The influence of Hadith Studies in keeping the Islamic World ‘Backward’

Before I begin this post I want to make a little excuse for my posts of the last few weeks in particular and this one. I have been dissatisfied with many of them but have been unable or unwilling to edit them properly because of carpal tunnel syndrome. For the same reason I'm taking a week off after this post to allow my wrist to recover.

That's a fairly provocative post title and it also signals that I'm now going to link the studies that originated with the time of Muhammad and the political ideas that first circulated then (but carried on into modern times) with modern times under ideological and other domination by the West. So really this is about how certain strands of Islam have proved not to be useful in moving beyond a mediaeval mind-set to face modern realities.

Modern Islamic thinkers are generally concerned to deemphasise the legal importance of the Hadith and Qur’an to the extent they have been used to inhibit the use of ijtihad (legal reasoning). Notable exceptions to this recent understanding of Islam as a moral rather than a legal/constitutional force include the recent Iranian, al-Qaeda and Taliban ideologies although some of these ideologies are in dialogue with modernity as they must be.

Debate will continue as to how literally or how interpretively to deal with questions in Islam using very old sources of ‘law’ in much the same way there continues to be legal debate in the West concerning ‘activism’ among judges. Al-Shafi’i and Ibn Hanbal were early exponents of the literalist camp in early Islam. They held that the Hadith ought to cover matters not explicit in the Qur’an thus obviating the need for excessive interpretation. In response to this approach, which tends to have resulted in excessive legalism, modern scholars note the emphasis which the prophet himself placed on principles rather than formalised details.

Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab and Saudi Arabia

Wahhab lived from 1703 to 1791 in Central Arabia and he began a movement of religious revivalism and moral reform there. He received his earliest Hanbali clerical training in Eastern Arabia and more in the Hijaz, Syria and Iraq. He opposed the Enlightenment values that the Ottomans, who controlled parts of Arabia, had taken on.

He gave his personal bay’a to an Emir of the House of Sa’ud in 1744 and called himself Shaykh and the Emir, Imam. His descendents thus took the surname ash-Shaykh and continued to have an important relationship with the Sa’udi family which became the royal family of Saudi Arabia. His views are certainly in the Ahl al-Hadith tradition of Ibn Hanbal and Ibn Taymiyya. He opposed superstition and idolatry, which he saw as involved in the veneration of saints and their tombs; even the most sacred sites at Mecca and Medina were over-venerated in his view. Again, he followed Ibn Taymiyya in Salafiyya atavism. The upshot of that was that an ideal and true Islam could only be discovered in emulation of the main players in 7^th Century Arabia. He tended to overlook some of the flaws of these men and women and exaggerate their virtues. He opposed all non-Muslims and also Sufi and Shi’a Muslims, which he saw as idolatrous and/or manipulative, even more narrow-mindedly than Ibn Taymiyya. His ideas were also arguably quite derivative of Ibn Taymiyya rather than in any sense original and he regularly narrowly interpreted and selectively quoted from Taymiyya's work. This self-proclaimed Shaykh who inspired ‘modern’ Saudi Arabia essentially combined a tribal world view with patterns of puritanical Hanbali Islam that Saudi oil wealth has helped to export to much of the rest of the Islamic world today.

The Saudis ruled when they were able with the support of the Wahhabi Shaykh family from the time of that first agreement on. They were suppressed at various times by Ottoman troops at one time under the command of the Albanian, Muhammad ‘Ali, who ruled Egypt. Saudi rule has now been continuous in Saudi Arabia since ‘Abd al-'Aziz as-Sa'ud with the aid at first of a mere 40 odd warriors began to reassert his control in the early 20^th century, shortly before the finding of large quantities of oil in the territory. To date all of the kings who have succeeded him have been his sons (as is the current crown prince). The regime’s legal system was generally opposed to the use of ijtihad and its philosophy may be best described by itself on the occasion of the state’s 60^th Anniversary as a kingdom in London’s The Times as “progress without change”. Material progress has occurred along with no change permitted to attitudes or behaviour in any material respect according to the lights of the regime and its supporting clerics. Obviously this regime stance is a purely fantasist one. Attitudes are indeed changing as are behaviours. While no parties are allowed the Muslim Brothers are permitted to operate there and the Saudi regime has given substantial financial support to the Brethren in other Islamic countries arguably in order to destabilise those countries. The trial of Qutb which led to his execution apparently raised the support he received from Saudi Arabia. While attitudes and behaviour in private may be changing, public behaviour with which the regime does not agree remains dangerous. The problem for the general population remains that the regime’s oil wealth means it does not require the support of its people in the form of tax, one of the major reasons people usually give for justifying asking for representation in government.