Fields of Blood (37 page)

During the Conquest Era, the ulema had begun to develop a distinctive body of Muslim law in the garrison towns. At that time the ummah had been a tiny minority; by the tenth century, 50 percent of the empire’s population was Muslim, and the code of the garrisons was no longer appropriate.
⁷⁷
The Abbasid
aristocracy had its own
Persian code known as the
adab
(“culture”), which was based on the literate artistry and courtly manners expected of the nobility and was obviously unsuitable for the masses.
⁷⁸
The caliphs therefore asked the ulema to develop the standardized system of Islamic law that would become the
Shariah. Four schools of law (
maddhab
) emerged, all regarded as equally valid. Each school had its distinctive outlook but was based on the practice (
sunnah
) of the Prophet and the early ummah. Like the
Talmud, which was a strong influence on these developments, the new jurisprudence (
fiqh
) aimed to bring the whole of life under the canopy of the sacred. There was therefore no attempt to impose a single “rule of faith.” Individuals were free to select their own maddhab and, as in
Judaism, follow the rulings of the scholar of their choice.

Shariah law provided a principled alternative to the aristocratic rule of agrarian society, since it refused to accept a hereditary class system. It therefore had revolutionary potential; indeed, two of the maddhab founders—
Malik ibn Anas (d. 795) and
Muhammad Idris al-Shafii (d. 820)—had taken part in Shii uprisings against the early
Abbasids. The Shariah insisted that every single Muslim was directly responsible to God; a Muslim needed no caliph or priest to mediate divine law, and everybody—not just the ruling class—was responsible for the ummah’s well-being. Where the aristocratic adab took a pragmatic view of what was politically feasible, the Shariah was an idealistic countercultural challenge, which tacitly condemned the structural violence of the imperial state and boldly insisted that no institution—not even the caliphate—had the right to interfere with an individual’s personal decisions. There was no way that an agrarian state could be run on these lines, however,
and although the caliphs always acknowledged the Shariah as the law of God, they could not rule by it. Consequently, Shariah law never governed the whole of society, and the caliph’s court, where justice was summary, absolute, and arbitrary, remained the supreme court of appeal; in theory, any Muslim, however lowly, could appeal to the caliph for justice against members of the lower aristocracy.
⁷⁹
Nevertheless, the Shariah was a constant witness to the Islamic ideal of equality that is so deeply embedded in our humanity that despite the apparent impossibility of incorporating it in political life, we remain stubbornly convinced that it is the natural way for human beings to live together.

Al-Shafii formulated what would become the classical doctrine of
jihad, which, despite Shariah aversion to
autocracy, drew on standard imperial ideology: it had a dualistic worldview, claimed that the ummah had a divine mission and that Islamic rule would benefit humanity. God had decreed warfare because it was essential for the ummah’s survival, Al-Shafii argued. The human race was divided into the
dar al-Islam
(“The Abode of Islam”) and the non-Muslim world, the
dar al-harb
(“The Abode of War”). There could be no final peace between the two, though a temporary truce was permissible. But since all ethical faiths came from God, the ummah was only one of many divinely guided communities, and the goal of jihad was not to convert the subject population. What distinguished Islam from other revelations, however, was that it had a God-given mandate to extend its rule to the rest of humanity. Its mission was to establish the social justice and equity prescribed by God in the
Quran, so that all men and women could be liberated from the tyranny of a state run on worldly principles.
⁸⁰
The reality, however, was that the Abbasid caliphate was an autocracy that depended on the forcible subjugation of the majority of the population; like any agrarian state, it was constitutionally unable to implement Quranic norms fully. Yet without such idealism, which reminds us of the imperfection of our institutions, their inherent violence and injustice would go without critique. Perhaps the role of religious vision is to fill us with a divine discomfort that will not allow us wholly to accept the unacceptable.

Al-Shafii also ruled against the conviction of “fighting scholars” that militant jihad was incumbent upon every Muslim. In Shariah law, the daily prayer was binding on all Muslims without exception, so it was
fard ayn,
an obligation for each individual. But even though all Muslims were responsible for the well-being of the ummah, some tasks, such as
cleaning the mosque, could be left to the appointed official and was
fard kifaya,
a duty delegated to an individual by the community. Should this job be neglected, however, others were obliged to take the initiative and step in.
⁸¹
Al-Shafii decreed that jihad against the non-Muslim world was fard kifaya and the ultimate responsibility of the caliph. Therefore, as long as there were enough soldiers to defend the frontier, civilians were exempt from military service. In the event of an enemy invasion, though, Muslims in the border regions might be obliged to help. Al-Shafii was writing at a time when the Abbasids had renounced territorial expansion, so he was legislating not for offensive jihad but only for defensive warfare. Muslims still debate the legitimacy of jihad in these terms today.

Sunni Muslims had accepted the imperfections of the agrarian system in order to keep the peace.
⁸²
The Shii still condemned its systemic violence but found a practical way of dealing with the Abbasid regime.
Jafar al-Sadiq (d. 765), the sixth in the line of
Imams (“leaders”) descended from Ali, formally abandoned armed struggle, because rebellions were always savagely put down and resulted only in unacceptable loss of life. Henceforth the Shiah would hold aloof from the mainstream, their disengagement a silent rebuke to Abbasid tyranny and a witness to true Islamic values. As the Prophet’s descendant, Jafar enshrined his charisma and remained the rightful leader of the ummah, but henceforth he would function only as a spiritual guide. Jafar had, in effect, separated
religion and politics. This sacred
secularism would remain the dominant ideal of
Shiism until the late twentieth century.

Yet the Imams remained an unbearable irritant to the caliphs. The Imam, a living link with the Prophet, revered by the faithful, quietly dedicated to the contemplation of scripture and charitable works, offered a striking contrast to the caliph, whose ever-present executioner was a grim reminder of the violence of empire. Which was the truly Muslim leader? The Imams embodied a sacred presence that could not exist safely or openly in a world dominated by cruelty and injustice, since they were nearly all murdered by the caliphs. When toward the end of the ninth century, the Twelfth Imam mysteriously vanished from prison, it was said that God had miraculously removed him and that he would one day return to inaugurate an era of justice. In this concealment he remained the true leader of the ummah, so all earthly government was
illegitimate. Paradoxically, liberated from the confines of time and space, the
Hidden Imam became a more vivid presence in the lives of
Shiis. The myth reflected the tragic impossibility of implementing a truly equitable policy in a flawed and violent world. On the anniversary of Imam
Husain’s death on the tenth (
ashura
) of the month of Muharram, Shiis would publicly mourn his murder, processing through the streets, weeping and beating their breasts to demonstrate their undying opposition to the corruption of mainstream Muslim life. But not all Shiis subscribed to Jafar’s sacred
secularism. The
Ismailis, who believed that Ali’s line had ended with Ismail, the Seventh Imam, remained convinced that piety must be backed up by military jihad for a just society. In the tenth century, when the Abbasid regime was in serious decline, an Ismaili leader established a rival caliphate in
North Africa, and this
Fatimid dynasty later spread to
Egypt,
Syria, and
Palestine.
⁸³

In the tenth century, the Muslim empire was beginning to fragment. Taking advantage of Fatimid weakness, the Byzantines conquered
Antioch and important areas of
Cilicia, while within the Dar al-Islam,
Turkish generals established virtually independent states, although they continued to acknowledge the caliph as the supreme leader. In 945 the Turkish
Buyid dynasty actually occupied
Baghdad, and even though the caliph retained his court, the region became a province of the Buyid kingdom. Yet Islam was by no means a spent force. There had always been tension between the
Quran and autocratic
monarchy, and the new arrangement of independent rulers symbolically linked by their loyalty to the caliph was religiously more congenial if not politically effective. Muslim religious thought subsequently became less driven by current events and would become politically oriented again only in the modern period, when the ummah faced a new imperial threat.

The
Seljuk
Turks from Central Asia gave fullest expression to the new order. They acknowledged the sovereignty of the caliph, but under their brilliant Persian vizier
Nizam al-Mulk (r. 1063–92), they created an empire extending to
Yemen in the south, the
Oxus River in the east, and Syria in the west. The Seljuks were not universally popular. Some of the more radical Ismailis withdrew to mountain strongholds in what is now
Lebanon, where they prepared for a jihad to replace the Seljuks with a Shii regime, occasionally undertaking suicidal missions to murder
prominent members of the Seljuk establishment. Their enemies called them
hashashin
because they were said to use hashish to induce mystical
ecstasy, and this gave us our English word
assassin.
⁸⁴
But most Muslims accommodated easily to Seljuk rule. Theirs was not a centralized empire; the emirs who commanded the districts were virtually autonomous and worked closely with the ulema, who gave these disparate military regimes ideological unity. To raise educational standards, they created the first madrassas, and
Nizam al-Mulk established these schools throughout the empire, giving the ulema a power base and drawing the scattered provinces together. Emirs came and went, but the
Shariah courts became a stable authority in each region. Moreover,
Sufi mystics and the more charismatic ulema traveled the length and breadth of the Seljuk Empire, giving ordinary Muslims a strong sense of belonging to an international community.