Science

The new Arab and Islamic rulers of the Middle East continued to study the sciences that had preceded Islam in their region as I've already mentioned (especially but not exclusively Hellenistic science). Naturally they focused on what would be useful to them and so medicine was continued in the Eastern tradition. As the position of heavenly bodies was still regarded as important to events on earth, astrology (and ultimately astronomy) continued to be studied. Astronomy and geography assumed new importance in order to determine the direction of Mecca from a given locality for religious and architectural purposes. Already-established hospitals, the newly formed ‘Abbasid centre for translation in Baghdad, the Bayt al-Hikma, and observatories all played a role in ensuring the continuation of the older forms of learning. The great translation process into Arabic from (usually) Greek initially tended to take place via an earlier Syriac translation with attendant problems of subtly changed meanings (later, as Arabic expanded its capacities as a language of learning, direct translations from the Greek into Arabic were able to be made).

The initial chief of the Bayt al-Hikma was Hunayn Ibn Ishaq who lived in the 9^th Century. His translators translated works of philosophy, logic, medicine, pharmacy, alchemy, astrology, astronomy, geography, mathematics, musicology, politics and ethics.

These motives and actions are the basis for the sciences that I will discuss in later posts as well as the philosophy I discussed in the last post. I'll begin with medicine in the next post and proceed to discuss the other sciences mentioned above and other forms of Arab science in later posts.

The Philosophers

I'll now turn to secular learning and before I consider various sciences and the humanities I want to examine an area that was a special challenge for some time for what I may call fundamentalist Islam: philosophy, as inspired by the Classical Greeks.

Up until the 12^th century, the philosophers were concerned to build upon Hellenistic philosophy. Many of the philosophers were Christian Arabs but philosophy didn’t require a specific religion. Schools of mainly Christian scholars in mainly Syria and Iraq continued the Neo-Platonist teachings of Plotinus and Porphyry of Tyre of the School of Alexandria. Philosophy was (initially, at least) considered useful for theological argument. The Four new philosophy masters of the Islamic world were al-Kindi, al-Fārābi (called Alfarabius or Avennasr in the West), Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes).

Al-Kindi was a Muslim Arab who lived in Iraq in the early to mid 9^th century. He also studied mu’tazila theology. He distinguished between human and divine knowledge and sought a détente between reason and revelation. He also studied arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, astrology, natural sciences and alchemy. He received the support of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate and some of his work was considered sufficiently important in the mediaeval West to translate into Latin in the 12^th Century. He suggested to Arabs that they should not fear knowledge from wherever it came.

Al-Fārābi lived in Baghdad, Damascus and Aleppo in the 9^th and 10^th Centuries and was a student of Aristotle in the Neo-Platonic form taught in Alexandria. He sought truth and happiness in his philosophy. He asserted that religious dogma was inferior philosophically to human reason while claiming that they do not necessarily conflict. His commentaries on various Aristotelian works earned him the title (after Aristotle) of “the second master” in both the East and the West. He also wrote a famous work on musicology and works on science, cities and politics, among many others.

Avicenna lived in the 10^th and 11^th Centuries in Eastern Iran and was also a physician, politician and scientist. He wrote a famous work on medicine along with his philosophical works.

Averroes, also a practicing physician, lived in the mid 12^th Century in Cordova and Morocco and is considered the best Arabic translator of Aristotle. He also criticised other interpretations and contributed to the commentaries. He famously wrote a refutation of al-Ghazali’s Refutation of the Philosophers (known informally as "The Refutation of the Refutation") and also wrote a significant work of Islamic jurisprudence and one of medicine.

Sufism and Islamic Asceticism

As with many religious traditions, Islam has always had two main strands: the strand that emphasised a god-given moral law to be followed without question out of fear of God and a strand that sought a deeper understanding of, communion with and true love of God and thus an understanding of the deeper meaning of "His" laws. Islamic ascetic traditions also had direct precursors in the Middle East before the Islamic Era. In fact, Muhammad himself was practicing a form of ascetic practice in an isolated cave when he received his first revelation. Tasawwuf is the term for Sufism in Arabic. Muhammad and some of his closest companions also continued to practice asceticism. They were called the Ahl al-Suffa. Such practices also remained common among devout Christians in Syria, Palestine and Egypt.

The ascetic practices began to be supplemented with mystical ideas from the 8^th to the 9^th Centuries. Centres of mysticism developed in Kufa, Basra, Khurasan, Baghdad, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt under the influence of location and individual ideologists.

Al-Hasan al-Basri (d. 728) was possibly the first ideologist of mystical Sufism. His ideas revolved around great and necessary fear of Allah. In that sense he was only beginning to depart from the first strand that I mentioned above.

Ibrahim Ibn Adham (d. 777) lived in Khurasan in eastern Iran and later Syria. He abandoned a former life of luxury in Khurasan to journey to Syria practising asceticism. Shaqiq of Balkh (d. 801), also of eastern Iran, was possibly the first to develop the notion of certain attitudes denoting particular mystical ‘states’ that later 'caught on' in Sufi ideology. The first attitude he articulated was one of “trust in God” or “tawakkul”.

Rabi’a of Basra’s (d. 801) focus was on love of God. She was the first noted female Sufi and still inspires today with her concise poetry and aphorisms concerning that love as she experienced it.

Al-Harith Ibn Asad al-Muhasibi (d. 857) moved from Basra to Baghdad to found the Baghdad School whose focus tended to be on spiritual accountability and self examination and understanding, hence his nickname related to examination or investigation (al-Muhasibi).

Al-Ghazali (d. 1111), the extremely multi-talented 11^th and 12^th Century religious and secular scholar, later recognised al-Muhasibi’s contribution in what he called the “science of hearts”. There was room in Sufism, he considered, for all of (scientific) introspection, theology and Qur’anic and Hadith study. He further articulated attitudes (such as repentance, pious fear of God, love, resolution and fear with hope) that would be held to produce particular mystical ‘states’ and ‘stations’ in later Sufism.

Al-Junayd’s (d. 910) focus was on knowledge of God. He was initially a Baghdadi follower of Muhasibi who developed a school of ‘sober’ Sufis (as opposed to the "intoxicated" Sufis (see below)). He continued to follow the idea of Sufism as an intellectual and sober quest for understanding of God. This he saw as a process of returning to God and "life" from a state of absence of God and "death".

Abu Yazid al-Bistami (d. c. 875) led the "intoxicated" Sufis who believed that the mystic was actually able to become one with God (rather than merely subsist in Him/Her/It as soberly proposed by the other school). Al-Hallaj (d. 922) took this to such an extreme that he was executed at the indirect instigation of Islamic jurists, who saw him as mad and a blasphemer (which he probably was). He proposed that the mystic could achieve this oneness without erecting all the ‘pillars’ of Islam (he (or she) could perform a ‘spiritual’ hajj, for instance, in his (or her) own home without having to outwardly perform a hajj). For a time, the teachings of this "intoxicated" school led to a decline in the prestige of Sufism. Al-Hallaj was essentially executed for saying that he was God (so he essentially suffered the fate of Jesus).

Finally, after over a century, the many-talented al-Ghazali managed to reinstate Sufism as legitimate in Islam. He was reacting to excessive formalism and intellectualism in Islamic rules. He sought to actually experience God’s presence and finally settled on Sufism after rejecting theology, philosophy and Esoteric Isma’ili teaching methods (in all of which he apparently excelled). He was able to integrate his practice into a scheme permitted by Islamic theology and laws. His form of Sufism was directed towards a fullness of worship of God and fellowship with others. He fully articulated the way of Sufism including its stations and states also discussed by al-Qushayri (d. 1074) and others in the 11^th Century.

The main stations were held to be repentance, abstinence, renunciation, wariness or pious awe of God, meekness (tawadu’), humility (khushu’), sincerity, constancy and courtesy. Others included earnest spiritual striving, solitude and withdrawal, silence, hope, sorrow and fear. The last "station", which may also be the first of the "states" is satisfaction or acceptance. Later states include servanthood to God, desire for God or seeking of God and finally love and spiritual yearning.

Major Sufi poets after this rebirth include Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240), the Egyptian, Omar Ibn al-Farid (d. 1235), the Iranian (and writing in Persian), Farid al-Din Attar (d. 1220), and from Anatolia the famous Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273) (also writing in Persian).

Ibn ‘Arabi was also a great Sufi master. He was born in Murcia in Islamic Spain and was also educated in Cordova. In Sufism, he was first instructed by masters including two women. He also travelled to Tunisia, Mecca, Jerusalem, Damascus (where he died and his tomb there is still venerated) and Aleppo in Syria and Konya and Malatya in Anatolia. He wrote extensively on Sufism and his main idea was that man could receive insight direct from God with the aid of a Sufi master as guide. For him, the guided part which was a “journey towards God” would be followed by the “journey in God” of the successful Sufi who had learned to love the divine wisdom.

After the early asceticism was thus modified and as a more popularist form of Sufism thus developed and until the late 19th Century, most Muslims in the Middle East were affiliated with at least one of the many Sufi "Schools" (usually as "lay" members).

The Development of the Major Legal "Schools"

Regional differences developed early on in even the central parts of the first Caliphate (even in the period of the first four Rashidun Caliphs) in relation to marriage, international affairs (such as questions of war and peace) and even in relation to the formation of subordinate governments within the Caliphate.

From around the mid 8^th century, scholars discussed the variations and what if anything was required to be done about them. The 2^nd Abbasid Caliph, al-Mansur, considered some codification in order to promote more uniformity in the law but was persuaded to accept the status quo on the basis that Islam importantly accepts and promotes diversity and independence of thought and ideas. This same principle led to the acceptance of differing mutually respectful schools of jurisprudence. Various schools were formed under the influence of respected scholars and later ceased. By the end of the 10^th century there had been around 10 major schools.

One example of schools arriving at their own diverse positions that dealt with new situations is the case of tobacco products. Tobacco was not widely known in Arabia until around the 16^th Century. There is still disagreement among scholars today (based to an extent on the schools to which the scholars adhere) as to whether consumption of tobacco products is acceptable but disapproved or actually forbidden (in an Islamic legal sense) . Incidentally coffee, which became popular at around the same time (well after the death of Muhammad), has generally been found to be an acceptable dietary item by all schools. These debates occurred well before modern times and bespeak some prescience particularly concerning tobacco's attributes vis a vis coffee's given the current state of scientific knowledge. The general Islamic concept appears to be that stimulants generally don't fall within prohibitions to the extent that items with narcotic properties similar to those of alcohol do (such as heroin or marijuana (by analogy with alcohol's prohibition)). Incidentally, music has also been considered by some especially puritan scholars (Ibn Hanbal was one (see below)) to have similar narcotic effects to alcohol thus making it potentially subject to regulation and certainly suspicion.

The idea arose that a consensus of the major scholars applying the original sources could raise the status of an opinion from an opinion to a law. There are four major Sunni schools today and one major Shi'a school but there have been several others that have contributed to Islamic law in the past, as I've mentioned. The Shi'a schools have required that Hadith be transmitted solely by members of Muhammad’s family in order to be considered valid as legal sources and have also included acts of senior members of his family as valid sources of law.

I will now briefly discuss the five major schools that exist today in the order in which they came to prominence. Note that today there are two other significant Shi'a schools and one significant Khawarij school active in a few regions. It has been common for serious scholars to learn the methods of all or several of these five major schools rather than merely a single school’s methods.

The Maliki School

Malik Ibn Anas (713 – 795) developed a system for 750s Medina of searching the sources for solutions to then-current issues. The school is now mainly prevalent in the western part of the Arab world (typically from Libya West). Malik gave particular weight to the consensus of the earliest jurists of Medina and the principle of the common good of the community as principles of legal decision-making. His major work is called al-Muwatta’ (also the earliest comprehensive book of Islamic jurisprudence) and was evidently written over around a 40 year period. It thus provides a model for later works and typically combines ideas concerning things such as grooming regulations and religious duties with everything from international laws of war and peace to division of estates upon divorce, penal law, contracts and the freeing of slaves. Malik was the only one of the five major school founders who produced such a major work himself. The other four appear to have left that role to one or more of their disciples.

The Hanafi School

Abu Hanifa al-Nu’man (c. 699 – 767) championed Greek logical methods in Islamic legal philosophy in Iraq. The 'Abbasid dynasty centred in Iraq first took on his philosophy when a disciple of Hanifa’s was appointed head judge and it remains prominent in Iraq and the North and East of the Arab world today. The Seljuk and Ottoman Turks and Indian Mughals thus came to prefer it and the Ottomans later popularised it in much of the rest of the Arab world with the exception of Egypt by means of their Ottoman Empire. It persists especially in the East of the Middle Eastern Islamic world.

The Ja’fari School (The Major Shi'a School)

The sixth Imam of the Twelver Shi’a (I will discuss the Twelver Shi’a further later) Ja’far al-Sadiq (c. 700 – 765) knew of and respected the above two scholars (i.e. the putative founders of the Maliki and Hanafi Schools). These first three scholars lived more or less contemporaneously and were in contact with and respected each other. The Ja'fari School is now prevalent especially in Iran (where Twelver Shi'ism is the major religion) and in southern Iraq and Lebanon (the areas that Condoleezza Rice used to menacingly refer to as the Shi'a Crescent that threatened peace when she wanted to scare Sunni Arab rulers into doing what she wanted).

The Shafi’i School

Muhammad Ibn Idris al-Shafi’i (767 – 820) was born in Gaza and was a disciple of Malik. He made use of the principle of precedent and thus a kind of judge-made law as a reaction against the kind of relatively arbitrary speculation promoted by the relatively logic-based Hanafi School. Shafi'i law is most commonly used today in Egypt and in South East Asia.

The Hanbali School

Ahmad Ibn Hanbal (780 – 855) was, in turn, a disciple of ash-Shafi’i. I will write more about Ibn Hanbal in later posts. For this post I will leave it that he was the least legally trained of the five scholars. His training was more in Hadith criticism - a quite different but of course related area. The Wahhabi clerics of Saudi Arabia constitute a quite puritanical sub-school of this already quite conservative School. The School mainly remains popular in Arabia and Syria today.

I will turn to Sufism in the next post.

The Law that Developed

The first elements of the Islamic "law" are not supposed to be compelled at all. They are more religious requirements including prayers, fasting in the month of Ramadan, pilgrimage, belief and the giving of alms. Piety, mysticism and copying of the habits of Muhammad are a further layer of requirement (but voluntarily undertaken) for the most desirous of attaining complete submission to Allah. Nevertheless Islam had created a state and it was not seen as necessary initially to separate that state from religion. Therefore the actual laws of the first state were derived from the religious teachings of its leader. Muhammad’s death led to a succession of successors who attempted to continue the success of the new ummah (community). Naturally therefore they built their legal system on the structure so successfully begun by Muhammad. He had left the Qur’an and his example (or Sunna) embodied especially in the Hadith and generally in the versions of the Sira (biography) of Muhammad that people wrote soon after his death.

Nevertheless time did not stand still and it was necessary to apply thought to the above sources in order to arrive at the laws that should apply in this new community. New circumstances always arise with which lawyers must inevitably grapple in new ways (albeit according to established principles, one could argue). The Qur’an and Hadith are not, in themselves, law books. The Qur’an, in particular, is far too abstract but certainly contains principles such as those of justice, equality and mercy that may provide a basis for a legal philosophy and ultimately "new" laws. Occasionally, however, both the Qur’an and the Hadith do contain direct pronouncements on matters that may be regarded as binding laws to be followed (importantly at least as long as circumstances remain unaltered). Circumstances always change, however. That is why laws are required to change and why the idea of an unchanging Shariah is palpably ridiculous to many Muslims today as it should be.

The Islamic law thus developed from the two sources of law, the Qur’an and the example of the prophet (and for the Shi'a, the rulings of the Imams which I may discuss further in another post).

The Islamic law came to be seen as one body of law that covered everything from the exceptional moral behaviour I mentioned at the beginning of the post (and even good grooming) and prayer as well as punishable immoral behaviour, the establishment of the clergy, commercial rules and family and intestacy law. However, as different governments came, they all freely interpreted the law and codified law when further clarification appeared to be necessary so there was almost never one single Islamic law. Some of it was codified by ‘Islamic’ governments (I will consider "Islamic" political theory in later posts) and some was judge-made as is the case today in the Western Common Law nations (and indeed in Civil Law nations, too). It also includes dietary rules (basically a pork, blood, meat not properly slaughtered and wine/alcohol prohibition).

The Qur’an itself does set down some rules that came to be accepted as the law as I've said but it tends to discourage and encourage behaviours (it also regards contrition as a mitigating factor to be considered in punishment decisions) much more than it sets down firm punishments for crimes. Some especially esteemed books of law by scholars based on the generally accepted sources (Qur'an and Hadith) came to have the status of persuasive secondary sources of the law. Judges were also appointed by the earliest Caliphs who had to solve the actual problem of interpretation of the law and they and the government were always the ultimate sources of the law in Islamic countries.

The Qur’an has been accepted as legislating concerning intestate estate inheritance, a requirement for a written record of contracts of debt (but not credit purchases), witnessing requirements for debt contracts, dietary rules, a law against usury, the law of peace and war between nations (this is quite an area of contention, naturally) and some penal law and rules concerning witnesses. Today some argue that the witness and inheritance rules that may appear to disadvantage some women may have been reasonable in the circumstances of 7^th Century Arabia when women both traditonally received a dowry and were expected to attend more to their domestic affairs than legal affairs but may not reasonably apply in a modern context. The usury rule has led to somewhat complicated arrangements to take into account the time value of money and yet be lawful. Considering that the rules of evidence in large parts of England apparently permitted guilt to be decided by battle and/or ordeal for centuries after the 7^th Century, these rules seem to have been eminently modern for their times.

The Hadith have been held to elucidate various legal/religious matters referred to in the Qur’an and to therefore constitute an ultimate legal source in Islam subordinate only to the Qur’an.

Legal decisions and rules were written down from the earliest period for reference (to be regarded as a kind of rule of law and a form of precedent in interpretation). A rule also developed that the burden of proof generally fell on the bringer of an action in a court.

The law was understood to leave much punishment and praise to be meted out by Allah himself and so behaviour was classified by legal theorists more in terms of its usefulness in society (whether it was Ma’ruf (good) or Munkar (unacceptable)) rather than associated with human penalties. With that as a proviso, the early jurisprudents defined around five legal attitudes to behaviour. Behaviour could thus be viewed as compulsory (Fard/Wajib) including generosity, certain basic prayers and truthfulness (default is only punishable by Allah), highly recommended (Sunna/Mandub) such as extra prayers, permitted (Halal – note this word also encompasses the first two kinds of behaviour and Mubah, meaning neither approved nor specifically disapproved), disliked (Makruh) and forbidden (Haram) such as murder, stealing, some dietary items and self-harming. The relatively short Haram list occasionally came with human penalties in Islamic law (as in other legal schemes, Islamic societies punish behaviour thought to be especially "bad").

The law was first administered directly by Caliphs in consultations with knowledgeable companions of Muhammad and later also by governors and chiefs of police in regions in criminal matters as the Caliphate expanded. The advice of experts often continued to be sought in the tradition of consultation with the companions after the companions were no longer available; the consultation now was with people learned in the law. Judges were appointed mainly to decide questions of family law, property and commercial practice.

Firstly the collections of Hadith and then the collections of fatawa (singular fatwa), the rulings of distinguished jurists, came to be regarded as important to deciding how to live one’s life according to the "School" to which one’s family adhered. I'll discuss the different "Schools" in the next post. The fatawa of individual scholars are mere opinions, though, and not law in themselves (although based on legal learning) rather like the opinions of legal academics in Western universities but followed more popularly. Nevertheless, the variety of opinions that were accorded some authority in this system that developed in a large Caliphate is partly due to the collection of a vast number of potentially contradictory Hadith in the time of ‘Umar II and the decision of the Caliph al-Mansur in the 8^th Century not to fully codify and unify the law of the Caliphate when that was under consideration. I will consider the later influence of modernity and the West on the law later. In Egypt and widely, the al-Azhar is today recognised as the foremost scholarly Sunni institution.

The laws that are today applied in Saudi Arabia and some other Gulf countries are merely conservative versions of Islamic law. They are not the only real Islamic law possible any more than the law of Australia is the only law possible in a "Christian" country.

Theology

Theology was influenced by political splits in early Islam. As well as the Shi’a there were the Khawarij and others. Theology was also influenced by Christian theology and debates with Christians.

The idea of predestination was considered early.

The mu’tazila (intermediate) school (not their preferred name) that began in Basra and became prominent in Baghdad was an early theological school that was associated with the Greek ideas of rationality. It had precursor ideas in earlier Syrian theology upon which it drew.

One major argument concerned whether the Qur’an was eternal. Ibn Hanbal, as a Hadith scholar and not a logician, (and his supporters) said it was but mu’tazilites saw that as tantamount to deifying the words and thus giving Allah a partner (a special blasphemy in Islam as asserted by the mu’tazilites). They further argued that the very idea of God’s justice (which was certainly Islamic) clearly implied the existence of a form of freewill. Their name comes in part from their view that a major sinner is in an intermediate position (with regard to God’s justice) between a true believer and an infidel (kāfir).

The Ash’ariyya school was named after its founder who had been a mu’tazilite. It became the dominant theological school and it asserted that the nature of God was beyond the power of human rationality to comprehend. Ash'ari and his school held the Qur’an to be eternal and held God to be the creator of human acts which humans 'acquire' from God (in some mystical way, presumably) in order to do the acts. There were also Khawarij and Shi’a theology schools.

Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani and ‘Muhammad Abduh were prominent theologians emphasising the concept of God's oneness (Tawhid) in the last couple of centuries and Muhammad Arkoun, Muhammad Shahrur and others have been still more recent critics of standard theologies.

Study of the Analytical Religious Sciences and Historiography

Study of the Qur’an as the direct word of Allah was the foremost foundation of the Islamic religious sciences. Commentary (Tafsir) was the elucidation and exegesis of its script and required extensive training to master.

The prophet and his companions (including his wives) were the first and considered the most authoritative commentators. ‘Abdullah Ibn ‘Abbas (ancestor of the ‘Abbasid Caliphs) was a young cousin of Muhammad who became his companion and a major early commentator. He died in the Umayyad period.

The Qur’anic language was confusing even to Arabs and it has become a tradition that not all of it can be understood (at least until some time in the future). This difficulty led to an interest in the linguistic sciences which aimed to aid in the elucidation of as much as was possible especially in the 8^th and 9^th Centuries. At-Tabari (d. 923) probably produced the most comprehensive commentary of the early period. Commentaries began to be preferred on the basis of the theology (which I discuss in my next post) that had previously been decided upon by the reader leading to competing partisan commentaries in the following centuries.

Thus specialised theological school-approved and general commentaries came to co-exist. The new law was also naturally dependent upon this commentary science and thus each legal school also tended to have preferred commentaries. Philosophers skilled in Greek logic such as Ibn Rushd (known in the West as Averroes) also contributed commentary coming from this logical view-point. Commentaries even served the purposes of a multitude of other factions throughout the history of Islam including Sufis and two of the most noted commentaries (of many) in the modern tradition are those of Muhammad ‘Abduh (d. 1905) and Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966), incidentally written before his radicalisation.

The correct reading of the Qur’an was also a subject of disagreement and therefore studies were required to be made of this aspect of the Qur’an. Recital from memory also naturally required study to master. The language had to be altered to standardise readings, as mentioned in the last post. Melodic reading also became an art-form. There are about four major regional styles of reading the Qur’an today.

The Hadith were also subject to much dispute especially before there were written collections and therefore they were studied in order to verify and correctly interpret them. The Hadith were considered mainly important legally as elucidators of the Qur'an. The major collections of Hadith also required travel to meet possible hearers at the ends of the hearer-chains of the until-then oral Hadiths for the purpose of verification of their validity.

The alleged hearers of Hadith also had to themselves be studied extensively to ascertain their truthfulness, memory and the likelihood of them having been in a position to have heard the Hadith from the source in the chain alleged. Chains of transmission were thus studied over the many years before the Hadith were formally written in accessible collections. Some of the companions (sahāba) of Muhammad had collected and written down what Muhammad both ruled and said presumably for the purposes of understanding better what Islam required. It could also be used potentially to cite a legal precedent. These early notes (the sahifa) were then either communicated to many others or known to relatively few and mostly collected much later by scholars into various written collections.

At first the scholars focused on attributions to a single companion and that compilation was referred to as the companion’s musnad. Ibn Hanbal (d. 855), the renowned lawyer, produced an early version of a more comprehensive collection. Malik (c. 715 – 795), also one of the major lawyers, included the first more or less comprehensive collection arranged thematically in his unique (at the time) law book.

Eventually six major collections were made that are usually accepted (and debated over) by at least Sunni Muslims. Al-Bukhari (d. 870) produced his Sahih (True [Ones]), Muslim Ibn al-Hajjaj (d. 875) produced his and Abu Dawud, at-Tirmidhi, an-Nasa’i and Ibn Majah rounded out the most accepted large collections also in the 9^th Century. There are three major Shi’a works: those of al-Kulaini (d. 939), al-Qummi (d. 991) and at-Tusi (d. 1067) typically produced a little later.

Scholars criticised Hadith based on the collection of the biographies of all of the transmitters in chains. From that they reasoned whether a specific transmitter may have an ulterior motif when transmitting a version that suited him (or her) or a particular viewpoint (and the weakness of character to follow through with the deception). It quickly became apparent that Hadith and their collectors could not always be trusted and sectarian interests and loyalties were often at the heart of the matter, hence the tendency for a variety of collections rather than one authoritative one accepted by all. The science could also ascertain the possibility of the Hadith being a fraud by testing the chain (isnad) of transmission. For example one link may be that person A told the Hadith to person B. If it could be shown by science that person A had died before person B could understand (e.g. person B was a baby at the time) or that one of these people had never been in the same place at the same time as the other or one had become deaf or perhaps senile before the alleged transmission would have been possible the Hadith could be thus invalidated. The scholars regarded face-to-face oral transmission at all points in a given purported chain as necessary for the chain to be a valid Hadith chain.

The science of biography, then, became vital to the religious sciences. Various forms of work appeared including lists of the important transmitters of a generation or generations in chronological order or of a city or region or more comprehensive works arranged alphabetically (all arranged for ease of checking the logical possibility of isnads). Histories of cities were appended to these lists (basically to provide context) so that we now have this type of work and related histories for many cities and regions including Damascus, Egypt, Baghdad, Aleppo, Bukhara, Isfahan, Cordova, Fez and many others. With these resources scholars were able to focus on specific transmitters and thus criticise the unique musnad (i.e. any Hadith only known via that person) of that transmitter and 'disprove' the validity some chains 'scientifically'. This science, of course, is essentially a form of historiography. The dictionaries of transmitters continued to be refined until the 15^th Century.

Separate schools for Hadith studies proliferated from the 10^th Century throughout the Islamic world and were still common in the 20^th Century. The methods of source citation and criticism and the focus on biography arrived at in these schools thus significantly contributed to and influenced the science of historiography in the Islamic world.

In coming posts, I discuss the other religious sciences of theology, Sufism and Islamic jurisprudence (legal philosophy).