Abdal Hakim Murad – Imam Malik Paradigms of Leadership
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss the history and cultural context of Islam, including the shift from ambiguity to clarity, diversity of cultural practices, and the importance of finding the right way to pray. They also touch on shrouds of human emotions, including the "outiderity of human civilizations" concept, and the controversy surrounding a former spiritual figure. The discussion also touches on the influence of Islam on modern Islamic culture, including Moore's Law and the Sun statement, the use of translation and sound in writing, and the return of a former spiritual figure.
AI: Summary ©
Smilla hamdulillah salat wa salam ala Rasulillah. But early he was
Safi or Manuela.
So this will be the second in our series of
leadership figures. He'll recall that last time I was drawing a
large red question mark after the whole concept of leadership in
Islam, taking my cue from the well known,
or at least it should be well known prophetic Hadith, that one
should not seek Imara or positions of power or authority.
And this
prophetic guidance, which is repeated in a number of
circumstances, has, I think, historically shaped the mindset of
the more morally conscious members of the ummah.
inscribing a second question mark after the idea of
Islamic leadership programs, as these are frequently touted, in
perhaps slightly westernized or confused or syncretic, modern
Muslim environments, and we looked at this a little bit, leadership
programs and all kinds of buzzwords described on flip
charts, as though being a religious leader were in some
sense, however, remote analogous to being a
captain of industry, or a politician. And we saw that
actually, this is not the prophetic paradigm.
As the Hadith goes on to say,
if you seek leadership, and a given it, leadership will be given
authority over you will become your leader, that if you are given
it without seeking it, God will help you.
It's actually very clear in our tradition, and throughout our
moral reflection, that be ambitious, in that sense, is
extremely problematic. One doesn't have to turn many pages of the
texts of
Muslim heroism. We saw Imam Shama last time that is real reluctance
but the fact that he had to engage in the defense of his people.
Remember, the great Quranic verse fighting is prescribed for you,
well, who are Corporal Lacan, we don't like it.
This is not our conventional image of what it is to be a military
hero, stand up to the crease, wave the flag, wave the sword, and it's
not an ego trip that is disliked thing.
Reluctant responsibility, all the pages of the text of Islamic law
where you see how zealous the early Muslims were to avoid
positions of fatwah positions of judgeship. Terrifying.
So we began by suggesting that the title of this series of lectures
might actually be wrong or contradictory. But nonetheless,
given that we have people who
have been leaders, in other words, they have had people whom they
lead, objectively speaking, we can, I think,
proceed. But with this caveat, the difference between profane and
sacred leadership is the difference between Pharaoh and
Moses. The one is zealous for power and lives for power and
thinks of nothing else and fears nothing other than losing it.
Whereas the one who is spiritually powerful really is kind of
reluctant, he doesn't want to go to fit around, he wants somebody
to support him, he is diffident, throughout and yet he is the one
who has to remember as as as the leader, this turns the usual
secular and certainly the 21st century logic on its head, we need
to remember this throughout. So in this series, I will be looking at
different facets of this complex phenomenon.
Noting, of course, that ours is not a religion of
anchorites hermits, except under certain very specific
circumstances, and particularly at the end of time,
where we are authorized and even prophetically enjoined to step
back, because the situation seems hopeless, the collapse of
everything. Who are we as mere mortals to stand against the Torah
by Magna the great turbulence at the end of time where everything
is inverted, and this is part of the manifestation of the divine
July in the end times. So yes, that's when you find your shoe.
We head for the hills. This is prophetically mandated.
And conversely, those who jump up and seek leadership under those
conditions are likely to be
much closer to the Pharaonic than to the mosaic type.
But generally, we are not people who step back from responsibility.
We're the people who go to God through the world rather than
trying to skirt it or avoid it. When this is the case, in family
life,
we are not celibate. Instead, we go to God through assuming the
normal responsibilities of our created humanity. Other
traditions, notably Christianity, and Buddhism, say no you, if you
wish to be part of the spiritual elite, you do step out of that as
well. And you step out of the positions of authority, and you
don't engage in warfare, those are two pacifist, as well as celibate
traditions. But our ethos is different.
Our ethos is about embracing the world, understanding it as an
avert of tribulation, but an abode in which righteousness is possible
in the world. And perhaps despite the world, but through it. This is
very characteristic of the Islamic ethos of Judaism in many respects,
is quite akin to it in forms of Hinduism with Chatelier. warrior
caste.
Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita is a great example of a leader, I
guess, one of history's earliest instances of that.
So we have this odd place of starting, where on the one hand,
we really are cagey about this idea of wanting to be a leader.
But on the other hand, our view of human responsibility and ethical
agency in the world generally mandating involvement rather than
disengagement. So we try and balance those two things, and
that, that the nature of that balance really defines those very
multiple diverse, discrepant individuals who will be very
briefly looking at in this series.
So we began perhaps, obviously with the very primordial type of
the sacred warrior. We looked at Imam Shanel last time.
And we drew the obvious comparison between his ethically constrained
and dissident and unwilling but militarily brilliant leadership of
his people, as they faced annihilation at the hands of
Orthodox ethnic cleansers then contrasted that with pomp and
circumstance of the Tsar, with his Winter Palace, and his servile
nation. And we saw that as a kind of Latter Day instantiation face
off this time, this dichotomy.
So the militant is an obvious form, perhaps the most obvious
form, the primordial human society looks to the leader as somebody
who will be a leader in war, not just the tribe, in that Australian
outback. But
Churchill in the 1940s, or whatever it might be the ultimate
responsibility for the leader is to be someone who bears the sword.
But there are many other forms of this and one form which I wish to
address today, because it's very characteristically Islamic is the
scholarly and juridical form.
So partly as a concomitant of our insistence that
human righteousness is achieved through going through the world
with its veils of tears, and its shadows and its challenges and its
moral possibilities is that we have an idea of human life,
personal life and collective life as potentially open to
sanctification.
And here again, we seem to diverge from the Christian and the
Buddhist traditions which have not evolved complex
apparatuses of secret law.
In fact, they have at times canon law, and aspect of Buddhist law,
but they're not really the center of what the priest or the sage is
teaching
in Islamic civilization, because we get to God through the world,
rather than by trying to age anxiously around it.
we necessarily have the idea that there is a path to step through
the world, which is a holy path, and which actually provides us
with a way of being transformed despite the manifest imperfections
of
In the world and human collectivities with which we
engage. That's essential to Islam's moral and human vision.
That's the anthropology of Islam.
One of the great poets said, walk down a little jewel Belka. Theva
is savory unhurt what I am the federal ban naughty you've heard
me say reefy her.
Cut the thick veils by avoiding them and cut this the subtle veils
by going through them. By thick veils, he means mortal sins. You
deal with the temptation to theft by avoiding it.
But the subtle veils the world, running a business, having a
family being the mayor of a town these things which are part of our
normal civic membership of Benny Adam, you deal with them, not by
avoiding them, but by going through them. They're veils
nonetheless, and they really distracting. And they have many
pitfalls, but we go through them and this is kind of Islamic
commandment we we go through those veils rather than simply sidestep
them. So this idea of the world as something that we experience as
full of human imperfections. Most of our conversation is taken up
with criticisms of people and what they've done, whether it be the
Cambridge City Council, canceling a bus route, or whether it be
Trump's latest argument with a journalist or whatever it is, most
of what concerns us is the manifest imperfection and
difficulty of other human beings. Sometimes we might talk about the
weather, but mostly it's other human beings. The human realm is
by far the most interesting
realm of the created order, but it's also the most troubling, we
get hurt more by human beings and we get hurt by
other things in creation. By and large, sometimes we might get
bitten by a dog, we might catch cold, or you might even drown at
sea, but generally that which routes which is most deeply into
our heart is the the wounds caused by the daggers of an unsympathetic
on uncomprehending humanity. This is our weakness, that's our
Achilles heel each other.
So,
to deal with this to allow us to create a path through this
minefield
revelation envisages the possibility of smoothing that
path, and keeping those human many human dangers at bay. The shittier
sometimes deals with
animals and floods, but its main concern is with human animals and
human floods.
And that's why the word Shetty and means way means path you get
through this world is not an end in itself. Those people are God
forgives them who say the purpose of Islam is to establish the
Sharia
that's never narrated from any jurist of the past. That's that's
mistaking the means for the end. Purpose of Islam is to bring us to
paradise to bring us to God to sort out our souls. Albin Salim,
the Sharia is a means to that end, without boundaries. Without this
smooth path, we're going to be victims of human predators of a
million different kinds. So we have this in our civilization.
view that the function of law, legality, jurisprudence, all of
these really dry things, is actually to facilitate salvation.
They are an ethical exercise. They're not just utilitarian
expressions of some kind of calculus about public interest.
They can be redolent with holiness.
This is strange, sometimes for the Western mind to understand.
They think that the public sphere should be regulated by matters of
public user fructan kind of utilitarian calculus, however hard
in practice, that is to bring about free speech versus the right
to be protected from abuse and everything is kind of a
compromise.
But from the point of view of Socratic putty and the Islamic
take on human responsibility, we've raised everything to a much
more interesting level. It's not just a kind of social science that
could theoretically ultimately be quantified. If you knew all of the
human variables, you could actually quantify somebody's
utility mapped out against somebody
else's kind of computer could be a lawyer on that basis. But in our
vision, though it is a fundamental one of the most fundamental human
moral tasks.
Because this is about creating a society that is godly, and
therefore, in its structures satisfies humanity's more profound
needs.
It's not just that you have the right to be protected from being
swindled online, nor has to do that.
But it's also about being shaped in a way that provides you with a
personal and societal and a family environment. That that feeds you
spiritually, the different kinds of exercise and so the jurist in
Islam. The fucky,
literally is the one who understands.
And part of the animal finales project was to remind us, the
jurist really has to understand not just juggling different delis
of Quran and Hadith and competing with rivals, which was the state
jurisprudence had reached in his time, but rather,
to see that this is a secret science, it is an art, which
because human perfecting, and perfectibility is something really
beautiful moral beauty even more amazing than physical beauty, that
it is an aesthetic exercise of the highest order. So part of as Ali's
uptake on or solo therapy is that it's an aesthetic exercise to do
with the SN. Doing what's beautiful.
So, we have this and then at the same time, and part of the reason
why we will classify this as art rather than science. It's a
humanistic exercise in the real sense of humanism. It's for many
Adam, not just for kind of mortal primate, it's for many Adam,
is that this tradition that we have, is really multiple.
And this, again, offends a lot of people nowadays, including
Muslims. And it's important to grasp this when we look at the
leader paradigms in our history, who have been jurists.
Very often,
under normal circumstances, where people are looking for what is
right,
and are anxious about ongoing multiplicity, we tend to revere
moral thinkers or jurists whose legacy seems to be a concordance
one, or one that makes the law kind of unified. After all, that
we want to know what Islam says, about a given thing. What does
Islam say about abortion? What does Islam say about prayer in the
space station when we need answers? That's a legitimate need.
People look to religion for guidance.
Similarly, Western historians of Islamic law have tended to proceed
on the Enlightenment assumption that it is moving towards some
kind of answer or
body of statutes that the entire history of Islamic law can be
understood, essentially, through cover Western optic as a moving
towards some kind of agreement on what is moral and how society
should be regulated, because that's taken to be what Western
jurists have always looked for. They want to know what's right.
And that particularly the backdrop of transformations in European
law, between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment took place
partly against a kind of scientific background. After all,
scientists want to know what's right.
Science doesn't really like ambiguity. Unless you're a quantum
mechanics expert, perhaps in which case you're stuck with it floating
as Cat. But basically, scientists want to know what's right, what is
the correct chemical formula for potassium, there can only be one
way of denoting it, and only one way in which it reacts with other
elements and produces compounds. The same with physics laws of
thermodynamics, science is totalizing in a certain way,
because the physical world
philosophers are still a bit staggered by this the physical
world is characterized by certain constants, which are remarkably
consistent and uniform. So to the extent that science has been the
governing paradigm of Western civilization is often pushed
social sciences and things like law and jurisprudence in the same
kind of direction. We want to know what's right
in the
ticularly the continental legal traditions in England we have more
of a, quite a medieval legacy, in many ways, case law and
kinds of accumulating things in the common law. It's much messier,
and some would say, closer and more intuitive to the actual
reality of what goes on in the courts rather than being handed
down, like the cordon Apollyon. From some kind of philosophical
set of suppose, certainties. There's
different ways of doing jurisprudence in the western
context. But nonetheless, the tendency generally is for people
to want to know what's right.
Now, in the religious context, people also, as I've said, really
want to know what's right.
What's the right way to pray? Is it right for me to
repeat my prayer?
If I've prayed for rockers for Maghrib or not, or can it make up
the extra rocker and what's right?
Isn't a zero sum game? You can't? How could you possibly have saved
both right? It's like, you can't be pregnant or not pregnant at the
same time. It's either or. It's not the kind of whoever whatever
the modern tendency, particularly amongst Muslims, who have been
stung by enlightenment, triumphalism, and whose
understanding of their religious identity has been shaped and
reshaped by desire to react against the implicit or explicit
critique leveled against their civilization by the West, has been
to try and turn Islamic law, also into something unified and simple
and comprised of certain statutes that do try to be right.
This, however, is a profound revision and a strangeness in our
civilization. And one of my favorite books,
published in 2011, quite recent, but already thrown the cat among
the pigeons is by Thomas Bower, the culture of ambiguity.
It's a German historian. And he looks at the classical texts of
the soul and the classical texts will fit in the classical text of
doctrine and all of those classical texts. And then he looks
at modern equivalents.
And he finds that there's not just different answers a lot of the
time but also different reasons for finding those answers.
Obviously, jurisprudence is not carried out on some kind of
vacuum. The jurists have the culture, their preferences, their
agenda, their mock acid, they're human beings are embedded.
What jurists in the Muslim world are finding now, what activists
and headbangers, loudmouth, various kinds of particularly
finding is certainty. For the first time, they want uniformity.
So the point of his book really is that sometime in the 19th century,
Muslim jurists, Muslim theologians stopped being happy with
multiplicity and started to be unhappy with it.
So pre modern Islam, he says, was ambiguity friendly.
Whereas modern Islam is generally hostile to ambiguity. We don't
like it, it makes us uncomfortable, partly because of
the desire to know what Islam says when modernity is criticizing it,
we want answers, rather than to say, Well, according to Abu
Hanifa, and according to Chef A and the traditional response, and
also because of the general ideological assumption in much
modernist or
modernizing discourse, whether acknowledged or not, that there's
a kind of scientific basis for these things, and that there must
be something right. So there's ambiguity tolerant Islam, which
gives way under the impact of modernity to ambiguity, intolerant
Islam.
And he dates this, as I've said, to the 19th century, give lots of
examples.
A lot of book is basically examples of this transformation,
how modern Islam, whether reformist stroke, liberal Islam,
or
fundamentalist Islam, they're both subject to this. This isn't just
the shift to Salafi This is most modern discourse, as he sees it
is
illustrated with a huge range of decisions. So he looks for
instance of the great 15th century or an expert the expert on the
variant readings of the Quran that adds
just very
real monument of physiological and forensic textual genius. Nowadays,
you think he must be a German professor because there's just
nothing is the book is staggering. Now one of our great
monuments. And he points out that throughout Ibn jaziri is very
happy with the idea that there can be different texts of the Quran,
different readings.
Maliki omitting or Maliki omitting. You just document it, it
doesn't matter. And then he looks a lot of modern writers, including
the former Saudi mufti, even off a mean, who really, really, really
wanted to abolish them and say there's only one correct reading
of the Quran that he sees is symptomatic of what's happening in
modern Islam the desire for an answer.
Similarly, he looks at
issues of folk,
historically, enormously diverse, inevitably inexorably diverse, and
points out how modern writers simply cannot abide to this
because of the insistence on a single way of reading the text. So
he looks at my work, it was a bit earlier because it's 11th century.
And my world either great chef or a jurist, great commentator on the
man who says,
The Art of Tafseer of interpreting God's book is to explore all of
the different defensible interpretations.
Maybe he'll give you a sense of what is his preference. But it's
certainly not the purpose of the Muslim read of the Quran to
determine what the text definitely says. Occasionally, there's
unambiguous, no source, but generally, there's a multiplicity
of interpretation from the earliest period. And then he
contrasts it with modern commentaries on the Quran, which
seek typically to demonstrate the right reading. And again, he looks
at Ibn or thymine and his insistence that there's only one
correct meaning of every verses of Quran.
And he proceeds for hundreds of pages, making his case pretty
decisively. Islam has changed, he says, from being an ambiguity
tolerant to an ambiguity, intolerant to tradition.
And from then, of course, it's just a short step to the modern
Muslim debate as to why everything is such a mess.
The answer is quite simple. Muslim societies are really diverse.
different sects, different orientations, rationalists,
mystics, literalist, religious people, not so religious people,
men, women, different languages, every Muslim country, by and large
is really plural.
That works with classical Islamic law, which is this ambiguity
tolerant thing in which almost every decision is kind of a
working conclusion.
But if you try to impose a kind of modernist Islam on that, then
immediately you have detonation, because most people can't accept
it and can't recognize themselves in this form of Islam that is
being imposed on them. So it looks like a
very abstract text. But actually, it has very significant
repercussions.
What he doesn't pick up, perhaps quite so evidently, is the fact
that the traditional paradigm is still alive amongst the
traditional all on that, who regarded as part of civilized
religious scholarship to enjoy the plurality of conclusions and to
respect that diversity. But the modern mind, whether liberalizing,
or near Morteza, light, or feminist commentators on the
Quran, or fundamentalist code, they will want to find the one
correct view and to lambaste those who disagree with them. And this
clearly is something that the traditional scholars will also be
noticing, and are noticing with perplexity.
So this is one of the interesting dimensions of our tradition, we
have this strong reverence for those who seek to rectify human
beings individually and collectively by studying legal
boundaries. And on the other hand, very consistently in Sunni Islam
in particular, she Islam often has this idea of the Imam of the age
knows the correct view, but Sunni Islam is this kind of this
conceptual thing.
It's something that is really not sufficiently understood. A lot of
modern Muslims get kind of fidgety when they're told that Islam is a
tradition of ambiguity and multiplicity. Just read the
classical text and you'll, you'll see it
my friend, yeah, he and B. Shaw, who is a Hartford Seminary in
American is one of the experts on Ibn Taymiyyah
real expert translates he says Ibn Taymiyyah addict who just can't
get to sleep at night. Mrs. Translated something from Ibn
Taymiyyah says the best way of dealing with Islamic radicalism is
to teach
prisoners classical Arabic, and to have all of the works of Ibn
Taymiyyah in the prison library, so that in all of those boring
hours, they actually get to read the thing. And they see the
diversity of it even even Taymiyah, who can be quite
abrasive. Actually see what he says about theologians. And what
he says about mystics, you see his part of a culture of ambiguity.
That's the solution. The problem is not knowing and assuming that
Islamic law is something like Western law, and the journalists
do it. Islamic law is being introduced in northern Nigeria.
Well, that means nothing to a traditional jurist. Which madhhab
which interpretation of the madhhab who's doing it? What do
they mean, is it customary law? But for journalists, of course, we
know what Islamic law is don't we will strict Islamic law sometimes
and Muslim gets shaky because it looks like it's a disaster. And we
are trapped in that false dichotomy. But we have nothing,
nothing, nothing to do with that. So
bowels work is worth perusing. And another book that I like is
even more
recent, by Conrad here Shala, published here in Cambridge, which
is basically a study of the first comprehensive library catalog that
we have of a classical Sharia madrasa in the Middle East. And
it's another extra fear in Damascus.
And it represents the books that the scholars thought should be in
circulation. And it's enormously diverse when compared to say, to a
monastery library in Europe at the time. Firstly, it's about 10 times
bigger. But it's got everything from Plato to the views of sects
to Ismaili books to you name it different motherhood.
The scholarly tradition was part of a law revoke world that was
interested in multiplicity. So he writes, this tolerance made it
possible to accept opposing systems of values and norms,
without necessarily insisting on the exclusive truth of one's own
system.
intellectual life in these societies was less characterized
by the quest for the one and only truth, but rather by searching for
probable and likely answers. That's classical Islam. Sounds a
bit like a modern university in a certain way, although it is it is
different. There is the presence of the Divine and Revelation and
you have material to work with you have
a sea floor on which to fix your anchor. But it's certainly not the
kind of ideological
take on Islam that is increasingly provided. And again, not just by
saying Islamic University of Medina, which tells you there's
just one view, there's a correct view and this hadith the sound of
this is looking for the wellhead, the one truth, but also
increasingly in much of the curriculum of regime directed
Islamic universities elsewhere in the Muslim world.
Where the regime wants people to reach a particular view on
politics or democracy or gender or whatever it isn't. Everything is
being defined as the true Islamic view from the Minister of
Religious Affairs or some general so that subversion is very
widespread.
Unfortunately, because you could say, in an age of multiple
challenges, such as our own Islamic law needs all of this
wriggle room, and we need to have the capacity to respect this
plurality. And not to feel uncertain when we're told that
Islam is still working on questions that have been posed for
more than 1000 years. So
what we find when we look at these leaders of jurisprudence is a
remarkable balance between the one hand and absolutely austere,
uncompromising rectitude. These are kind of the monastic figures,
ascetics, the foregrip, jurists of early Islamic, ascetic figures.
You can imagine their personal gravamen and seriousness if you're
with Mohammed bin Hanbal, who kind of just the presence of the man
would have been overwhelming.
People for whom God is the master signifier of everything and the
next world, or the life in the grave are whatever thing is
tending towards, but at the same time, they're the ones who
recognize this plurality, and actively promoted
what the Maliki is called RE AYATUL fina, if
not just acknowledging that there's differences of opinions,
but preserving it is an important principle in the Maliki method,
but generally I still feel F. Don't lose it. Make sure that the
multiplicity is still there because this is part
of what God has intended in the great Maliki jurist a shelter be
famously explains that if Allah subhanaw taala had wished the
Sharia to be just a single set of statutes, the revelation would
have looked very different.
So much in the Quran is hard to figure out
difficult words. Some words in the Quran, are acknowledged to be of
basically mysterious significance. There's words in the Quran that do
not appear anywhere else in the Arabic language, which is an
anguish with a big literature.
Why use that word rather than one that people could understand?
Good question. The juristic consensus of pre 19 century of
Islam was as sharp to be said, so that there could be divergence.
So there could be this multiplicity.
Which nowadays, what does the word mean? We tend to do things with
translation of these things. One reason for the untranslated
ability of the Quran is that you have to come down on the side of a
particular belief as to what a particular verse means. You can't
maintain the ambiguity in a translation unless you're some
kind of translation, super genius. That translation is not the
original partly because it can't conserve the ambiguities of the
original text. But the Quran itself says there's a very
interesting thing to find in a world scripture where it talks
about itself. The self awareness of the Quran is always quite
exceptional Surah Al Imran verse seven, how will the bIllahi min
ash shaytani R rajim Bismillahi Rahmani Raheem? Who will lead the
unzila Alico Kitab Amin who are yet to knock him out on him not
all keytab were oclaro Moto share Behat
he is the one who has sent down upon you singular, the book in
which are clear versus they are the mother of the book. And others
are more to Share Bear.
Even translating that is a headache for translators. But
ambiguity is one possible interpretation for this. So in the
Quran, we have necessarily the beginnings of a religion of
diversity, a culture of ambiguity, the text seems to impose that the
Hadith even more so.
Or the only religion with an absolutely gigantic and oceanic
scriptural basis, maybe a million different Hadith reports. It's
said to be the pre modern world largest single body of literature.
And it's revelation of different degrees, where there's the site,
and the knife, and the more sun, and the moon cotta, and the Hassan
and arriba, and dozens of other categories simply on the basis of
the soundness or dubiousness of attribution. That's before you get
into the question of what it actually means, what the context
might have mean, whether it's bound by context, or whether it's
a general view, or what the Sahaba might have made of those Hadith,
or whether there's a consensus on the meaning of those Hadith. It's
an enormous Cornucopia that has been preserved for us because of
the love that the first generations had of the Holy
Prophet. And the determination that not one of those pearls
should ever be lost. We have this
mountain of Hadith.
You can't construct a fundamentalism on the basis of a
scripture like that. Can't do it cannot do fundamentalism in Islam,
because it's just too enormous. To diverse, there's too much of it.
And it's never even been combined in a single collection, a single
Scripture, the Quran, the time said, Not off man subsequently was
the most half which we have today. The hadith fits in hundreds of
collections, remember, so Yachty, tried, died before he could finish
it. Others try there's just too much too big, and arguments as to
whether something is from the sahabi, or from the Holy Prophet,
or whether the sabe think, is considered Hadith and it can't be
done.
So you can't have fundamentalism in the Islamic context in the
sense of the simple, literal understanding of what the
Revelation says there's too much of it. It's too diverse. It's not
intended to be that. So all the jurists of Islam are legal
leaders, have seen that as a kind of obvious first order truth. It
is not the divine intention, that Islam is the simple formula.
Doctrine is this, and this is how we do that. And this is always
heard divorce has to happen. And this is always how you have to
rule a country. It's multiple.
It's endlessly multiple. And this is part of the greatness of it. So
if you look at the text of all sort of where it classifies
scriptural statements, you get
chapter heading
was like this the unequivocal the Perspicuous unclear words obscure
difficult ambivalent, general specific, absolute qualified,
literal metaphorical homonyms.
That's just for the Quran for the Hadith, even more so.
So
this is kind of the Muslim response to ballasts historians
observation, which is that not only is it a reality that pre
modern Islamic law and to a considerable extent doctrine, and
certainly mysticism is endlessly multiple.
But this is actually intended by the revealer of the Scripture.
Otherwise, why is it so hard to understand so much.
Some of it, despite all of the current rhetoric about Kitab, or
sunnah, has not even been properly edited in a critical way.
I was involved with the project to edit
that must not have asthma had been humble.
And we found over 100 Hadith that weren't included, weren't included
in any of the existing printed editions, because those additions
had been based on late manuscripts or had just been very carelessly
collocated. And nowadays, you have movements that are turning
countries upside down on the basis of the literal reading of texts
that aren't even accurate texts and are different from the
manuscripts. not impressive. So
ours cannot be a fundamentalist tradition. But it's juridical
custodians, those who are aware of the enormous burden of
responsibility and manner that they carry from God, the all on
that water that will NBS as to the profits, which is the CMC logo,
that's some quite a heavy thing to carry.
Got a frightening place to stand, are the ones who assured that this
ambiguity is maintained within the boundaries, and that absurdity and
frivolity at work, can't intrude into it. That the Sangha is this
big family of discussions and methodologies and conclusions, but
it does have certain limits.
The word Muqtada, heretical, reprehensible, innovative, still
has a meaning.
Nobody says there's six obligatory prayers every day, certain things
are really clear. So that's another event just intentions.
We have a religion whose texts are telling us that Muslims can't be
fundamentalist if they read the text. On the other hand, we have
this remarkable consistency of many of our forms.
Isn't it interesting that the Christians, there are plenty of
Christian fundamentalists who believe in the literal inspiration
of the King James Bible. And yet the way in which they worship is a
million different ways, and it changes all the time, you don't
know what you're going to see next in some of those churches.
The preacher comes in and he's wearing a tuxedo and a bow tie and
there's a guy with an organ and it's like Vegas and curtains and
people eating doughnuts in the mega church. The only thing you're
not going to see that is how Satan or ISA used to pray. They don't
even think that that might be a good thing to follow. We do have
this principle of precedent of sunnah which, through the jurists,
responsible and ego, Lis filtration of everything, and then
merciful regard for what human beings need, creates a consistent
religion. So multiplicity, hardwired into the logic, the
circuit boards of the religions, part Dr. But at the same time, we
have forms that seem to be more consistent and uniform than in
other religions. And that's another funny thing is
you go into a mosque, and you're not going to see the Imam wearing
a tuxedo and somebody with a kind of Vegas organ,
little kind of roll of drums when somebody comes on to do truth and
TESTIMONY TIME, if you see that stuff, you'll see how decadent it
is. No, you will not see that in any mosque out of the 10 million
mosques that exist in the Ummah, you won't see one where they're
doing it.
So that's another interesting accomplishment, a culture of
ambiguity we like if he left rehire till he left. That's what
it is to be part of the Sunnah. wedgemount But on the other hand,
out of this non fundamentalist tradition, this culture of
ambiguity we get forms that are within certain boundaries quite
consistent and unsurprising.
You go into a mosque you're pretty certain as to what you're going to
see.
There might trick out the mosque with all kinds of weird things.
And Bala sweets into calendars, can't avoid them and tinsel and
yar Mohammed who knows what they're going
Put in the bud, the form of the press. Nobody dares to fiddle with
that ever. Yeah, or there'd be a riot, half of Pakistan, stop
shouting in the streets and limit is going to do that. So this is
another of the interesting civilization accomplishments of
our civilization. Now, another aspect of this, and I haven't even
got onto my leader of today yet, maybe he'll have to wait a bit is
the
nature of the law, which these people are the custodians of?
I've mentioned, it's not statutory law. Because one of the things
that these jurists are doing is not accepting any kind of external
regulation. There's no legislature.
There's no House of Lords or
Monache, the ultimate source of legality. No symbol of the crown
on court documents is not a Christ. Muslim court is not a
Crown Court.
And this, again, is often misunderstood by modern Muslims.
And Bauer doesn't talk about this so much. But while Haluk is at
Columbia University, he is maybe the most respected Western expert
on
Sharia
does see this very clearly in some of his recent books have been
about this, the way in which Muslims nowadays look at Islamic
law, only a problematic, inadequate translation of Sharia,
and try and turn it into something that looks like Western law,
statutory law. So this is one of his recent books, he keeps writing
books that get heavier and heavier
is an erudite, an interesting person. And
he, of course, recognizes diversity. The fact of differences
of opinions that page 364
is representative of what he has found is not the Muslim,
Palestinian Christian origin.
The central fact is that Islamic law is a grassroots system that
takes form and operates within the social universe. It travels upward
with diminishing velocity to affect in varying degrees and
forms the modus operandi of the state.
So the law is shaping the state, but the law comes up from the
population from below. That strange, the jurists themselves
emanate from the very society and societal culture that they serve.
And the law is ideology and doctrine required that they be so.
In other words, it's not the state that is appointing professors have
jurisprudence and enacting the laws and it all comes down from
above its site itself that is producing the jurist and the law
and the judges and the state is affected affected by this. It's
passive, not active. It is one of the most striking features of
Islamic law as a doctrinal and judicial system that it is
generated at the very social level on which it is applied.
In sharp, contradict contradistinction, the law of the
nation state is superimposed from a central height in downwards
direction. First, originating in the mighty powers of the state
apparatus, and they're offered, they're often deployed in a highly
structured but deliberately descending movement to the
individuals constituting the social order. Those individuals
who have harnessed as national citizens, fathers and mothers in
the nation's families, economically productive agents,
taxpayers, soldiers, etc.
As society subjected to Islamic law is one that is largely self
governing, in which law and the morality intertwined with it
largely operates in the interests of that society. By contrast, a
society subject to the nation state is one that is ruled from
above,
and so on. So he's drawing attention to another of our
strange paradoxes when we look at the Sharia and those who are
leaders in determining the Sharia and that it is not statutory law.
And that historically, actually is strange. It's unlike what the
Chinese did, or the Romans did. It's odd for the state not to
legislate. What does the soltanto Well, he's busy with his new loot
or with his slaves or with whatever, but he can declare war.
Sometimes he can appoint chief judges,
but he doesn't legislate.
The state doesn't legislate in the Sharia. And that's pretty
consistent. So in a more recent book, while Haluk on the book is
called The Impossible state, where he looks at the various exclusions
and inclusions and catastrophes of the modern Muslim world where
Sharia is being proposed as the nation's law and he says that's
not how the Sharia works. Look at the text Sharia is not statutory
law. You cannot have the Pakistani parliament say
This is the Islamic law on blasphemy. And it becomes right
for the country because Islamic law does not give the parliament
or the state that right.
It's God's law interpreted by the jurist in a million different
ways. As soon as the state starts to impose it, you've got some
totalitarian thing with the government making HD head and
determining which of these multiple ambiguous solutions is
correct. What right does the government have to exercise HD had
all the members of the Pakistani military or parliament, super
geniuses in HD head? And the gradations of Hadith? I don't
think so. So he says, This is the greatest legal system ever evolved
in human history. And towards the end of the book, he suggests ways
in which you can overcome much of the modern disjuncture of Western
law.
But modern Islamist model of the Islamic State is completely alien
to the Islamic legal system. We don't have statutory law that
government doesn't legislate. Instead, you've got a space almost
an anarchic state, where communities and religious
communities are self regulating with their own laws appointing
their own judges.
Anyway, so this is important for us to understand that Islamic law
is very surprising.
But this has nothing to do with this needs to be emphasized,
nothing to do with some kind of latitude and Arianism. As if truth
doesn't matter. And morality isn't important. This is very moralizing
society. And this law is determined by interpreters who are
not messing around. But that guiding assumption that which
unites them is that it's not so true. And it's never going to be
united. And the texts are not designed to be read by
fundamentalists.
So let's look at the leader that I wanted to cite, as an example as
an exemplar and figure perhaps as the first of whom we have
extensive documentation because we have his views his fatwas his
book, still to hand, which is Imam Malik, Imam Malik been ns. So
let's see how he fits into this.
Bit of bio data, first of all, in his context, remember, the Islamic
Revolution has happened, blowing the minds of the pagan Arabs who
didn't even have a law before it arrived, blowing the minds of the
Byzantines and the Persians who want a state law and this is not
going to be state law. It's something really unusual in
radical dis continuity with what went before. And because of the
nature of the sources, which in the early period, were even less
systematized and filtered and graded than was the case later on.
Of course, early Islamic law really diverse.
Amongst the Sahaba Islamic law is differently interpreted. Some of
the Sahaba will consider to be muffed is sometimes they say there
were 10 of the Sahaba who could give judgments in Islamic law.
Most of them were not, you might get even ambass for a religious
judgment. You wouldn't go to Abu Huraira for religious judgment by
and large because he wasn't recognized as Mufti even though he
knew
a mountain of of Hadith in the earliest period, the idea of
jurists, jurists, experts in the fix the understanding of the law,
rather than people who just kind of went through the hard drive and
cited a relevant Hadith, which is we've seen it's not it's not going
to work was was pretty normative. So
he is born.
We didn't know exactly when, towards the end of in the 90s of
the second Islamic century,
pretty early
and becomes
an expert quite early on, as a child were told that his mother,
seeing his interest in learning and the prophetic legacy, put on
the formal kind of clothes of a student of Hadith. And said, go to
the mosque in Medina and and learn. So he was young and you
find that the Hadith that he narrates, have, amazingly
incomparably short isn't adds a lot of the time because it's kind
of close to that age is meeting people in Medina who knew the
Sahaba
so
that becomes one of the watchwords of his method.
Born in Medina, dies in Medina, bear in Medina who looked at old
Ottoman pictures you can see his tomb is one of the biggest domes
in Alba Pierre
Is the antonym of Medina scholars of Medina
and
from an early age becomes really paradigmatic of the sobriety and
austerity of that particular type.
He is not the sort of playful, whimsical, postmodern scholar that
you encounter nowadays he was a man of deadly seriousness.
We know a bit about his appearance because Abu Hanifa who visited in
once what honey for son unmad visits him several times it takes
from him but Abu Hanifa meets him one Malik doesn't really leave
Medina ever except for Hajj.
He calls him
as rock. So we're pretty clear that he had blue eyes.
DNA test him but it seems that his father was from the US buffer
tribe of Yemen. But his mother was from the Mohali convert background
we don't really know. So this becomes significant for Malick,
even though he's in this Arab city of Medina, where all the great
poets of the time are. Medina has a great center of Arabic
literature.
But he has an openness in his foot for the non Arab, which is
important not to go on about this. But it needs to be said in our
communities that one of the most startling and shocking aspects of
the Islamic Revolution was that your DNA didn't actually matter
too much. You learn your ancestry. And you can take pride in a
virtuous or generous great grandfather. That's fine, take
pride in their virtues.
But it doesn't have legal significance. Whereas for pre
Islamic Arabia, that who you were your rights, who would stand up
for you was determined entirely by your tribe.
So he was happy to allow at a time of very considerable time with the
bunny or Maya
sharib chauvinism.
A lot of discrimination against convert in the name of kind of
Arab pride. The insistence they continue to pay the Jizya even
after converting because they weren't really proper Arabs a lot
of discriminations in terms of official and military
appointments.
Imam Malik was on the side of equality of believers and this
needs to be recalled just this morning. I got another of those
emails.
African girl
being proposed to,
by somebody of Arab origin,
either want to get married, Sharia doesn't object. But the Arab
parents say no. Why? Because of African origin. Full stop, end of
story. What can they do? Just this morning, this comes
still 14 centuries after this prophetic revolution. That's still
how we are.
So don't think that learning about the early Islamic time is just
about the move towards the Islamic perfection which we now inhabit
Jaya. Helia is often for many Muslims and Muslim families and
Muslim governments more significant than any Islamic
values. So, we need to recall that
Yep, so he is
brought up in the city of Medina. And as a young person, and as a
child, he sought the people of Medina veneration for anything
that was still there from the time of the Holy Prophet. So not only
was the author of the Rasul has always been part of the culture of
the people of Medina that you have reverence for it in a kind of
physical way, which is why he never in his life rode an animal
horse or mule or donkey in Medina, just out of respect.
Mm Otto even I'd be rebuff was another great jurist of the time
when he went into the mosque to pray, would always touch the
minibar before praying in order to absorb some of the blessing memory
of the prophetic time and that one of the Khalifa has
heard that the minbar of this great mosque was just the kind of
old wooden thing that it had been at the time that the Holy Prophet
said that you were going to replace it with this great kind of
ivory and ebony
And jeweled thing and people of Medina protested and Imam Malik
says La ARA and your former nurse Rasul Allah. I don't think that
it's right that people should be deprived of the relics of Allah's
Messenger. This is always important for the people of Medina
in particular, every little well.
When I was living in Saudi Arabia, there were people who got to this
carpark
and in the carpark there was a kind of scratched area.
Somebody had taken a break or something just traced out this
kind of rectangle the size of a prayer company, we'll get them
pray.
Because it's narrated by the people of Medina that Holy Prophet
salAllahu alayhi wasallam once prayed to records in that place,
and even though there's a supermarket in the carpark, and
it's kind of like,
some American city just to look at it, but with palm trees, and maybe
it's
Miami.
There's this rectangle, and the people will go there still to pray
there to Rocco's people in Medina and the wells in the mountains and
they know where everything is. That's part of what they've in.
inherited from the age of the Salah. So the whole city is kind
of redolent with fragrant blessings from the Holy Prophets
time.
So he's brought up in a house of
learning.
And one of his teachers was naffaa,
who
is one of the figures of the so called Golden Chain Malik's also
Buhari is preferred. It's not just Malik, from Nafa. From Evan Omar
from the Holy Prophet, so just two intermediaries
so a very high isnaad As they say, short and bad he is absolutely
reputable, puritanical figures if an adverse very ascetical
Nathanael, his great student, and he's telling Imam Malik directly
so that hadith could not possibly be open to any kind of
interpolation or fabrication. It's just kind of a first order truth
that that is a genuine narration.
Yup, so we find in the first century, amongst the Sahaba and
attended a in a certain reverence for the city of Medina and for its
FIP.
So,
Abdullah ibn Omar, who just mentioned, heard that the Khalifa
this is under Malik bin Marwan the one who built the Dome of the Rock
in Jerusalem compared to Sahara was involved in arbitrating legal
dispute
between two jurists and trying to figure out which of them was right
so even Omar wrote to him saying in quantum there is it to the to
jurist to return in the matura family coma be during his Hijrah
was sunnah.
If you want good Council, then follow the Dar Al Hijrah and the
Sunnah.
So, the earliest period we find this reverence for the
prophetic fragrance of the city,
which still contain
a community which was in continuity with a prophetic age,
unlike some of the garrison towns, for start in Egypt call for in
Iraq, Muslims in Damascus, the Sahaba had spread to many places,
but the local tradition was a new tradition, whereas Medina was in
continuity with that early age and there had been so little
opportunity for it to,
to, to change. So in Malik I've mentioned a kind of
saintly individual but of the rather stern variety, the Jelena
type,
so and his reverence for the Sunnah was that he would never
give a fatwa unless he had waldock.
If he was asked for a hadith sometimes he'll go back to his
house and do a Wasson, before coming to narrate a hadith just
out of reverence. It's not required for the validity of
Hadith narration but just out of the kind of, or in which he held
the prophetic legacy and his knowledge of the onerous
responsibility of saying that God's messenger had said something
because of his fearfulness of getting things wrong, whenever he
He issued a fatwa, he was famous for saying, the hollow and water
in Lebanon.
This is exactly what we mean by the Islamic model of leadership,
who don't want to do it. It's your moral obligation to transmit
something that you know to be true from the Holy Prophet salallahu
Alaihe Salam, you can't hide that light under a bushel, but it's
really scary. You don't want to distort people's knowledge of
Revelation. So because of his own self knowledge, his own
understanding of his weakness and of the momentous business that he
was embarked upon who begin with this, hello, I love it. I love it.
I have to do this.
Not here I am. And I'd like to thank His Majesty for inviting me
to the splendid Islamic conference. And we're so grateful
to the catering staff, and here we are, they accept this medal on
behalf of the Muslim whatever. Instead of that performance, which
we have nowadays is just a performance bla bla bla, he's
being asked to relate from the best of creation. He doesn't want
to do it, but he knows he has to do it. And this is famous is a
part of his fastidious moral nature. His conscience imposes it
upon him.
Also making sure that he would only speak when he had consulted
with others was part of his leadership. I guess he said he
didn't give his first fatwah
until he had consulted with 79 all on that, on that fatwa.
Nowadays, give everybody's Mufti.
you post something on YouTube. And by the next day, you've got 50
fatwas, in bad English is haram. This is sunnah Masha Allah,
everybody's Mufti nowadays.
But he was not like that, and would consult and will consult and
will consult until he gave the view that he considered to be
correct.
Yeah, one of his
teachers was called Rubby
Rubby. He was his super k. And this becomes one of the features
of
fuckery in this early period, right? It means kind of
considered. deliberation doesn't just mean opinion. Right? He has a
very specific kind of view that you take on the basis of certain
processes that you've gone through very often. And this is starting
to come to our awareness. Now in modern scholarship.
We assume that in this formative period, there wasn't really a
legal methodology. There wasn't a solid fuck, as we later assume,
from Ghazali, and Amedee. And those amazingly complicated things
with 20 different types of PS.
The old assumption was that there's a formative period of
Islamic law and things are kind of chaotic. And people are giving
views just on the basis of what they think might be right. And
this is a position identified with somebody called yours, if shocked
in particular, who was active in the mid 20th century and was one
of the great professors the history of Islamic law, who had
this idea of
the formative period and ancient schools of Islamic law, the School
of the hijas School of Iraq particularly.
And then Imam Shafi comes at the end of this formative period and
with his famous reseller explains a methodology for the first time
on how you deal with the Quran and the Sunnah and you deduce the law.
That's been a very widely held view. More recently, we have
learned to challenge that. Dr. Omar Abdullah, for instance, who
has it was his PhD thesis, but he published it recently Malik and
Medina. The point of his book really is to show that if you
really look at Malik's
judgments, and you reconstruct the reasoning behind them, you can see
that he was also operating with something you can certainly call a
sort of.
It's not a kind of arbitrary, careless, random deploying of
Hadith, the way we often do it nowadays, instead, there's a
rigorous methodology behind it, which you can reconstruct what he
didn't publish was a book on how to do it. But he nonetheless had
his soul. And the same goes for Abu Hanifa and allows that I
certainly and the other early schools, it's just a chef, it
actually wrote it down, and it from that time on became a kind of
literary genre in Islamic civilization. But to assume that
the fuck was kind of chaotic, in the first couple of centuries
simply underestimates the again fastidious precision with which
these
People research the sources and the
reluctance that they had to actually express the opinions.
This wasn't an age in which people would just
randomly hold for So Robbie is one of his teachers Rabhi are famous
for giving views without apparent prophetic support. The reason for
that being in the city of Medina, the practice, the city of Medina
could be interpreted as being a reliable recollection of the
Prophetic practice, or that he had Hadith or other early texts own
but just didn't cite them in offering his position. So that's
rubbish. One of his teachers. Another was Ibn Hormoz.
had been homeless seems to have had a book, which in some ways was
the kind of precedent of the water which is the famous book, which we
sometimes think is a Hadith collection, although it's not,
which is
identified with Imam Malik given hornless also seems to have had
this
text and he's a text of that type, Ibn Hormoz. Again, emblematic of
this type of scholar, the leader
who doesn't want to pretend that he has the answers.
One of the famous things that every student learns about Imam
Malik is that he would say, I don't know, a lot of the time,
once some people came, asked him 42 questions, and he said, I don't
know that three to 36 of them. They've traveled to Medina to get
the right answer, or at least his preferred opinion is
a bit disappointing.
It's like going to sort of Chief Justice, or saying, Well, what's
your view on this case? I didn't know.
The Attorney General I didn't know doesn't happen nowadays, partly
because they lose their job if they kept saying,
but it is from their diffidence and that control of their egos.
Because the Odium, academic,
the besetting effort or sin of academics is that they always want
to have an answer to everything. And that it's kind of lips, the
bits the site down. If in a monograph or in a conference, you
say, I don't know, who knows? You're not supposed to do that.
You don't get tenure by saying, I don't know. Every time somebody
asks you a question. In an interview, the whole system is
directed really towards propping up people's ego. So people wing it
and they come up with reasons that they may not actually believe in
and this is something a member of US ally talks about the bad
scholar who pretends to know, but doesn't. So he gets this from Evan
Hormoz.
And it becomes Malik's what word really so Carla Malik, semi auto
Abner Hormoz in your call Youngberry. And you return early
modular Sir, who cola at three?
Malik said, I heard Ibn Hormoz saying it is right for the scholar
to teach his associates the words I don't know.
That's a good piece of advice for a scholar. But why is this the
case? Well, he explains the kind of man that he's studying with I
would visit Ibn Hormoz he would order the servant to shut the door
and close the curtains. And then he would speak about the early
days of this ummah, and tears would run down his beard.
Another type of contrite type of scholar, nostalgic for the last
fragrant days of early Islam, part of the Hadith scholars and indeed
the jurists task is to try and recreate something of the unique
spiritual immediacy of the early days of the ummah.
Sometimes we're told the Imam Malik in order to get to his view,
would not allow himself to sleep or to eat or to drink while he was
researching something.
Wouldn't be like the modern scholar who gets up on Starbucks
and talks to his friends and it gets back to something and
postpones it. He went when he wanted to do something, he would
focus on it in the there and now and not do anything until he had
come to his view on it.
Yep, so he's translated transmitting from these scholars
fic and ratiu and Hadith. He has other teachers as well. Jennifer
esodoc and his father Mohammed and by
occur, we tend to think of as she authors in this early period, she
our kind of political legitimacy movement rather than the
denomination. So there was no problem with Abu Hanifa Imam
Malik, associating as equals with jurist later identified with she
lines
with a zaharie, naffaa. And others. You might say, well, this
is all a bit provincial, he's sitting in Medina shouldn't a
scholarly leader, particularly in Islamic culture, which we assume
is the culture of rattler and traveling everywhere? Shouldn't be
travel isn't as odd. He's just saying that? Well, the answer is
because he's in Medina, the world travels to him.
Most of the hedges, go through Medina, or visit Medina on their
way to Hajj now includes the scholarly elite. So it gets to see
people from around the Ummah and he goes out of his way to get to
know them. Because the principle of juridical leadership in Islam
is that you don't just know the books, but you know, the people to
whom the law applies. And regional variation is something that is an
axiom in Sharia.
Not in matters of worship.
But in matters of
personal law, and the actual practice of the court. Because the
judge has far more discretion and leeway in an Islamic court to see
what actually is natural justice in a circumstance than Western
statutory law where the judge can't do anything, you've done
something outrageous online. But the law hasn't caught up with that
outrageous thing yet the way in which society can penalize you.
But in Islamic law, that the judge does have the right not to impose
a death sentence, but to impose some kind of custodial sentence of
a fine if you've done something that he thinks is wrong, even if
there's no statute, which is another thing that seems strange
to the Western consciousness that often depends on the culture of
individuals. And the ruling might be different for different
families or for different regions because of what the local
perception of natural justice might be. So Imam Malik is
actually he's got his finger on the pulse of the OMA just by being
in Medina, and meeting all of these jurists, and that's one
reason why this apparently very local matter becomes global,
because his approach is being taken out.
So his call spreads quite quickly in Egypt, North Africa, even
during his
lifetime.
It was always experienced as being
a kind of practical and workable system of law. I've mentioned that
it did have or fall. But these weren't conceived as an elaborate
philosophical, jurisprudential structure,
but rather focused on
the Imams close knowledge of people's actual circumstances, and
his awareness of the purpose of the law, which is a tayseer to
make human life easier under God. So
there's a lot of things in the madhhab such as taqdeer, sort of
estimating what something ought to be, if you didn't have a clear
Hadith for it, followed certain assumptions presuppositions
based not on a random subjective sense of what ought to be right.
But on his life experience of dealing with the practice of a
righteous city and of human nature.
Because of his lifelong experience of litigants, and of jurists, and
of just dealing with the marketplace, and just people in
Medina, and hearing cases from strange places around the world
for scholars who came to visit him, uh, his idea of juridical
leadership was based on somebody who really used society and was
part of it, which again, is part of the
what I began by saying, the characteristic Islamic vision that
we go through the world to get to the other side, rather than trying
to tiptoe around it.
In the Catholic context, people will say, well, the priest is
advising me on my marriage, or how to do with my children, the priest
has never been in that space. Who are these old guys in the Vatican?
Two right, begin cyclical rules about family life. It's odd,
was an Islamic context because the jurist is absolutely part of
society and married and has children and might participate in
wars and has a business or a shop. It's on the basis of that close
experience of the gritty reality, the texture of human life, that
the jurist acquires this this fear rasa, this spiritual aesthetic
insight into what sounds like good law
which is absolutely necessary given the complexity of the
revealed sources, there has to be this right. This inspired
considered judgment. Again, this is not a fundamentalist age and
not a fundamentalist community.
And one of the famous heroic leadership incidents of the life
of Imam Malik and there's a famous parallel in the life of Imam Ahmed
bin Hamburg, underlines this fact that the law is not determined by
the state,
which is that the KDF sitting in his palace in Baghdad, which is
this kind of outrageous thing with seven concentric walls and moats,
and guards from different countries and
a pet lion that guards the throne that it's that kind of Arabian
Nights. Well, Malik doesn't want to go near that the bailiff
sitting on this throne thinks wouldn't be nice to have a single
law for my empire. Maybe the Byzantines have got that Justinian
code. And I could be in charge of much more power if I control the
law. And these jurists don't want me to have anything except my
throne and my lion and my name and the hot person. I'd like a bit
more than that, please.
So the Khalifa tries to throw his weight around by compelling
leading jurists to issue judgments that the Khalifa approves off. So
among sore is the first really significant Ambassade qlf.
Since Imam Malik a messenger telling him not to narrate a
particular Hadith, Lisa Arlen was crying Talaq,
which is that forced divorce is invalid. In the Sharia, you can't
force somebody to divorce somebody else. And then Halifa wants to get
rid of this partly because of the aversive forcible assumption of
power. And the idea everybody had been forced to take bait.
This still goes on, of course, some new king or tyrant appears in
a Muslim country and everybody has seen someone will die, we pledge
our obedience to you and you're forced to do that the Abbasids
we're forcing people to do this after the very violent, brutal
revelation revolution. And so the analogy from this legitimacy of a
forced divorce was important and Imam Malik gets this messenger and
says, No.
And so the governor of Medina is almost ordered to cease and flog
Imam Malik
and puts them on the rack. So he's physically stretched his shoulders
dislocated, and he passes out if the pain is so great that he loses
consciousness
and they loosened the rack and he comes to and is asked, Well, are
you going to continue with this hadith?
His Royal Highness doesn't like and he says,
I forgive a mon sore.
Why you forgiving the honey for for torturing us I forgive him
because I don't want to meet God on the day of judgment. Having
said something bad about somebody from the prophetic family.
It's a kind of way around it but it's also indicative of the
greatness. He's not kind of cursing
and screaming He forgives the Khalifa. The Khalifa has taken a
different view she doesn't agree with but he's not going to start
screaming and cursing. So he's not going to stop narrating this
Heidi's and so that the police of the time, shave off his beard
and mounts him on a camel and parade him through Medina looking
ridiculous.
And then he's ordered to condemn himself aloud in front of
everybody but he says man, either funny or funny.
I may look strange today, but whoever knows me will recognize
me. My name is Malik Ibn Anas. And I say Lisa Allen will Stukeley
Talaq, forced divorce is illicit.
So the key word here is if this says, Well, I can't really go any
further. He's stubborn,
ontological saraha, who let him go and so his released that's an
example of leadership that in
extremists, these early ambassadors are very brutal.
They've even dug up the bodies of the bunny or Maya and thrown the
remains to the dogs. They're kind of vicious.
They're doing this to Imam Malik. And it's a kind of important
political thing that they're trying to force him to do, but he
will not succeed.
Another great a basket case with Haroon Rashid, the famous one of
the Arabian Nights, was in Medina and wanted to go to Imam Malik's
class.
And the Khalifa has his chair brought everybody sitting on the
floor and a Khalifa was on his chair.
And Imam Malik stops talking and indicates that the Khalifa should
sit on the floor along with all of the students.
Haroon says,
what can you send them away, so I can read you some Hadith and you
can give me a Jazza in these Hadith and Malik says, If ordinary
people are not allowed to attend because of the wealthy, how the
wealthy are going to benefit? In other words, it's in your interest
to be with these other students. This is not a kind of private
thing. Can I have a private session with you please share. I
don't want to be with those people because it wouldn't really know
very much and they're all
people I don't approve of notices. The Imam is very happy to ask the
khalifa to sit on the floor. And this is leadership and he kind of
gets away with it even though he's beaten and stretched and has his
beard shaved off because he will not make concessions and this is
why we still revere his name and he's madhhab is still followed by
so much of the ALMA maybe 15% of the ALMA is Maliki.
So when put to the test, he doesn't buckle. Nowadays, some
Allamah do buckle. The Grand Mufti of here, or the Minister of Alkaff
of they're threatened, sometimes quite in quite bloodcurdling terms
by this, that, or the other Sultan or general or whoever it might be
will say, all right, every caught in my Gulf country is now going to
be only about obeying the ruler and the wonderfulness of the
ruler, and we don't have any other subjects. That's what we're going
to do. And this is what happens. This would not be the way of Imam
Malik, who
was a dignified man and must have found this very humiliating. We're
told he was dressed well, and he had a nice house. He wasn't the
kind of barefoot
dervish type, he believed that scholarship should look good. This
was terribly humiliating for him, but he wasn't going to capitulate.
And that is an important lesson for our age when regimes try to
control the Sharia, or abolish the Sharia or get scholars to give
some crazy statement and pressurize them. Unfortunately,
if you're going to be a scholar, you have to say what Mr. Malik
says each time is giving a fact right now Hola, La Quwata in
Lebanon, even if this means I have to go to jail. This is God's
religion. This is the way of the Holy Prophet, this is God's law.
This is how it is.
And there have been some there perhaps not enough heroic
instances of this in recent years, so
we should
move on to consider
although we've already learned a certain amount about him, his
books or while his book really, but there are two that are
significant in the early spread of his mouth hub.
These are amongst the most influential texts in Islam. The
first of them is Alan Watts top
people think well this is the sixth or seventh of the
sacred six Hadith collections, which is a very kind of popular
way of seeing this six sound Hadith collections but in fact
their sound Hadith and collections that most of us will probably
never have heard of. Another reason why you can't be a
fundamentalist in Islam is that these Hadith are so numerous and
spread very widely.
Are these people who don't in the Arabic who are telling you what
Islam is yelling away on YouTube because of mosques enhanced
translation of Buhari
which version of Bihar is he using didn't know there's different
versions of Buhari
it's a sorry sign of our decadence unfortunately there's plenty of
Hadith that aren't in these Hadith collections Hadith in
one of the she had Hadith in
a Kabir Martin in February top Ronnie, Hadith in the more sunnah
of Abdul Razak, or even ABI Shaybah, dozens and dozens and
hundreds of Hadith collections, which also have Hadith in them
that the jurists will know and will take into consideration of
this scripture, realizing of the sound six as if as long as the
book and six more books is a complete aberration and a kind of
bit of a westernizing of Islam, I think. And all of those ideas are
never going to be translated
Got
a million Hadith in different versions, and I don't think so.
Even though translation doesn't give you access in a juridically
reliable way to the original, you have to use Arabic. So
the water
effectively this is his own compilation. He didn't write it
but it's verdicts of his and Hadith, and sayings and reports of
the believers, particularly the jurists of the city of Medina and
the word water
gives us a clue.
It means the approved what it what it always kind of trample on in
other words, all of the animals are coming to the watering hole
and leveling the ground. And this is something that everybody has
been to and except so he says, I showed my book to 70 jurists of
Medina and Kula home, water on the LA they all agreed with me on it.
So I call it and what
I mentioned Epinal merger, Sean, one of his teachers who also had a
matar, which was slightly earlier. Malik has a disciple Ibn Webb who
also has on water so he wasn't the only person to write a book called
on water.
Water is a collection of material in the category called more sun
nuff
which means that it's arranged not by narrator, but by subject, which
is useful Hadith collections that must not have been handled,
narrated just by
the,
the narrator of the Hadith.
The sahabi, or the ones that you get the Hadith from are rather
technical and difficult to use. But this is narrated by arranged
by subject.
Again, those who think that you can know what Islam is just by
pulling off the shelf translations, or even single
editions should be aware of the fact that the Mater is not just
there in a single version, but there's maybe 75 different
versions of the water of Malik. Again, this is our culture of
ambiguity idea. But it hard sometimes for the modern mind.
I've read this in the water.
Okay, which more top? Did you look at the manuscripts? Do you know
there's differences even about that particular Mater, etc. We
tend not to go there because we're just too lazy. And almost all of
these are actually Malik's own recensions. He produces different
versions of his collection, which is not kind of like a monograph
nowadays is perfect. I'm going to send it to the University Press,
but rather, his systematic notes is anthology of legal and
doctrinal material that evolves over time. And the best known of
these is the ascension the version of somebody called yeah, here,
then yeah, here a lacy,
who is a Spaniard is from Cordoba.
And it's perhaps the most widely used recension, partly because he
was one of the last of Malik students so he gets this text when
it's an evolved.
form, and Malik really respected
Jacobian he actually called him an archeologist and the last the
intelligent man of Andalusia.
So, as well as there being different mortals,
there are lots of commentaries, a lot of countries on the water a
lot of the Indian scholars produced scholars on water for
various reasons, the Indians have always loved the book.
Perhaps the most famous commentary is that of imminence or Kearney,
which is in four volumes, but there are plenty of others. And
you really need to go into the commentaries in order to see the
complexity of the interpreters task, their commentaries, because
the texts are complicated.
So what is in it? Well, it contains sound Hadith, it contains
sayings of the companions, fatwas of the companions, and of the
tablet, I mean, and also Malik's view, considered scrupulous
opinion writing on certain issues.
This famous isnaad, which we mentioned, Malik
are nerfed and even Omar on the Rasulullah sallallahu alayhi wa
sallam is there in the Matahari call it the most reliable of all
of the chains. There's 80
of these in the more top
and
scholars have debated and continues to debate on the degree
of soundness of all of the Hadith in the water.
So there's 222 is Nan
or Hadith was snared in the Yemen. Yakir ascension of the moor,
which don't name the companion, it's a hadith but it kind of skips
a generation. This is what's called the morsel. There's a lot
of them in the MATA and in other early Maliki texts and texts in
general. Dr. Omar in his book Malika Medina explains this and
explains why, in some cases are more subtle Hadith Hadith admits
the name of the sahabi is regarded as having more evidentiary weight
than
a hadith which is Hadith in our head sounds narrated in a single
line. And there's complex reasons for that. It's certainly not an
example of his
carelessness.
Even Abdullah, but perhaps the greatest mind who has applied
himself to the mortar at nominal bar is
two or three centuries later, he's from Cordoba, but travels
extensively and becomes the chief body of Lisbon, and Osborn, which
of course, was Muslim city at the time,
and writes this amazing thing called kitab. A Tim heed.
One of the monuments of medieval scholarship Kitab it Tim heed the
Murphy and water image on the annual ehsani, which is a big
multi volume. Text, which is basically a study of the isn't
adds many of the innards of the water and establishing them and
analyzing them.
And his conclusion, which is generally followed in the later
months, which is that there are only four Hadith in the Mata,
which can be considered to be non sati.
I've got a list of them here, but perhaps time is pressing. The
other book which preserves Malik's
is called N word a winner
sometimes cause more than one that's known. This is not compiled
by malloc himself. And it's much bigger. What it contains basically
is Malik's legal views that were collected during his lifetime. And
also fatwas, which were Anna logically deduced from his fatwas.
So it's a text of the early Maliki madhhab, really, rather than Manix
own book. Again, the problem with this is that, although it contains
it's one of the most important sources we have the social and
legal life of early Islam,
there isn't really a good edition of it. There's an old one, which
everybody used to use a recall, it was on sale on kind of
tobacconist shops in Cairo.
But it was based on a Moroccan manuscript, which now nobody can
find. And there's also one that came out about 15 years ago in Abu
Dhabi, because the Emirates is still technically a Maliki
country.
But that is also quite problematic because it doesn't really explain
which manuscripts it's used. So we don't have a stable text for this.
Unfortunately, it's been worked on by somebody called Mick lush
morani, who is one of the great historians of early Islamic law,
and particularly of the Maliki madhhab, who's spent much of his
life in the libraries of Cairo one, which is this great city,
inland city of Tunisia, which has some very, very ancient Maliki
texts, including versions of the Madonna, but also other early
Maliki texts and we're stuck Raja, the otter the year, the malware
Zia, of Ibn Mo was a while they have as long as the model as well
as the Madonna, these other compendium of Maliki law. And
here's some some very ancient fragments of those which
apparently don't exist anywhere else. So the main channel for
modern winner is somebody called Epital Qasim, who was one of Malik
style pupils who spent 20 years keeping his clothes company, again
a very austere figure of interest solely Sufis as well he read the
entire Quran every day. And
another figure associated with it is somebody called ash hab, who is
the Chief coffee of Egypt. And then samnaun ibn Saeed who's
buried in in either one. It's quite a big Mazhar. Who is the
chief Gaudi of pirate one
who studied in Medina under some of Malik's pupils
Yeah, another leadership example. So he's always
felt that he was not competent to be a judge. This is understandable
at the age of 74
As the governor of rapier North Africa, presses him, we really
need a good judge, you're the man for the job. This is your
responsibility. As he says, I agree on condition that I have the
right to prosecute members of your family. If you've done anything
wrong, that's the that's the deal has to go in the contract.
So he was always very courteous in his court, but he never allowed
official representatives, any kind of concessions. So if the ruler or
somebody from the government wanted to be represented in the
court, they would have to come themselves, they couldn't just
send an official or a proxy.
We're told that when it comes satin on died, that Amir's family
also crossed with him that they refuse to attend his Jenessa.
He always refused to accept a salary from the state. He was a
judge, but for free, and a great backer. So famously, he was a big
test via prayer prayer beads on his neck while he was he was
judging.
So he is one of the contributing thinkers of the modern wanna
works with Immanuel Qasim. But our understanding of the text is that
essentially, it's there to deal with difficult technical
questions, which are really not covered in mallex. More.
And on those issues, it can be amazingly detailed.
But on other issues, that seems to be quite short. So some scholars
have wondered why that should be it doesn't seem consistent. The
reason why it tends to be short on some issues is generally that
those issues which have been covered in some other text in the
mouth have been particularly in the water.
So we should draw this to a close, we can see that even though I've
just been talking about a lawyer jurisprudence, we see in our
civilization, this is really where the essence of life is. This is
where the divine through morality intersects with the grittiness of
people's lives, and the function of the jurist is conscientiously
and in an egoless way, to create a path for people to engage
positively with a gift of life, and God's creation, but at the
same time to see everything as sacred. So this is religious law,
but it's sacred law. But it isn't really Islamic law in the sense
that a lot of modern modern Muslims understand it, or the
journalists understand it, it is a legal tradition.
And the Maliki are sold particularly that the respect and
the veneration for the people of Medina, represents a Maliki way of
doing business with the revelation. But the Iraqi way is
quite different to that becomes the Hanafi madhhab, which
interacts with a mannequin that is different. The chef a way is
different, the humbly way tends to accept certain categories of
Hadith at face value, that the Malik is and the Hanafis won't
accept these different methods. And that also reminds us of the
point that I started off with, which is this very striking pleura
vocality, of classical Islam, that they had this reactive enough that
they preserved differences. And even though the followers of the
math hubs, human beings, nature, human nature being what it is,
sometimes there were acerbic relations between them,
nonetheless, Sunni Islam becomes this family of opinions and
methodologies, not just in the furore the actual rulings of the
law. But in the whole method, the legal philosophy, the theology, of
how you engage with the text is quite different, as well. So
that's the point that I think we have to end with that we have in
our civilization, heroes and leaders, like Imam Malik, who
managed to combine an absolute refusal of any kind of compromise
in matters related to God's religion with the equal certainty
that God's religion has to be multiple and has to have respect
for different views, different interpretations, FTF, he had to
arrowed all of these things that become really what it is, at least
until the 19th century to be a Muslim of the Atlas underworld. So
I could talk about Imam Malik all day, we've just scratched the
surface and much of the greatness of his soul is to be found in the
actual details of his his rulings. But in sha Allah this is at least
incentivized us to learn more about him Rahmatullahi Allah He
was aleikum wa rahmatullah.
Cambridge Muslim College, training the next generation of Muslim
thinkers