especially traveling around in Iraq, which was this
amazingly cosmopolitan place where you could meet people
from every possible
denomination. It said that he spoke Farsi quite
well.
And some of his family were in Khorasan,
and occasionally would visit him, and he could
speak to them in in Farsi. So, again,
a cosmopolitan person, not some kind of limited
monk.
So he's basically just doing this.
He doesn't hear from Imam Malik,
Imam Ibn al Mubarak, and some other very
early transmitters, because they just died too soon.
And then
he's still not teaching.
He passes the age of 30,
35.
Doesn't teach Hadith. At the age of 40
his life changes, he sits down and he
becomes the great Muhadith, the great Hadith teacher.
'jelatha
litahhadith.'
because he was following the colonic
verse about
maturity.
So that at the age of 40, one
reaches one's full maturity.
And this was
from his scrupulousness.
He knew the enormous amena, the responsibility
of teaching the prophetic legacy, and he wanted
to make sure that he was doing this
in his prime, at a time of real
maturity.
So by this time he's finally got his
circle in Baghdad,
he's already famous.
Even when he was just collecting hadiths
and hearing ISN ads, he had a reputation.
So when he finally sat down in Baghdad
to teach,
huge crowds came.
It said sometimes 5,000 people would come
just to hear some hadiths
from him, and people would come from from
all over.
And this is said to be one reason
why his
hadith spread very widely, because there's just so
many people there,
to listen to them.
It's recorded that not everybody
attended these sessions,
just to memorize some hadiths.
Some of them came because of his famous
spiritual presence. It was a very
holy, sacred, Mubarak environment,
is seshun.
So, ibn al Josi, a great later
historian,
Reports of 1 in the audience,
So somebody who was present said,
I used to go to Imam Ahmed Ben
Hanbal
regularly for 12 years, while he was teaching
the Musnad
to his children.
But I didn't write down a single
hadith.
I only
went
because of the guidance that he was given,
giving the akhlaq that he showed and the
adab.
I'm just observing
the beauty of the man as he taught
in his ascetical,
god filled way,
was a spiritual transformation for this person.
It was his habit to teach the most
able students in his house,
but also to give these enormous public lectures
in the mosque in Baghdad,
usually after the Asar prayer. That was his
his life.
His sessions were also famous for their their
gravitas.
Remember, Imam Malik used to take a rusl
before,
sitting to
give hadith.
Imam Ahmad never in his life
was reported to have told anything like a
joke in his classes.
Never said anything humorous or witty.
Because he considered his classes to be worship,
and one should not be light hearted during
Ibadah. So it's an intensely intense,
serious
environment.
1 of his pupils recalled,
I've never seen a more precious or unusual
gathering than the majlis of Imam Ahmed.
He had tremendous mildness,
never went too fast,
was extremely humble,
was dominated
by tranquility
and dignity.
And when in the afternoons, after the Asar
prayer, he sat down for his majlis,
He wouldn't speak
until somebody asked him a question.
It was in this kind of dignified
state, and people would venture to ask him
a question, then he would speak.
So in these sessions, we're told that he
would do 2 different things. Firstly, he would
be dictating hadith.
Secondly, he would be giving fatwas and judgments
of various kinds. He wouldn't
allow anybody to write these down,
and it said that's because he
didn't want to see anything written which contained
his own fatwas. That was his tradition.
So everything seems to be going fine for
him. He's this
king of the scholars in Baghdad,
this incredibly holy person.
But then the great catastrophe of his life
happens,
which is what's known in Islamic history as
the mihna. Mihna is like an inquisition.
Baghdad,
despite being the center of the world,
is also the center of many of the
fitness of the world.
As well as different kinds of Shia, you
have
rationalists. You have the beginnings of Arabic philosophy.
You have the Muatezilah.
And this argument between Akkal and Nakkal,
reason and the transmitted text of revelation,
is kind of pulling the city apart.
And this comes to a head with this
event known as the the Mirna. This begins
with the Abbasid caliph, Al Ma'mon,
and continues with his 2 immediate successors, Al
Martasim and Al Wathak.
Macron
may not have been a card carrying member
of the Mu'tazilite sect,
but he certainly was convinced of the idea
that somehow Allah's book, the Quran,
is something new that's created.
This is an idea that had appeared earlier
in the Umayyad period that's associated with somebody
called Jahan Bandirham.
Jahan Band software.
Effectively a denial of the divine attribute of
speech.
Moctezilites
didn't think that God speaks.
It's an anthropomorphism,
and also it suggests that
there's been something with God,
before
anything existed, and this creates a kind of
cluster of entities rather than a single single
one God. So then what Hazlalite said, for
the sake of Tawhid,
we have to say that the Quran comes
into being in time. There was a time
when it just wasn't around.
So the Motezilites
on this argument, and this is one of
the
more understandable
doctrines,
start to gain in strength in the city
of Baghdad. They infiltrate the entourage of the
caliph,
and Macron seems to, kind of, be interested
in this this idea.
Sometimes, Abu Harsim,
the great
Mo'Tazalite theologian, said that, Ammona would almost stand
up when he came in.
So in the year 212 of the Hijra,
an official caliphal proclamation goes out saying that
the official doctrine is the Halkul Quran, the
creativeness of the Quran.
This is an official doctrine, but at first
it's not kind of imposed.
That comes in 218,
when the scholars obviously are not buying
the strange idea,
and the caliph tries to physically impose it
forcibly.
And gets his soldiers, and his entourage, and
the city police to require the fuqaha and
the Hadith scholars
to subscribe to it.
And those who don't, are told that their
testimony won't be accepted in courts of law.
They can't hold any kind of public office
like a judgeship.
So they're kind of cancelled, we'd say nowadays.
Everybody's views on this is assembled in a
huge book, which is sent to Matt Morn,
who looks through it And then orders ultimately
that dissidents, if they won't change their view,
should be arrested,
threatened with
execution.
This is very unusual in Islamic history because
the caliph doesn't really have the authority to
do that.
For all of the Western polemical talk about
Islam and
theocracy, the reality is that the ruler doesn't
really have much religious authority.
His name is on the coinage, it's recited
in the Khutba, he can declare jihad. He
is responsible in some way for the establishment
of the Khodur,
but he can't really
interfere in or impose a theological or fekri
perspective.
That's God's business
as interpreted by the olamat.
So he's doing something that's rather strange, and
it's the only example of a major
doctrinal dispute attempting to be resolved in Islamic
history through force.
Nowadays, all of the regimes are trying to
correct the masses,
Aqidah or whatever, but this is not the
function of the state historically.
But Malmon seems to have thought it was.
So
the scholars threatened with execution,
kind of say that they accept this new
teaching, or they have some way of finessing
it so that they can get away with
it.
But some of them refuse, and they are
arrested,
beaten up, thrown into jail.
One of these is Imamal
Boetti,
an associate of Asherbe,
a very rigorous
and beloved scholar who actually dies in prison.
Nuhayin Benhammed,
another Hadith expert,
also dies.
Macron is on campaign
during this strange period, a place called Tarsus,
Northern Syria.
And claps his hand and says, let all
of the scholars,
come to me whether they're free or whether
they're in chains.
So they're going to this kind of council
on route.
The angel of death gets there first,
and the caliph
dies. But before he dies, he tells his
brother Mu'tasim
to maintain
this
policy.
This is
probably now more in the hands of his
chief,
wazir, Ahmed Ben Abi Doad, who is a
dyed in the wool convinced Mortezelite,
who tries to impose this thing on the
scholars.
And this idea
the Quran came into being, is created, was
written, and put above all of the doors
of the mosques in the empire, so that
people would have to
walk beneath them. Very difficult in Islam to
use religion or liturgy to impose a doctrine.
Remember, at the time of the English reformation,
in this country,
the state was at liberty to change the
form of worship.
So the Apostle's Creed
had to be read in all of the
churches under Henry the 8th and Elizabeth the
first,
and it was obligatory to go to church.
So if you didn't accept some of the
things in the Apostle's creed, you could be
arrested.
Because they could just change their Ibadah. In
Islam, you can't do that.
No matter how outrageous the khalifa, he can't
say, please pray now in a different way
and insert something.
So the only way in which the state
can really
impose a doctrine is by these strange maneuvers
of threatening the scholars, or putting up big
signs in the mosque,
announcing this new doctrine. But they can't
really press it into the heart of religion.
Their power is very limited.
So
Mu'tasim, who's a soldier more interested in,
battles,
allows this ibn Abi Du'ad, this vizier, to
continue with this policy.
Imam Ahmad is in prison
in Baghdad,
and they're deciding what to do with him.
He's asked to repent again. The caliph's messenger
says, just just say something.
It's embarrassing for the Sultan, just say something,
but he refuses.
And Imam Ahmed Ben Hanbal is flogged
repeatedly
and is in jail for 18 months,
and he will not shift.
He won't say anything other than, the Quran
is God's speech. God has always had speech.
So after these 18 months,
when the masses are really pretty sympathetic to
the Imam,
they let him out again,
and he hasn't
changed his position.
Immediately,
although he's
sick
and wounded from being flogged
for so long,
he goes to the mosque, sits in his
mosque, but until he's better,
his wounds have healed. He doesn't
teach.
And then when his wounds are just scars,
which he carries for the rest of his
life,
he begins again, Mem Appad Mahanbal
teaching Hadith in his mosque.
Mu'tazim dies, Alwathir, the new caliph,
still can't get out of this rut, starts
this inquisition again, but not so
violently.
Ibn Abu'ad manages to get ibn Hanbal, kind
of, under house arrest.
Just waits there until Al Wathir
dies. So there's a period of about 5
years until 232,
when Imam Ahmad is is not teaching.
Finally, Al Wathak dies.
Imam Ahmad has not
changed his position.
The whole city turns out
to welcome,
Imam Ahmad as he goes in triumph to
the mosque
to teach Hadith
Again, it's a great moment in the life
of the city. And you have to remember
that those were times
when the scholars
recognized that they need to be independent of
the state, even if it meant that they
got flogged.
This is just the way of the,
of the olamat.
They are the representatives
of the people
to the ruler,
not the other way around. In Christianity, it's
the other way around because the bishop crowns
the king, and
the institution of the church is linked to
the royal family,
and together they rule.
In Islam, the triangle works differently.
The ruler is there,
but the scholars are with the masses
and represent the masses to
the Sultan. I was reading just yesterday,
the life of Mohideen ibn Arabi.
He was once in Seville
and went to a dinner with his disciples,
and accepting hospitality.
Muslim culture is a big thing.
And his host says, thank you, Athan Wissahlen.
I'd really like you
to tell
the ruler
about
a favor that I'd like to be done,
because something wrong has been done, and I'd
like him to to sort that out.
And Ibn Arabi agrees,
but doesn't stay for the meal,
and takes his disciples out.
Why is that?
Because he doesn't want
to be beholden to anybody. He's going to
go to the sultan, going to tell him
to sort himself out, but he's not going
to be paid for that.
That's the that's the way the olamat used
to be, absolute detachment and concern for the
masses.
So
we have the Imam
still
not accepting
payment.
So sometimes he would go out into the
countryside, the Sawad around Baghdad,
and ask for permission,
once the harvest had been brought in, to
see if he could walk around and find
any grains of wheat that had been left
behind. So he would be gleaning
after the harvest.
Sometimes,
this great imam would earn a bit of
money just by working as a copyist.
Didn't have photocopiers then, so you'd get somebody
to write things up.
Sometimes he worked as a weaver.
Did not accept gifts from caliphs or from
governors,
and he really didn't like it if his
students or his colleagues
ever accepted gifts, particularly from people in political
authority.
The modern
idea of the kind of state Mufti with
his
limousine, would have been, you know, for him
the opposite of Islam.
This of course is one way in which
the olema retain
the love of the masses and incentivize the
masses to practice
religion. They have confidence in their
leaders.
Once Imam Shefaye went to him
with a message from the ruler saying, we
would like to appoint you to be a
qadi, a judge in Yemen.
But Imam Ahmad refused to do it because
the salary
was from the ruler and might contain some
Shuba.
Perhaps the money from the state
contained money that had been taken from people
unjustly,
through unlawful taxation, or from bribes, or all
kinds of corrupt
sources of income
flow into the coffers of the state. And
this again, was one of
the ways of particularly these olema who are
engaging with the Sufis and the state of
Wara and and Muhasaba,
that they don't want
anything
to come into their bellies that is bought
with money that might have come from extortion
of any kind.
So this day, in the city of Istanbul,
the Sufis love to pray their Jumr in
the mosque of Sultan Bayazid.
Maybe not the Blue Mosque or the other
mosque, Sultan Bayezid. Why is that?
All of the Sultans knew that their income
came from
dubious sources very often.
Sultan Bey said, when he built his mosque,
said, I'm going to make sure that the
money that is used to build my Sultanate
mosque will absolutely only be from
morally
correct sources.
There'll be no expropriation or stuff that I've
taken from my enemies or bribes, or anything
like that. Only halal money. And from that
time to this, the Salihin of Istanbul have
liked to pray their Jum'ah
in that Bayezid mosque. And to be imam
of the Bayezid mosque, and why is there
something that is a source of particular pride
for the, for the pure hearted. And I
know scholars there who maintain that tradition are
still very much, very much alive.
So
incidentally, Imam Ahmed is not doing it for
him, but he
he doesn't consider it haram to take
a state salary. This is from his warah.
He's not going to say there's some ruling
in the sharia that proves that you can't
be a judge and take money from the
local governor.
That's not there.
But he's not going to do it himself
because of this warat. Warat means scrupulousness.
So
in the city of Baghdad, this scrupulousness,
this muhasaba,
this asceticism,
this holiness,
comes,
really in tandem with his great love for
the Sufis. And I mentioned that
more than the other great Imams, he is
particularly concerned to spend time with them.
In particular, he loved Maruf al Kalki, who's
buried in Baghdad, and is one of
the great,
Auliya of Baghdad. He was originally a Christian,
converted to Islam, and worker
of miracles,
and
really a great
a great individual. Sometimes somebody went to Imam
Ahmad
and said,
this Ma'ruf is a convert. He doesn't have
much 'alma.'
Then Ahmed became angry
and said, is true knowledge anything other than
what Ma'ruf has achieved?
Hadith and so forth, 100,000 hadith is memorized,
200, who knows?
But real knowledge is the direct knowledge of
your creator.
Hadith is something that needs to be done
and gives you the fragrance of the chosen
one
But real Ma'rifah, knowledge of God,
that's an end in itself,
not a means to an end.
He also loved
the Sufis because of their Murabata. This was
a practice in medieval Islam that you would
spend some time, maybe every year, at the
front line defending the Dar eslam
from the byzantines,
in most cases. You'll go to Rebat, a
frontier fortress, maybe on some frozen hilltop
somewhere in Asia Minor,
to defend the Darul Islam.
And Ma'ruf al Karkhi was famous for this.
Bishr al Hafi also, Bishr of the barefoot,
Great saint of Baghdad was also known as
the great
Mujahid
and and Murabit.
Yeah. Bishra al Hafi,
always useful to remember these people. And Imam
Ahmed is always zealous to keep the
company.
Even though Bishra was a, Hanafi in his
madhab, and Imam Darukotni praises him for the
reliability of his hadith
narrators. He calls him jabal, thicka, a mountain.
It's a kind of technical term in describing
the
the the immensity of a scholar's knowledge. Thicker,
reliable.
But Bishr al Hafi, mainly known today as
one of the great Sufis of of Baghdad.
Once, Bishr al met a drunkard on the
road who
came up to him, hugged him.
Said, yes, say ye thee, oh my master.
Bishuram,
according to the eyewitnesses,
doesn't push him away. You know, if a
drunk came up to me in Cambridge and
hugged me, I said,
get away.
Bishu doesn't do that,
and allows him to hug him, and kiss
him, and lets him finish till he gets
fed up.
And then
Bishop
starts to cry. People are watching this weird
event. His eyes fill with tears and he
cries. And he says,
here is a man who loves another man,
because he thinks there's some good in him.
But perhaps the lover is saved, while the
one who is loved is unsure about his
final destination.
So he's not embarrassed by the encounter, still
less does he become all superior about it.
He's just moved that the man has loved
him, even though Bishop thinks that he himself
is not worthy of that love. So he's
kind of
humbled
by this man's love.
We've changed a lot, but this is how
they were. And these are the people Imam
Ahmad
loved.
His Zahid, we mentioned, but of course
the marriage is a sunnah.
So he marries, it seems
twice.
His first wife is Abu Abbasa,
who bears him his son, Saleh.
She dies under sad circumstances, and then marries
another woman, an Arab woman
called Rehana.
She is the mother of the better known
Abdulla
Ben Ahmed Ben Hanbal.
She too dies.
And he says,
may Allah have mercy upon her. We lived
together for 20 years,
and we never quarreled once.
That was it. After that he didn't marry
again.
Yeah. So in his home life, he was
also this
exemplary person.
He is also in Baghdad
promoting the correct belief about,
how you assess other people.
Since the time of the early fitners, this
has been a divisive issue.
What about those Sahaba who took opposing sides?
What about the Khawarij?
What about
the Mu'tazilah?
Who's a believer? Who's not a believer? This
has big implications, because it means who you
can marry, inheritance.
It's a life or death issue.
His belief is that the Sahib al Kabira,
the person of mortal
sins, is still a believer.
For the Kharijites, they said, a person who
commits a mortal sin is an unbeliever.
You commit murder
or adultery or something, you're kafir. That's the
Kharijite
position.
Hassanal Basri had said, such a person can
be judged to be a monathak.
Motesilites
had this strange idea of there being a
kind of space between belief and unbelief.
The manzilabeinor
manzilatein,
person could be called a Muslim,
but not really.
So he's
we call him a Muslim, but he's still
going to * forever, because the Moatazalite logic
was that if you deliberately disobey God in
a matter of mortal sin,
God's going to send you to * and
has to, because
he's just. And in their view, his justice
means that he has to punish sinners. That
Moatazilite got is very kind of constrained by
these abstract ideas of what he can and
can't do, which is one reason really why
the Ummah eventually
walked away from their position.
For the 4 Imams,
a mortal sinner is still a believer,
and what happens to him in the afterlife
is left to Allah.
So Imam Ahmad says,
This is Imam Ahmed's position.
It's the position of Sunni Islam.
We do not
judge
anybody
to be in heaven or * because of
any action that they do.
We have hopes for the righteous person.
We are fearful
for the unrighteous person who commits sins, but
we still hope that Allah's mercy
will prevail
in his case.
So this
is part of the the beauty and the
inclusivity of Sunni Islam, that the true believer
is naturally
repelled by the idea of making takfir of
anyone.
And the person of weak iman,
or the heretic,
or the Khariji,
or the Munafak,
is very quick to say,
this is wrong, this is kufr.
And that's one of the hallmarks of the
traditional scholar.
Real real reluctance to say,
that anybody is kefir.
How did he do his Fiqh?
After all, so far our account has apparently
been of a Hadith scholar,
but he's the founder of a madhab,
which is madhab a fiqh.
So what's characteristic of his fiqh that becomes
alfaqalhanbali?
He used to like to begin his fatwas
with the word haddathanah.
In other words, it's going to begin with
a hadith.
He was famous for that. If on an
issue that he was asked about, he couldn't
find a hadith,
he would find if the Sahaba ever had
an Ijmaq, a unanimous position amongst themselves.
If they took different views, or there wasn't
anything evident in their views, he would take
a view from the Teberin,
the disciples of the Sahaba.
Or sometimes
a view from an early scholar such as
Malik or Al Hawza'i in particular.
If there's nothing to contradict it, he will
accept
a mursal or even a weak hadith. That
is to say, the one that's disconnected in
its chain in a particular way, or a
weak hadith.
But that hadith can't contradict the verdict of
a companion.
So because of this strong hadith centeredness,
the Hanbalis are more inclined to
find as many hadiths as they can, even
if they don't meet the full degree of
authenticity
than the other madhhabs. And this is why
a lot of modern fundamentalists,
when they study Imam Ahmad's way, don't really
like him, because he seems to
find ways of using weak hadiths, which very
often
they will,
refuse.
Imam Ahmad's
Madhab and his firkuh has been more seriously
and dangerously misunderstood
than the madhab and the firk of any
of the other Sunni Imams.
So for Imam Ahmad, the word sunnah
means the Hadith, including weak Hadith
and the fatwas of the Sahaba.
What about PS and logical deduction?
Can you look to see what is the
reason for a prohibition that is present in
scripture,
and use that reason
in order to deduce a fatwa for a
case that's not present in scripture.
He says, you can, and the Hanbalists allow
sorts of analogical deduction,
but only if absolutely necessary.
Unlike the Hanafis, who tend to use kias
in their Ijtihad
very considerably.
There's something also very practical about his firk.
He doesn't like the Iftirad,
the supposition.
What if? He will only give a fattwa
on something that has actually occurred,
unlike say, the method of Abu Hanifa.
He doesn't allow any kind of Istihad
or kriyas
or rationality in anything that's to do with
worship as such with Ibadat.
But in Muhammedalet,
public law, public transactions,
he would
actually allow a good deal of latitude. This
idea we have of the humble is as
being
strict,
isn't really accurate at all.
So the basis for the ruling of things
in Aybadde is that everything is forbidden, unless
you can find a text that indicates that
you can do this thing.
Whereas in
ordinary human transactions,
relations,
deals, and so forth, the basis of them
is that they are sound, unless you can
find a text
or possibly a ps,
that indicates that those things are forbidden.
So actually, the Hanbali Mathab turns out to
be quite flexible, particularly when relating
to issues
that are
new, for which there wasn't a hadith.
So a lot of fatwas in modern Islamic
banking, for instance, are actually from the Hanbali
position.
Because of this idea that things, unless they're
explicitly forbidden,
are just fine. Some of the olemmat would
say that that as humanity moves away from
the world covered by the hadith,
humanity encounters more and more different situations.
Will actually mean that religion has less and
less to say to those situations.
It's new, it's not in the hadith, it's
kind of Mubah. But that's a generalization, because
on important issues the Hanbalists will always struggle
to find some kind of text based
reason to have an Ijdihad,
rather than just leaving it as a kind
of secular space.
If there's no noss though, no text
on an issue, he will often seek to
determine
the maslaha or the public interest.
Rather like Malik does, but possibly a little
bit less. And of course,
Malik's
focus on the practice of the people of
Medina is not something that is central to
Imam Ahmad's
system.
But here again,
when we have the stereotype of the Hanbali's
as being irrational
and just
text
based. In order to determine where the public
interest is, what is the Maslaha,
you need some kind of rational
analysis of that thing. Is it in the
interests of the Ummah
that there should be shari'a compliant hedge funds,
for instance?
Just suppose
anybody would be weird enough to ask such
a question.
Imam Ahmad wouldn't say, just Mubah not mentioned
in that. He'd say, where's the Maslaha? Where
is the interest? And determining that interest does
involve the Hanbali thinkers
necessarily
in a certain amount of of
of ratiocination
and reasoning it out. But there is a
wing of the Hanbalis,
represented famously
by somebody called Nejmeddin Tawfi,
a later Egyptian Hanbali.
Which takes the view that just about anything
in Sharia can be adjusted or defined,
if you can figure out where public interest
lies.
So quite a lot of modern reformers like
to use Najmuddin Tawfi and that type of
Hanbalism.
So again, we have to get away from
the idea that this is a super strict
madhab, that these are fundamentalists,
and into a rather different and more nuanced
understanding.
I mentioned
his tremendous love of
the chosen one, sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. He
was really a follower of the inward, as
well as the outward sunnah. This is one
reason for his love of the Sufis, because
he saw in them the holiness of Islam,
rather than just the outward compliance.
He had a particular attachment to the city
of Medina.
I mentioned,
the fact that he asked to be buried
with 3 hairs from the holy prophet. His
son, 'Abdallah, reported a lot of things that
he'd seen in his father. He used to
keep, for instance, hair from the beard of
the holy prophet, salallahu alayhi wa sallam. Sometimes
put it in water,
take it out, and then drink
the water for the
blessings.
In the city of Medina, the bowl, qaza,
from which the Holy Prophet used to drink,
was conserved.
When he passed through Medina, he would
ask to see it and would take Baraka
by drinking from it himself.
So,
we're getting now, I think, what is a
rather different image of this great imam,
from the conventional one, that says the Hanbalists
kind of lead on to Iben Tamia, and
Iben Tamia leads on to Mohammed bin Abdulwaherb.
Mohammed bin Abdulwaherb leads on to ISIS, and
it's all
from this. That's not the case at all.
Real scholars on the math of Imam Ahmad
and traditional Hanbalists would say, we have nothing
to do with any of that stuff. This
is a method of mercy, and of prophetic
love, and of closeness to the to Allah's
people, to the Auliya.
But before we finish, we should of course
think a little bit about the greatest book
that Imam Ahmad left us with,
which is he wrote several books or compiled
several books,
including his katabazuhud,
which is a very useful collection
of hadiths,
mainly about renunciation
and leaving dunya.
But his great book, of course, is his
famous Musnad, which is one of the 8
or so really great hadith collections, and very
important for all of the madhhabs.
And really a brilliant monument of scholarship.
Hamdulillah, the sunnah project, which has connections
here in Cambridge, and Alsar as well, brought
out quite recently
a complete new addition of the Musnad of
Ahmed bin Hanbal.
The first really good edition that there's ever
been. They found hadiths that were in the
earliest manuscripts that hadn't been published before, unfortunately,
because of the decadence of so much middle
eastern publishing. But this is we have it
in our library at CMC,
really beautiful,
respectful
Imam Ahmad. And the book is just so
beautiful.
About 27,000
hadiths in it, so bigger than Bukhari Muslim.
It's
heavy. 13 volumes or something in the new
edition. You
would risk,
sort of lower back pain if you try
to carry the whole thing.
But what's
characteristic
about
this book, other than unlike say, the Sahihab
Bukhary, is that those other books are often
arranged
according to subject.
A Musnad
is a collection of hadith
that is arranged
according to the name of the companion who
narrated that hadith.
And he actually begins with the 10,
companions who are guaranteed
paradise while they still live, the Asherah Mubasharah
Mubasharina
Biljena.
Then he goes on through all of the
Sahaba. So there's Musnad of Baisha
and a
of Abu Huraira.
And that makes it a little bit specialized,
difficult to use.
You can pick up buhari,
and say, well let me see some hadiths
about Udo, and there they are.
Of course, if you want to know how
to do wudu, you look at a book
of fiqh, because you might misunderstand
the hadith.
But in the Muslim of Imam Ahmad, if
you want to find a hadith about Wodaw,
you have to find, well, the new edition,
which has a lot of
indexes,
and then you can look it up. But
it's kind of
it takes some time. So it's a very
specialized scholar's work. It's kind of encyclopedic, but
according to a specialized principle for those for
whom knowledge of the ISN ad is vital,
and those whose memorization is so amazing
that they will actually remember hadiths by the
isnad.
Ah, this is the hadith of Abu Sayid
al Khudri. And they'll think that before they
actually think of the subject of the hadith.
You can hardly find such people nowadays.
But this
is how they were with their amazing eidetic
memory. So it's a recollection of a time
of gigantic,
scholarly
erudition
and wisdom.
And it is a book that continues to
be
a vital treasury
of
the prophetic sunnah.
So
we've really come to the end of this
quick visit to the life of Imam Ahmad,
which was a quiet scholar's life, apart from
the the great tumult at the time of
the
the fitna.
But the important thing to bear in mind
is that we need to push away the
conventional stereotype that says it was the beginning
of stupid fundamentalism in Islam
and a rejection of rationality and compassion. On
the contrary,
this is a highly spiritual person.
And his madhab
was very often the madhab of the Sufis
subsequently,
who is maybe the greatest best known Sufi
in Baghdad, Abdulqad al Jilani,
who is humbly in his doctrine and in
his fiqh.
One of the greatest early
Sufis of what's now Afghanistan,
Khwaja 'Abdallah Ansari
of Herat,
Hanbali.
The first
Sufi tafsir
in Persian
is by Rashiduddin Meibodi,
a Hanbali.
So, yeah, we need to get out of
this idea that this is something that's
form formalistic,
legalistic,
exoteric,
uninterested in the living heart of religion. It's
simply not the case. There is always in
Islam a very close symbiosis
between the Ahlul Hadith, the real Hadith scholars,
and a kind of prophetic devotion and a
love of the Auliya.
And when you think about it, you couldn't
really separate the 2. A mark of real
love for hadith is a love for the
Auliya and those whose lives are transformed
in this holy and beautiful way by
recollection of the chosen one
So,
that essentially is the story. And we just
have to ask Allah
that the current misunderstandings
of the way of Imam Ahmad,
which are a kind of compounded
ignorance based on a misunderstanding
of the nature of the hadith, and the
nature of how we read hadith,
and the
nature of Ikhilaf and difference of opinion is
in Islam. Those misunderstandings
are overcome,
insha'Allah, so that
the beauty and the ironic inclusivity of classical
Sunni Islam, which these imams worked so hard
to maintain and defend, is restored again. So
that being Ahlus Sunnah wal Jema'ah is once
again this beautiful, spiritual,
inclusive,
authentic thing
that genuinely conserves
the reality of the prophetic sunnah, rather than
just certain poorly understood aspects of its form.
So may Allah
have mercy on Imam Ahmed
and grant us the benefit of
understanding the life of Imam Ahmed and bless
all of the true Hanbalis
in this age. Make us all lovers of
the Hadith and love of the true fatwa.
Cambridge Muslim College, training the next generation of
Muslim thinkers.