In the Name of Allah, The Merciful, The Compassionate

				Electro-Publisher's Preface

This text which I have here reproduced in electronic form is a
 key-text for
 the proper understanding of Islamic Scholarship, an understanding that is
 not exclusive to specialists only but which every lay-Muslim should have.
 For this reason I have decided to render available on Internet the main
 text of the booklet, I have although purposely omitted the footnotes which
 appear in the original booklet published by WiseMuslim Publications, so
 that those who are really interested in entering the subject fully will be
 moved to order an original copy of the book from the publisher for the
 modest price of A31.00. In the orginal booklet there are 74 footnotes
 covering the same amount of space of the text itself, and I have found them
 to be very useful and full full of references. The original publication is
 not copyrighted and it might be freely reproduced, although it would be
 wise to contact the publisher in order to benefit from other publications
 which might have gone into print lately. Anyone interested on other books
 in English on Islam (in paper form or electronic) should also contact me at
 the E-Mail address given below, many title since long unavailable have been
 put back into print in paper form, also I am at present working on the
 translation from Arabic to English of the "Mukhtasar" of Khalil Ibn Ishaq,
 the most complete compendium on Maliki fiqh, a book which provides a
 complete madhhab framework of the early Islamic jurisprudence.

		The Electro-Publisher

				"Mahdi" <mahdi@ipsnet.it>

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Not copyright
Published 1416/1995 by Wise Muslim Publications
1 Hillcroft Crescent Wembley
Middx HA9 8EE
England
ISBN 0 9520853 1 3

This book is published on behalf of the Sunday Muslim School, Wembley, to
 whom all profits will accrue.
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			Understanding the Four Madhhahs


				Abdal Hakim Murad


THE UMMA'S greatest achievement over the past millenium has undoubtedly been
 its internal intellectual cohesion. From the fifth century of the Hijra
 almost to the present day, and despite the outward drama of the clash of
 dynasties, the Sunni Muslims have maintained an almost unfailing attitude
 of religious respect and brotherhood among themselves. It is a striking
 fact that virtually no religious wars, riots or persecutions divided them
 during this extended period, so difficult in other ways.

The history of religious movements suggests that this is an unusual outcome.
 The normal sociological view, as expounded by Max Weber and his disciples,
 is that religions enjoy an initial period of unity, and then descend into
 an increasingly bitter factionalism led by rival hierarchies. Christianity
 has furnished the most obvious example of this; but one could add many
 others, including secular faiths such as Marxism. On the face of it,
 Islam's ability to avoid this fate is astonishing, and demands careful
 analysis.

There is, of course, a straightforwardly religious explanation. Islam is the
 final religion, the "last bus home", and as such has been divinely secured
 from the more terminal forms of decay. It is true that what Abdul Wadod
 Shalabi has termed "spiritual entropy" has been at work ever since Islam's
 inauguration, a fact which is well-supported by a number of hadiths.
 Nonetheless, Providence has not neglected the Umma. Earlier religions slide
 gently or painfully into schism and irrelevance; but Islamic piety, while
 fading in quality, has been given mechanisms which allow it to retain much
 of the sense of unity emphasised in its glory days. Wherever the antics of
 the emirs and politicians might lead, the brotherhood of believers, a
 reality in the initial career of Christianity and some other faiths,
 continues, fourteen hundred years on, to be a compelling principle for
 members of the final and definitive community of revelation in Islam. The
 reason is simple and unarguable: God has given us this religion as His last
 word, and it must therefore endure, with its essentials of tawhid, worship
 and ethics intact, until the Last Days.

Such an explanation has obvious merit. But we will still need to explain
 some painful exceptions to the rule in the earliest phase of our history.
 The Prophet himself (s.a.w.s.) had told his Companions, in a hadith
 narrated by Imam Tirmidhi, that "Whoever among you outlives me shall see a
 vast dispute." The initial schisms: the disastrous revolt against 'Uthman
 (r.a.), the clash between 'Ali (r.a.) and Talha, and then with Mu'awiya,
 the bloody scissions of the Kharijites -- all these drove knives of discord
 into the Muslim body politic almost from the outset. Only the inherent
 sanity and love of unity among scholars of the Umma -- assisted, no doubt,
 by Providence -- overcame the early spasms of factionalism, and created a
 strong and harmonious Sunnism which has, at least on the purely religious
 plane, united ninety percent of the Umma for ninety percent of its history.

It will help us greatly to understand our modern, increasingly divided
 situation if we look closely at those forces which divided us in the
 distant past. There were many of these, some of them very eccentric; but
 only two took the form of mass popular movements, driven by religious
 ideology, and in active rebellion against majoritarian faith and
 scholarship. For good reasons, these two acquired the names of Kharjism and
 Shi'ism. Unlike Sunni Islam, both were highly productive of splinter groups
 and submovements; but they nonetheless remained as recognisable traditions
 of dissidence because of their ability to express the two great divergences
 from mainstream opinion on the key question of the source of religious
 authority in Islam.

Confronted with what they saw as moral slippage among early caliphs,
 posthumous partisans of 'Ali (r.a.) developed a theory of religious
 authority which departed from the older egalitarian assumptions by vesting
 it in a charismatic succession of Imams. We need not stop here to
 investigate the question of whether this idea was influenced by the Eastern
 Christian background of some early converts, who had been nourished on the
 idea of the mystical apostolic succession to Christ, a gift which
 supposedly gave the Church the unique ability to read his mind for later
 generations. What needs to be appreciated is that Shi'ism, in its myriad
 forms, developed as a response to a widely-sensed lack of definitive
 religious authority in early Islamic society. As the age of the Righteous
 Caliphs came to a close, and the Umayyad rulers departed ever more
 conspicuously from the lifestyle expected of them as "Commanders of the
 Faithful", the sharply-divergent and still nascent schools of fiqh seemed
 inadequate as sources of strong and unambiguous authority in religious
 matters. Hence the often irresistible seductiveness of the idea of an
 infallible Imam.

This interpretation of the rise of Imamism also helps to explain the second
 great phase in Shi'i expansion. After the success of the fifth-century
 Sunni Revival, when Sunnism seemed at last to have become a fully coherent
 system, Shi'ism went into a slow eclipse. Its extreme wing, as manifested
 in Isma'ilism, received a heavy blow at the hands of Imam al-Ghazali, whose
 book "Scandals of the Batinites" exposed and refuted their secret doctrines
 with devastating force. This decline in Shi'i fortunes was only arrested
 after the mid-seventh century, once the Mongol hordes under Genghis Khan
 had invaded and obliterated the central lands of Islam. The onslaught was
 unimaginably harsh: we are told, for instance, that out of a hundred
 thousand former inhabitants of the city of Herat, only forty survivors
 crept out of the smoking ruins to survey the devastation. In the wake of
 this tidal wave of mayhem, newly-converted Turcoman nomads moved in, who,
 with the Sunni ulema of the cities dead, and a general atmosphere of fear,
 turbulence, and Messianic expectation in the air, turned readily to
 extremist forms of Shi'i belief. The triumph of Shi'ism in Iran, a country
 once loyal to Sunnism, dates back to that painful period.

The other great dissident movement in early Islam was that of the
 Kharijites, literally, the "seceder", so-called because they seceded from
 the army of the Caliph 'Ali (r.a.) when he agreed to settle his dispute
 with Mu'awiya through arbitration. Calling out the Koranic slogan,
 "Judgement is only God's", they fought bitterly against 'Ali and his army
 which included many of the leading Companions, until, in the year 38, Imaam
 'Ali defeated them at the Battle of Nahrawin, where some ten thousand of
 them petished.

Although the first Kharijites were destroyed, Kharijism itself lived on. As
 it formulated itself, it turned into the precise opposite of Shi'ism,
 rejecting any notion of inherited or charismatic leadership, and stressing
 that leadership of the community of believers should be decided by piety
 alone.

This was assessed by very rudimentary criteria: the early Kharjites were
 known for extreme toughness in their devotions, and for the harsh doctrine
 that any Muslim who commits a major sin is an unbeliever. This notion of
 Takfir (declaring Muslims to be outside Islam), permitted the Kharijite
 groups, camping out in remote mountain districts of Khuzestan, to raid
 Muslim settlements which had accepted Umayyad authority. Non-Kharijis were
 routinely slaughtered in these operations, which brought merciless
 reprisals from tough Umayyad generals such as al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf. But
 despite the apparent hopelessness of their cause, the Kharijite attacks
 continued. The Caliph 'Ali (r.a.) was assassinated by Ibn Muljam, a
 survivor of Nahrawan, while the Hadith scholar Imam al-Nasa'i, author of
 one of the most respected collections of sunan, was likewise murdered by
 Kharijite fanatics in Damascus in 303/915.12

Like Shi'ism, Kharjism caused much instability in Iraq and Central Asia, and
 on occasion elsewhere, until the fourth and fifth centuries of Islam. At
 that point, something of historic moment occurred. Sunnism managed to unite
 itself into a detailed system that was now so well worked-out, and so
 obviously the way of the great majority of ulema, that the attraction of
 the rival movements diminished sharply.

What happened was this. Sunni Islam, occupying the middle ground between the
 two extremes of egalitarian Kharijism and hierarchical Shi'ism had long
 been preoccupied with disputes over its own concept of authority. For the
 Sunnis, authority was, by definition, vested in the Koran and Sunna. But
 confronted with the enormous body of hadiths, which had been scattered in
 various forms and narrations throughout the length and breadth of the
 Islamic world following the migrations of the Companions and Followers, the
 Sunna sometimes posed serious problems of interpretation. Even when the
 sound hadiths had been sifted out from this great body of material, which
 totalled several hundred thousand hadith reports, there were some hadiths
 which appeared to conflict with each other, or even with verses of the
 Koran. It was obvious that simplistic approaches such as that of the
 Kharijites, namely, establishing a small corpus of hadiths and deriving
 doctrines and law from them directly, were not going to work. The apparent
 internal contradictions were too numerous, and the interpretations placed
 on them too complex, for the qadis  to be able to dish out judgements
 simply by opening the Koran and hadith collections to an appropriate page.

The reasons underlying cases of apparent conflict between various revealed
 texts were scrutinised closely by the early ulema, often amid sustained
 debate between brilliant minds armed with the most perfect photographic
 memories. Much of the science of Islamic jurisprudence (usul aI-fiqh) was
 developed in order to provide consistent mechanisms for resolving such
 conflicts in a way which ensured fidelty to the basic ethos of lslam. The
 term ta'arud al-adilla ("mutual contradiction of proof texts") is familiar
 to all students of lslamic jurisprudence as one of the most sensitive and
 complex of all Muslim legal concepts. Early scholars such as Ibn Qutayba
 felt obliged to devote whole books to the subject.

The ulema of usul recognised as their starting assumption that conflicts
 between the revealed texts were no more than conflicts of interpretation,
 and could not reflect inconsistencies in the Lawgiver's message as conveyed
 by the Prophet (s.a.w.s.). The message of Islam had been perfectly conveyed
 before his demise; and the function of subsequent scholars was exclusively
 one of interpretation, not of amendment.

Armed with this awareness, the Islamic scholar, when examining problematic
 texts, begins by attempting a series of preliminary academic tests and
 methods of resolution. The system developed by the early Ulema was that if
 two Koranic or hadith texts appeared to contradict each other, then the
 scholar must first analyse the texts linguistically, to see if the
 contradiction arises from an error in interpreting the Arabic. If the
 contradiction cannot be resolved by this method, then he must attempt to
 determine, on the basis of a range of textual, legal and historiographic
 techniques, whether one of them is subject to takhsis, that is, concerns
 special circumstances only, and hence forms a specific exception to the
 more general principle enunciated in the other text. The jurist must also
 assess the textual status of the reports, recalling the principle that a
 Koranic verse will overrule a Hadith related by only one isnad (the type of
 hadith known as ahad), as will a hadith supplied by many isnads (mutawatir
 or mashhur). If, after applying all these mechanisms, the jurist finds that
 the conflict remains, he must then investigate the possibility that one of
 the texts was subject to formal abrogation (naskh) by the other.

This principle of naskh is an example of how, when dealing with the delicate
 matter of ta'arud al-adilla, the Sunni ulema founded their approach on
 textual policies which had already been recognised many times during the
 lifetime of the Prophet (saws.). The Companions knew by jima' that over the
 years of the Prophet's ministry, as he taught and nurtured them, and
 brought them from the wildness of paganism to the sober and compassionate
 path of monotheism, his teaching had been divinely shaped to keep pace with
 their development. The best-known instance of this was the progressive
 prohibition of wine, which had been discouraged by an early Koranic verse,
 then condemned, and finally prohibited. Another example, touching an even
 more basic principle, was the canonical prayer, which the early Umma had
 been obliged to say only twice daily, but which, following the Mi'raj, was
 increased to five times a day. Mut'a (temporary marriage) had been
 permitted in the early days of Islam, but was subsequently prohibited as
 social conditions developed, respect for women grew, and morals became
 firmer. There are several other instances of this, most being datable to
 the years immediately following the Hijra, when the circumstances of the
 young Umma changed in radical ways.

There are two types of naskh: explicit (sarih) or implicit (dimmi). The
 former is easily identified, for it involves texts which themselves specify
 that an earlier ruling is being changed. For instance, there is the verse
 in the Koran (2:144) which commands the Muslims to turn in prayer to the
 Holy Ka'ba rather than to Jerusalem. In the hadith literature this is even
 more frequently encountered; for example, in a hadith narrated by Imam
 Muslim we read: "I used to forbid you to visit graves; but you should now
 visit them." Commenting on this, the ulema of hadith explain that in early
 Islam, when idolatrous practices were still fresh in people's memories,
 visiting graves had been forbidden because of the fear that some new
 Muslims might commit shirk there. As the Muslims grew stronger in their
 monotheism, however, this prohibition was discarded as no longer necessary,
 so that today it is a recommended practice for Muslims to go out to visit
 graves in order to pray for the dead and to be reminded of the akhira.

The other type of naskh is more subtle, and often taxed the brilliance of
 the early Ulema to the limit. It involves texts which cancel earlier ones,
 or modify them substantially, but without actually stating that this has
 taken place. The ulema have given many examples of this, including the two
 verses in Surat al-Baqara which give differing instructions as to the
 period for which widows should be maintained out of an estate (2:240 and
 234). And in the hadith literature, there is the example of the incident in
 which the Prophet (s.a.w.s.) once told the Companions that when he prayed
 sitting because he was burdened by some illness, they should sit behind
 him. This hadith is given by Imam Muslim. And yet we find another hadith,
 also narrated by Muslim, which records an incident in which the Companions
 prayed standing while the Prophet (s.a.w.s.) was sitting. The apparent
 contradiction has been resolved by careful chronological analysis, which
 shows that the latter incident took place after the former, and therefore
 takes precedence over it.

The techniques of naskh identification have enabled the ulema to resolve
 most of the recognised cases of ta'arud al-adilla. They demand a rigorous
 and detailed knowledge not just of the hadith disciplines, but of history,
 sira, and of the views held by the Companions and other scholars on the
 circumstances surrounding the genesis and exegesis of the hadith in
 question. In some cases, hadith scholars would travel throughout the
 Islamic world to locate the required information pertinent to a single
 hadith.

In cases where in spite of all efforts, abrogation cannot be proven, then
 the ulema of the salaf recognised the need to apply further tests.
 Important among these is the analysis of the matn (the transmitted text
 rather than the isnad of the hadith). "Clear" (sarih) statements are deemed
 to take precedence over "allusive" ones (kinayah), and "definite" (muhkam)
 words take precedence over words falling into more ambiguous categories,
 such as the "interpreted" (mufassar), the "obscure" (khafi) and the
 "problematic" (mushkil). It may also be necessary to look at the position
 of the narrators of the conflicting hadiths, giving precedence to the
 report issuing from the individual who was more directly involved. A famous
 example of this is the hadith narrated by Maymuna which states that the
 Prophet (s.a.w.s.) married her when not in a state of consecration (ihram)
 for the pilgrimage. Because her report was that of an eyewitness, her
 hadith is given precedence over the conflicting report from Ibn 'Abbas,
 related by a similarly sound isnad, which states that the Prophet was in
 fact in a state of ihram at the time.

There are many other rules, such as that which states that "prohibition
 takes precedence over permissibility". Similarly, conflicting hadiths may
 be resolved by utilising the fatwa of a Companion, after taking care that
 all the relevant fatwas are compared and assessed. Finally, recourse may be
 had to qiyas (analogy) An example of this is the various reports about the
 solar eclipse prayer (salat al-kusuf), which specify different numbers of
 bowings and prostrations. The ulema, having investigated the reports
 meticulously, and having been unable to resolve the contradiction by any of
 the mechanisms outlined above, have applied analogical reasoning by
 concluding that since the prayer in question is still called "salat", then
 the usual form of salat should be followed, namely, one bowing and two
 prostrations. The other hadiths are to be abandoned.

This careful articulation of the methods of resolving conflicting
 sourcetexts, so vital to the accurate derivation of the shari'a from the
 revealed sources, was primarily the work of Imam al-Shafi'i. Confronted by
 the confusion and disagreement among the jurists of his day, and determined
 to lay down a consistent methodology which would enable a fiqh to be
 established in which the possibility of error was excluded as far as was
 humanly possible, Shafi'i wrote his brilliant Risala ("Treatise on Islamic
 Jurisprudence"). His ideas were soon taken up, in varying ways, by jurists
 of the other major traditions of law; and today they are fundamental to the
 formal application of the shari'a.

Shafi'is system of minimising mistakes in the derivation of Islamic rulings
 from the mass of evidence came to be known as usul al-fiqh (the "roots of
 fiqh"). Like the other formal academic disciplines of Islam, this was not
 an innovation in the negative sense, but a working-out of principles
 already discernible in the time of the earliest Muslims. In time, each of
 the great interpretative traditions of Sunni Islam codified its own
 variation on these "roots" (usul), thereby yielding in some cases divergent
 "branches" (furu', i.e. specific rulings on practice). Although the debates
 generated by these divergences could sometimes be energetic, nonetheless,
 they were insignificant when compared to the great sectarian and legal
 disagreements which had arisen during the first two centuries of Islam
 before the science of usul al-fiqh had put a stop to such chaotic discord.

It hardly needs remarking that although the Four Imams, Abu Hanifa, Malik
 ibn Anas, al-Shafi'i and Ibn Hanbal, are regarded as the founders of these
 four great traditions, which, if we were asked to define them, we might sum
 up as "sophisticated techniques for avoiding innovation", their traditions
 were fully systematised only by later generations of scholars. The Sunni
 ulema rapidly recognised the brilliance of the Four Imams, and after the
 late third century of Islam we find that hardly any scholars adhered to any
 other school. The great hadith specialists were all loyal adherents of one
 or another of the madhhabs, particularly that of Imam al-Sliafi'i. But
 within each madhhab, leading scholars continued to improve and refine the
 "roots" and "branches" of their school. In some cases, historical
 conditions made this not only possible, but necessary. For instance,
 scholars of the school of Imam Abu Hanifa, which was built on the
 foundations of the early legal schools of Kufa and Basra, were wary of some
 hadiths in circulation in Iraq because of the prevalence of forgery
 engendered by the strong sectarian influences there. Later, however, once
 the canonical collections of Bukhari, Muslim and others became available,
 subsequent generations of Hanafi scholars took the entire corpus of hadiths
 into account in formulating and revising their madhhab. This type of
 process continued for two centuries, until the Schools reached a condition
 of maturity in the fourth and fifth centuries of the Hijra.

It was at that time, too, that the attitude of toleration and good opinion
 between the Schools became universally accepted. This was formulated by
 Imam al-Ghazali, himself the author of four textbooks of Shafi'i fiqh, and
 also of "al-Mustasfa", widely acclaimed as the most advanced and careful of
 all works on usul al-fiqh. With his well-known concern for sincerity, and
 his dislike of ostentatious scholarly rivalry, he strongly condemned what
 he called "fanatical attachment to a madhhab". While it was necessary for
 the Muslim to follow a recognised madhhab in order to avert the lethal
 danger of misinterpreting the revealed sources, he must never fall into the
 trap of considering his own school categorically superior to the others.
 With a few insignificant exceptions in the late Ottoman period, the great
 scholars of Sunni Islam have followed the ethos outlined by Imam
 al-Ghazali, and have been conspicuously respectful of each others' madhhab.
 Anyone who has studied under the gracious and open-minded ulema of
 traditional Islam will be well-aware of this fact.

The evolution of the Four Schools did not stifle, as some Orientalists have
 suggested, the capacity for the refinement or extension of positive law. On
 the contrary, sophisticated mechanisms were available which not only
 permitted qualified individuals to derive the shari'a from the Koran and
 Sunna on their own authority, but actually obliged them to do this.
 According to most scholars, an expert who has fully mastered the sources
 and fulfilled a variety of necessary scholarly conditions is not permitted
 to follow the prevalent rulings of his School, but must derive the rulings
 himself from the revealed sources. Such an individual is known as a
 mujtahid, a term derived from the well-known hadith of Mu'adh ibn Jabal.

Few would seriously deny that for a Muslim to venture beyond established
 expert opinion and have recourse directly to the Qur'an and Sunna, he must
 be a scholar of great eminence. The danger of people misunderstanding the
 sources and hence damaging the Shari'a is a very real one, as was shown by
 the discord and strife which afflicted some early Muslims in the period
 which preceded the establishment of the Orthodox Schools. Prior to Islam,
 entire religions had been subverted by inadequate scriptural scholarship,
 and it was vital that Islam should be secured from a comparable fate.

In order to protect the Shari'a from the danger of innovation and
 distortion, the great scholars of usul laid down rigorous conditions which
 must be fulfilled by anyone wishing to claim the right of ijtihad for
 himself. These conditions include: (a) mastery of the Arabic language, to
 minimise the possibility of misinterpreting revelation on purely linguistic
 grounds; (b) a profound knowledge of the Koran and Sunna and the
 circumstances surrounding the revelation of each verse and hadith, together
 with a full knowledge of the Koranic and hadith commentaries, and a control
 of all the interpretative techniques discussed above; (c) knowledge of the
 specialised disciplines of hadith, such as the assessment of narrators and
 of the matn; (d) knowledge of the views of the Companions, Followers and
 the great Imams, and of the positions and reasoning expounded in the
 textbooks of fiqh, combined with the knowledge of cases where a consensus
 (ima') has been reached; (e) knowledge of the science of juridical analogy
 (qiyas), its types and conditions; (f) knowledge of one's own society and
 of the public interest (maslaha); (g) knowing the general objectives
 (maqasid) of the Shari'a; (h) a high degree of intelligence and personal
 piety, combined with the Islamic virtues of compassion, courtesy, and
 modesty.

A scholar who has fulfilled these conditions can be considered a mujtahid
 fi'l-shar', and is not obliged, or even permitted, to follow an existing
 authoritative madhhab. This is what some of the Imams were saying when they
 forbade their great disciples from imitating them uncritically. But for the
 much greater number of scholars whose expertise has not reached such
 dizzying heights, it may be possible to become a mujtahid fi'l-madhhab,
 that is, a scholar who remains broadly convinced of the doctrines of his
 school, but is qualified to differ from received opinion within it. There
 have been a number of examples of such men, for instance Qadi Ibn 'Abd
 al-Barr among the Malikis, Imam al-Nawawi among the Shafi'is, Ibn 'Abidin
 among the Hanafis, and Ibn Qudama among the Hanbalis. All of these scholars
 considered themselves followers of the fundamental interpretative
 principles of their own madhhabs, but are on record as having exercised
 their own gifts of scholarship and judgement in reaching many new verdicts
 within them. It is to these experts that the Mujtahid Imams directed their
 advice concerning ijtihad, such as Imam al-Shafi'i's instruction that "if
 you find a hadith that contradicts my verdict, then follow the hadith." It
 is obvious that whatever some writers nowadays like to believe, such
 counsels were intended for the Imam's sophisticated pupils, and were never
 intended for use by the Islamically-uneducated masses. Imam al-Shafi'i was
 not addressing a crowd of butchers, nightwatchmen and donkey-drovers.

Other categories of mujtahids are listed by the usul scholars; but the
 distinctions between them are subtle and not relevant to our theme. The
 remaining categories can in practice be reduced to two: the muttabi'
 ("follower"), who follows his madhhab while being aware of the Koranic and
 hadith texts and the reasoning underlying its positions, and secondly the
 muqallid ("emulator"), who simply conforms to the madhhab because of his
 confidence in its scholars, and without necessarily knowing the detailed
 reasoning behind all its thousands of rulings.

Clearly it is recommended for the muqallid to learn as much as he or she is
 able of the formal proofs of the madhhab. But it is equally clear that not
 every Muslim can be a scholar. Scholarship takes a lot of time, and for the
 Umma to function properly most people must have other employment: as
 accountants, soldiers, butchers, and so forth. As such, they cannot
 reasonably be expected to become great ulema as well, even if we suppose
 that all of them have the requisite intelligence. The Holy Koran itself
 states that less well-informed believers should have recourse to qualified
 experts: "So ask the people of remembrance, if you do not know" (16:43).
 (According to the scholars, the "people of remembrance" are the ulema.) And
 in another verse, the Muslims are enjoined to create and maintain a group
 of specialists who provide authoritative guidance for non-specialists: "A
 band from each community should stay behind to gain instruction in religion
 and to warn the people when they return to them, so that they may take
 heed" (9:122). Given the depth of scholarship needed to understand the
 revealed texts accurately and the extreme warnings we have been given
 against distorting the revelation it is obvious that ordinary Muslims are
 duty bound to follow expert opinion rather than rely on their own reasoning
 and limited knowledge. This obvious duty was well known to the early
 Muslims: the khalifa 'Umar (r a) followed certain rulings of Abu Bakr (r a)
 saying "I would be ashamed before God to differ from the view of Abu Bakr".
 And Ibn Mas'ud (r a) in turn, despite being a mujtahid in the fullest sense
 used in certain issues to follow 'Umar (r a) According to al-Shafi'i: "Six
 of the Companions of the Prophet (s a w s) used to give fatwas to the
 people: lbn Mas'ud, 'Uinar ibn al-Khattab, 'Ali, Zayd ibn Thabit, Ubayy ibn
 Ka'b and Abu Musa (al-Ash'ari). And out of these, three would abandon their
 own judgements in favour of the judgements of three others: 'Abdallah (ibn
 Mas'ud) would abandon his own judgement for the judgement of 'Umar, Abu
 Musa would abandon his own judgement for the judgement of 'Ali and Zayd
 would abandon his own judgement for the judgement of Ubayy ibn Ka'b."

This verdict, namely that one is well advised to rely on a great Imam as
 one's guide to the Sunna, rather than relying on oneself is particularly
 binding upon Muslims in countries such as Britain among whom only a small
 percentage is even entitled to have a choice in this matter. This is for
 the simple reason that unless one knows Arabic, then even if one wishes to
 read all the hadith determining a particular issue, one cannot. For various
 reasons, including their great length, no more than ten of the basic hadith
 collections have been translated into English. There remain well over three
 hundred others, including such seminal works as the "Musnad" of Imam Abmad
 ibn Hanbal, the "Musannaf" of Ibn Abi Shayba, the "Sahih" of Ibn Khuzayma,
 the "Mustadrak" of al-Hakim, and many other multi-volume collections, which
 contain large numbers of sound hadiths which cannot be found in Bukhari,
 Muslim, or the other works that have so far been translated. Even if we
 assume that the existing translations are entirely accurate, it is obvious
 that a policy of trying to derive the Shari'a directly from the Book and
 the Sunna cannot be attempted by those who have no access to the Arabic. To
 attempt to discern the Shari'a merely on the basis of the hadiths which
 have been translated will be to ignore and amputate much of the sunna,
 leading to serious distortions.

Let me give just two examples of this. The Sunni Madhhabs, in their rules
 for the conduct of legal cases, lay down the principle that the canonical
 punishments (hudud) should not be applied in cases where there is the least
 ambiguity, and that the qadi should actively strive to prove that such
 ambiguities exist. An amateur reading in the Sound Six collections will
 find no certain confirmation of this. But the madhhab ruling is based on a
 hadith recorded in the "Musannaf" of Ibn Abi Shayba, the "Musnad" of
 al-Harithi, and the "Musnad" of Musaddad ibn Musarhad. The text is: "Ward
 off the hudud by means ofambiguities".Imam al-San'ani, in his book
 "Al-Ansab", narrates the circumstances of this hadith: "A man was found
 drunk, and was brought to 'Umar, who ordered the hadd of eighty lashes to
 be applied. When this had been done, the man said: "'Umar, you have wronged
 me! I am a slave!" (Slaves receive only half the punishment.) 'Umar was
 grief-stricken at this, and recited the Prophetic hadith, "Ward off the
 hudad by means of ambiguities."

Another example is provided by the practice of istighfar for others during
 the Hajj. According to a hadith, "Forgiveness is granted to the Hajj, and
 to those for whom the Haji prays." This hadith is not related in any of the
 collections so far translated into English; but it is narrated, by a sound
 isnad, in many other collections, including "al-Mu'jam al-Saghir" of
 al-Tabarani and the "Musnad" of al-Bazzar.

Because of the traditional pious fear of distorting the Law of Islam, the
 overwhelming majority of the great scholars of the past -- certainly well
 over ninety-nine percent ofthem -- have adhered loyally to a madhhab. It is
 true that in the troubled fourteenth century a handful of dissenters
 appeared, such as Ibn Taymiya and Ibn al-Qayyim; but even these individuals
 never recommended that semi-educated Muslims should attempt ijtihad without
 expert help. And in any case, although these authors have recently been
 resurrected and made prominent, their influence on the orthodox scholarship
 of classical Islam was negligible, as is suggested by the small number of
 manuscripts of their works preserved in the great libraries of the Islamic
 world.

Nonetheless, social turbulences have in the past century thrown up a number
 of writers who have advocated the abandonment of authoritative scholarship.
 The most prominent figures in this campaign were Muhammad 'Abduh and his
 disciple Muhammad Rashid Rida. Dazzled by the triumph of the West, and
 informed in subtle ways by their own well documented commitment to
 Freemasonry, these men urged Muslims to throw off "the shackles of taqlid",
 and to reject the authority of the Four Schools. Today in some Arab
 capitals, especially where the indigenous tradition of orthodox scholarship
 has been weakened, it is common to see young Arabs filling their homes with
 every hadith collection they can lay their hands upon, and poring over them
 in the apparent belief that they are less likely to misinterpret this vast
 and complex literature than Imam al-Shafi'i, Imam Ahmad, and the other
 great Imams. This irresponsible approach, now increasingly widespread, is
 predictably opening the door to sharply divergent opinions, which have
 seriously damaged the unity, credibility and effectiveness of the Islamic
 movement, and provoked sharp arguments over issues settled by the great
 lmams over a thousand years ago. It is common now to see activists prowling
 the mosques, criticising other worshippers for what they believe to be
 defects in their worship, even when their victims are following the
 verdicts of some of the leading Imams of fiqh. The unpleasant, Pharisaic
 atmosphere generated by this activity has the effect of discouraging many
 less committed Muslims from attending the mosque at all. No-one now recalls
 the view of the early ulema, which was that Muslims should tolerate
 divergent interpretations of the Sunna as long as these interpretations
 have been held by reputable scholars. As Sufyan al-Thawri said: "If you see
 a man doing something over which there is a debate among the scholars, and
 which you yourself believe to be forbidden, you should not forbid him from
 doing it." The alternative to this policy is, of course, a disunity and
 rancour which will poison the Muslim community from within.

In a Western-influenced global culture in which people are urged from early
 childhood to "think for themselves" and to challenge established authority,
 it can sometimes be difficult to muster enough humility to recognise one's
 own limitations. We are all a little like Pharaoh: our egos are by nature
 resistant to the idea that anyone else might be much more intelligent or
 learned than ourselves. The belief that ordinary Muslims, even if they know
 no Arabic, are qualified to derive rulings of the Shari'a for themselves,
 is an example of this egotism running wild. To young people proud of their
 own judgement, and unfamiliar with the complexity of the sources and the
 brilliance of authentic scholarship, this can be an effective trap, which
 ends by luring them away from the orthodox path of Islam and into an
 unintentional agenda of provoking deep divisions among the Muslims. The
 fact that all the great scholars of the religion, including the hadith
 experts, themselves belonged to madhhabs, and required their students to
 belong to madhhabs, seems to have been forgotten. Self-esteem has won a
 major victory here over common sense and Islamic responsibility.

The Holy Koran commands Muslims to use their minds and reflective
 capacities; and the issue of following qualified scholarship is an area in
 which this faculty must be very carefully deployed. The basic point should
 be appreciated that no categoric difference exists between usul al-fiqh and
 any other specialised science requiring lengthy training. Shaykh Sa'id
 Ramadan al-Buti, who has articulated the orthodox response to the
 anti-Madhhab trend in his book: "Non-Madhhabism: The Greatest Bid'a
 Threatening the Islamic Shari'a", likes to compare the science of deriving
 rulings to that of medicine. If one's child is seriously ill, he asks, does
 one look for oneself in the medical textbooks for the proper diagnosis and
 cure, or should one go to a trained medical practitioner? Clearly, sanity
 dictates the latter option. And so it is in matters of religion, which are
 in reality even more important and potentially hazardous: we would be both
 foolish and irresponsible to try to look through the sources ourselves, and
 become our own muftis. Instead, we should recognise that those who have
 spent their entire lives studying the Sunna and the principles of law are
 far less likely to be mistaken than we are.

Another metaphor might be added to this, this time borrowed from astronomy.
 We might compare the Koranic verses and the hadiths to the stars. With the
 naked eye, we are unable to see many of them clearly; so we need a
 telescope. If we are foolish, or proud, we may try to build one ourselves.
 If we are sensible and modest, however, we will be happy to use one built
 for us by Imam Malik or Ibn Hanbal, and refined, polished and improved by
 generations of great astronomers. A madhhab is, after all, nothing more
 than a piece of precision equipment enabling us to see Islam with the
 maximum clarity possible. If we use our own devices, our amateurish efforts
 will inevitably distort our vision.

A third image might also be deployed. An ancient building, for instance the
 Blue Mosque in Istanbul, might seem imperfect to some who worship in it.
 Young enthusiasts, burning with a desire to make the building still more
 exquisite and well-made (and no doubt more in conformity with their own
 time-bound preferences), might gain access to the crypts and basements
 which lie under the structure, and, on the basis of their own understanding
 of the principles of architecture, try to adjust the foundations and
 pillars which support the great edifice above them. They will not, of
 course, bother to consult professional architects, except perhaps one or
 two whose rhetoric pleases them -- nor will they be guided by the books and
 memoirs of those who have maintained the structure over the centuries.
 Their zeal and pride leaves them with no time for that. Groping through the
 basements, they bring out their picks and drills, and set to work with a
 blind enthusiasm.

There is a real danger that Sunni Islam is being treated in a similar
 fashion. The edifice has stood for centuries, withstanding the most bitter
 blows of its enemies. Only from within can it be weakened. No doubt, Islam
 has intelligent foes among whom this fact is well-known. The spectacle of
 the disunity and fitnas which divided the early Muslims despite their
 superior piety, and the solidity and cohesiveness of Sunnism after the
 final codification of the Shari'a in the four Schools of the great Imams,
 must have put ideas into many a malevolent head. This is not to suggest in
 any way that those who attack the great Madhhabs are the conscious tools of
 Islam's enemies. But it may go some way to explaining why they will
 continue to be well-publicised and well-funded, while the orthodox
 alternative is starved of resources. With every Muslim now a proud
 Mujtahid, and with taqlid dismissed as a sin rather than a humble and
 necessary virtue, the divergent views which caused such pain in our early
 history will surely break surface again. Instead of four madhhabs in
 harmony, we will have a billion madhhabs in bitter and self-righteous
 conflict. No more brilliant scheme for the destruction of Islam could ever
 have been devised.