Imān , Kufr,
and Takfir
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By Nuh Ha Mim
Keller
|
Question: Is someone who has an idea that is Kufr or “unbelief” thereby an
“unbeliever”?
In
the name of Allāh, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful;
All
the praise and Thanks is due to Allāh, the Lord of al-‘ālamīn. I testify that
there is none worthy of worship except Allāh, and that Muhammad, sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam is His Messenger.
Response:
The short answer, somewhat
surprisingly, is “not necessarily.”
In some cases such a person is, and in some not. Many people today read an
expression labelled in books of Islāmic law as Kufr, and when they realize that some Muslim they know or
have heard of has an idea like it, they jump to the conclusion that he is a kafir. Charging fellow Muslims with unbelief (takfir)
is an enormity in the eyes of Allāh. It
is the fitnah or “strife” that destroyed previous faiths, and
whose fire in Islāmic times was put out with the defeat of the Kharijites, only to be revived on a
wholesale scale almost a thousand years later by Wahhabi sect of Arabia
in the eighteenth century, from whence its acceptability has spread today to
a great many otherwise orthodox Muslims, becoming the bid‘ah of our
times, and one of the most confusing Islāmic issues. A careful answer to the
question must look at what Kufr
means, both in respect to oneself and others, before drawing general
conclusions on what legally establishes or acquits a person of the charge of
unbelief.
I - Oneself
Life is a gamble, whose
stakes are paradise or hell. Allāh has explained to us that whoever dies in a
state of unbelief without excuse shall be punished in hell forever, just as
whoever avoids unbelief shall attain to felicity, even if he should be
punished first. Allāh Most High says:
“The likeness of paradise, which the god-fearing have been
promised—rivers flow beneath it, and its fruits are forever, and its shade:
that is the requital of the god-fearing, while the requital of unbelievers is
hell” (Surah al-Ra‘d, 13:35).
And He says,
“It is He who created death and life for you that He may try
you, as to which of you is best in works. And He is the All-powerful, the
Oft-forgiving” (Al-Mulk,
67:2).
This is our test, and the
judge is a King, who is not up for reelection. If our ignorance of how He
shall judge us in the next world is far greater than our knowledge, we do
have enough to go on, and the immense value in His eyes of our lives and
actions is certainly plain from the magnitude of the stakes. Those who knew
more than anyone about it was more afraid than anyone; namely, the prophets.
And the only ones not afraid are those who do not understand.
The hellfire, in its turn, is
really a mercy to believers, a fire that Allāh has built it in front of the
wrong road so that we will not go in the direction leading away from endless
happiness. Allāh moreover has made the key to paradise a simple matter, to
acknowledge that there is no god but Allāh, and that Muhammad is His slave
and messenger, which entails accepting everything conveyed to us by Allāh as
He intended it, and everything conveyed to us by the Prophet (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam) as he intended it. From the very simplicity of entering Islām,
many Muslims assume that the criterion for leaving it, for Kufr, must be equally simple.
It is not. Rather, the things
we must believe, “everything conveyed to us by Allāh as He intended it,
and everything conveyed to us by the Prophet (Sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) as
he intended it” resolve themselves, upon reflection, into three categories:
(1)
matters about Islām that everyone
knows, which even a child raised among Muslims would know,
technically termed ma‘lum min al-din bi d-darura or “necessarily known as being of the
religion”;
(2)
matters that not everyone knows;
(3) And
matters that are disagreed upon
even by “those who know,” the ulema’
or scholars.
Affirmation or denial of
tenets of faith within each category varies in their eternal consequences
because of their relative accessibility, and the
individual’s opportunities to find them out.
Things That Everyone Knows
To deny anything of the first category above constitutes plain
and open unbelief. It includes such things as
denying the oneness of Allāh, the attributes of prophethood, that prophetic
messengerhood has ended with Muhammad sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam; the
resurrection of the dead; the Final Judgement; the recompense; the
everlastingness of paradise and hell; the obligatoriness of the Solah, Zakat, Fasting Ramadhān, or the Pilgrimage;
the unlawfulness of wine or adultery; or anything else that is unanimously
concurred upon and necessarily known by Muslims, since there is no excuse not
to know these things in the lands of Islām ; though for someone new to the
religion, or raised in a wilderness, outside of the lands of Islām , or some
other place where ignorance of the religion is rife and unavoidable, their
ruling becomes that of the second category. As Imam Nawawi (rahimahullāh) explains:
Any Muslim who denies
something that is necessarily known to be of the religion of Islām is adjudged a renegade and an unbeliever
(kafir) unless he is a recent convert or was born and raised in the
wilderness or for some similar reason has been unable to learn his religion
properly. Muslims in such a condition should be informed about the truth, and
if they then continue as before, they are adjudged non-Muslims, as is also
the case with any Muslim who believes it permissible to commit adultery,
drink wine, kill without right, or do other acts that are necessarily known
to be unlawful (Sharh Sahih Muslim, 1.150).
Things Not Everyone Knows
To deny something of the
second category above, tenets of faith that not everyone knows, and that an
ordinary Muslim might not know unless it were pointed out to him, is only
unbelief (Kufr) if he persists in denying it after he understands that it has
come to us from Allāh or His messenger (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam), since before this, it is not
within his power to believe or follow it. This
is but divine justice, and plain from the implications of the words of Allāh:
“We do not charge any soul except in its capacity” (Al-Anam,
6:152),
and attested to by many
hadiths, such that related by Abu Dawud with a well-authenticated (hasan)
chain of transmission from Jabir (radiyallāhu`anhu),
who said:
A donkey that had been
branded on the face passed before the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam), and
he said, “Is
there anyone among you who has not heard that I have cursed whoever brands or
strikes an animal’s face?” (Abu Dawud, 4.26–27: 2564. H).
Although branding or striking
an animal’s face is a crime and an
enormity (kabira) in Islām, the words “Is there anyone among you who has not
heard . . .” indicate that whoever does not
know it is wrong is not culpable of it, even if he commits it, until he
learns it is wrong. And Allāh says in another verse,
“Allāh only charges a soul according to what has come to it” (Al-Talaq 65:7).
In matters of belief, the
line traditionally drawn between this type of knowledge and the preceding is
their accessibility. A Muslim is
responsible to believe everything from Allāh or His messenger (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam) that should be obvious to all Muslims, and that every
Muslim may reasonably be expected to know. As for what is beyond that, he is
only responsible to believe what he has learned of.
Things Disagreed Upon by Ulema’
No position upon which one
scholar may disagree with another because of evidence from the Qur’ān ,
hadith, or human reason (as opposed to emotive preference) may be a criterion
for faith or unfaith (Kufr),
provided it is a scholarly position, minimally meaning that:
(a) It is not based on a
fanciful interpretation of the Qur’ān or Sunnah that violates the grammar or
diction of the Arabic Language.
(b) it does not contradict
some other evidentiary text that is both
—qat‘i
al-wurud or “unquestionably
established in its transmission” from Allāh or His Messenger (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam) , whether a verse of the Qur’ān , or hadith that is mutawatir or
“established by so many channels of transmission (generally held to be
at least four) that it is impossible that all could have conspired to
fabricate it”;
—and
qat‘i al-dalalah or “uncontestable
as evidence,” meaning a plain text which does not admit of more than
one meaning, a plain text which does not admit of more than one meaning, and
which no mujtahid can interpret in other than its one meaning or construe in
other than its apparent sense;
(c) it does not violate ijma‘ or
“scholarly consensus” meaning the agreement of all Islām ic mujtahids
of a particular era upon a ruling or a point of evidence that bears on a
ruling, such as the interpretation of a particular Qur’ān ic word or phrase;
(d) And it does not violate a fortiori analogy from either (b) or
(c).
Within these minimal
parameters of validity, questions that have been disagreed upon by
traditional Islām ic scholars—those who best know the texts of the Qur’ān and Sunnah—cannot be the criterion of a
Muslim’s faith or unfaith. The proof of this is that Allāh has ordered us as
Muslims to ask scholars by saying:
“Ask those who know well, if you know not” (Al-Nahl,
16:43).
Now, the point of asking
scholars is to accept their answer, and few things are more incompatible with
divine justice than that the consequence of doing so should be perpetual
damnation, as it would if one side of an issue were unbelief. Unfortunately,
there are some Muslims today who seem to believe this, the reply to which we
shall see in our discussion of sects below.
To summarize, our Creator is
well aware that a great many of the things we know are learned from other
people, and has made allowance for this in even the most imperative of
commands, that of imān. The Testification of Faith by which we become
Muslim means accepting everything conveyed to us by Allāh and His messenger (Sallallāhu
'alaihi wa sallam). But because the details are only known
through others, our responsibility for believing in them varies among the
three categories we have mentioned: (1) things
every Muslim usually knows, (2) things not every Muslim usually knows, and
(3) things disagreed upon even by Muslims who know, the ulema’ or
scholars. The first we must know and believe in, the second we must believe
in as soon as we know, and the third, even if one position is stronger than
others, cannot be a criterion for kufr or Imān. If
these distinctions are indispensable for judging one’s own faith,
there are even more indispensable for judging that of other people, and so
directly enter into the question of takfir or “declaring others
unbelievers,” which forms the second part of our investigation, to which we
now turn.
II. Others
The first thing to know about
declaring someone an unbeliever is that the ‘aqidah or “Islāmic belief”
of anyone who has spoken the Testification of Faith “There is no god but Allāh, Muhammad is the Messenger of Allāh,”
is legally valid until incontrovertibly proven otherwise. This principle is
attested to by the hadith of Usama Ibn
Zayd (radiyallāhu’anhu):
The Messenger of Allāh (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam) sent us on a foray, and we made a surprise attack at dawn
on Al-Huruqat in the lands of Juwayna. I caught up with a man, and he said, “There is no god but Allāh,” and I ran him
through. I later had afterthoughts, and mentioned it to the Prophet (Sallallāhu
'alaihi wa sallam), who said, “He said ‘There is no god but Allāh,’ and
you killed him?” and I replied, “O Messenger of Allāh, he only said it
out of fear of the weapon.” He said, “Why didn’t
you split him open to see if his heart really said it or not?”—and he kept repeating this till I wished I had not
become a Muslim before that day (Recorded by Muslim, 1.96–97:
96. S).
Despite the overwhelming
circumstantial evidence that the man only said this Testification to save his
life—indeed it was almost absurd to believe otherwise—the Prophet (Sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) sternly condemned Usama
for not taking the outward sign of Islām at face value, establishing for all time that the primary and ongoing presumption (asl) for another
Muslim’s Islāmic belief (‘aqidah) is that it is sound and acceptable, until
there is incontestable proof that it is otherwise.
The Enormity of Charging a Muslim with Unbelief
Judging anyone who regards
himself a Muslim to be an unbeliever is a matter not taken lightly by anyone
who understands its consequences. The Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam)has
said:
“Whoever charges a believer with unbelief is as though he had
killed him” (Bukhari, 8.32: 6105. S).
and,
“Any man who says, ‘O kafir” to his brother, one of them
deserves the name” [1] (Bukhari, 8.32: 6104.
S).
It is difficult to think of a
dire warning, and its purpose is clearly to dissuade Muslims of religion and
good sense from judging anyone who professes Islām to be an unbeliever unless
there is irrefutable proof.
Then why would anyone do so?
In Muslim society, such a
judgement is the business of the qadi or Islāmic judge alone, and only
because he has to. In cases where he must distinguish between the kufr or Imān
of a nominally Muslim individual, he does so because of earthly
rights and penalties entailed by such a judgement, such as that an apostate’s
marriage to a Muslim woman is null and void, [2] the meat he slaughters is
not lawful to eat, and his property belongs to the Muslim common fund (bayt al-mal), and so forth.
Moreover, these are the responsibility of the Islāmic government to implement,
and in the absence of such a government, ordinary Muslims may neither judge
nor carry out the worldly consequences of such legal rulings because they
have no authority to do so, for Islām does not permit vigilante or mob “justice.” Ordinary Muslims other than the qadi are
not required to judge the faith in the heart of anyone who has spoken the Shahādah
or Testification of Faith, with the possible exception of someone married to
a spouse who may have left Islām.
The motives today behind
careless accusations of unbelief made by Muslims are many, of which few have
anything to do with religion. Some of the more obvious are:
Besides the first, of course,
there is nothing for Allāh in any of these. All the rest are simply bad,
whether found individually, or when confused with the first.
The True Measure of Unbelief
It is axiomatic in Sacred Law that a state whose
existence one is certain about does not cease through a state whose existence
one is uncertain about. A Muslim’s having validly entered Islām by publicly
pronouncing the Testification of Faith is certitude, while the occurrence of a
state of unbelief in his heart can only become a certainty if there is proof. So in matters of faith, a Muslim is always presumed to be
a Muslim until there is publicly observable and decisive proof
that he has ceased to be one.
We say that such a proof must
be “publicly observable” because
the above-mentioned hadith of Usama
ibn Zayd (radiyallahu’anhu) , according to Nawawi(rahimahullah), “attests
to the well known principle of fiqh and legal methodology that rulings are
based upon outward evidence, while Allāh is responsible for the inward” (Sharh
Sahih Muslim, 2.107). Al-Ghazali
(rahimahullah) adduces the same hadith to show that regarding [entering] Islām,
the jurist (faqih) but speaks of what makes it legally valid or invalid, not
even considering anything besides the tongue. As for the heart, it is not
within his jurisdiction, since the Messenger of Allāh (sallallāhu ‘alayhi
wasallam) has put it beyond the reach of those of swords and authority, by
saying to the killer of the man who had said the Testification of Islām : “Why didn’t you split him open to see if the heart
really said it,” when he offered as an
excuse that the man had only said it for fear of the sword (Ihya
‘ulum al-din, 1.17).
And we say that such a proof
must be “decisive” because words
can mean many things, the speaker might have an excuse, and the Prophet (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam)has said:
Turn aside
prescribed penalties from Muslims as much as you can. It there is any excuse,
let the defendant off, for it is better for the ruler to make a mistake in an
amnesty than to make a mistake in a punishment (At-Tirmidzi, 4.33:
1422. D).[3]
And Nawawi (rahimahullah) observes in the introduction to Sharh
al-Muhadhdhab, his largest legal work:
It is obligatory for a
student to give a positive interpretation to every utterance of his brothers
that seems to be wrong until he has exhausted seventy excuses. No one is
incapable of this except a failure (Majmu‘, 1.24).
Such excuses, applicable to
even the external legal sphere within which a qadi judges, are all the more
applicable to someone trying to judge the internal sphere between an
individual believer and his fate in the afterlife, especially in view of the
basic facts of takfir or “declaring someone an unbeliever” we have
outlined above, which, to summarize everything we have said so far are:
(a) that every Muslim’s faith
(‘aqidah) is valid until proven otherwise;
(b) it is not the legal
obligation of the ordinary Muslim to judge another’s faith, but rather that
of the qadi, in public cases where this-worldly interests dictate that it
must be legally decided;
(c) it is an enormity and a
crime to charge a Muslim with unbelief;
(d) the most common motives
discernable in our times for declaring others unbelievers are morally
repugnant, and themselves sins;
(e) to their own personal
sin, factions who declare others unbelievers add the onus of sinning against
the Ummah through sectarianism, the sunnah of the Christians whom the Qur’ān says Allāh afflicted with enmity and hatred
for each other as punishment for forgetting their religion;
(f) the mark of “sects”
throughout Islām ic history has been their adversarial attitude towards other
Muslims;
(g) the true measure of a
Muslim’s becoming a non-Muslim is legal proof that is both publicly
observable and decisive;
(h) it is incompatible with Allāh’s
justice and the Qur’ān that any scholarly position about which major
authorities among the Islāmic ulema’ differ could be the decisive criterion
of any Muslim’s faith;
(i) It is obligatory in Islāmic
law to avert prescribed penalties (hudud), including the penalty for
apostasy, by adducing extenuating circumstances (shubuhat) that exculpate the
accused.
Given these conclusions, and
the obligatory character of averting harm from Muslims, the final part of our
answer shall focus upon two broad categories among the least known today of
extenuating circumstances that acquit Muslims of kufr, the first
relating to the criteria for such judgements, and the second relating to the
accused himself.
III. The Legal Criteria for Unbelief
Words
That Entail Leaving Islām
The Usama ibn Zayd (radiyallahu’anhu)
hadith shows that a Muslim’s legally entering Islām by having said the Profession of Faith (Shahadah) is an absolute
certainty. No one can thereafter be considered a kafir without an
equal certainty, since the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) condemned
Usama for doing so. The Imams of fiqh have specified just how much certainty
is needed in texts like the following, which, though taken from the Hanafi school, is typical of the
caution observed by the ulema’ of all schools, and shows how far the loose
accusations of kufr echoing back and forth on the Islāmic scene today
are from the standards of Islāmic law. Imam
‘Ala' al-Din ‘Abidin writes:
The most grievous of offences
and heinous of enormities is associating others with Allāh Most High (shirik),
or disbelief in Him, or in that which has been conveyed by our liege lord Muhammad the Messenger of Allāh
(sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam), or sarcasm about anything
thereof, may Allāh be our refuge from that. “Disbelief” includes:
(1) reviling the religion of Islām
, or Allāh Most High, or the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam);
(2) denying any matter
necessarily known to be of the religion of Islām , that is established by a
text from either the Holy Qur’ān or mutawatir [4] hadith, provided the text is
incontestable as evidence[5] and there is no pretext (shubhat) for disagreement about it;[6]
(3) denying any matter established
by unanimous consensus of all the prophetic Companions (Sahabah), provided it
its unanimity is unquestionably established, and it was explicitly stated by
all, not merely tacitly agreed to;
(4) denying the existence of Allāh
Most High;
(5) believing that things
cause effects through themselves or by their nature, without the will of Allāh
Most High;
(6) denying a matter of
unquestionable scholarly consensus (ijma‘ qat‘i);
(7) denying the existence of
the angels, the jinn, or the heavens;
(8) believing something
intrinsically unlawful whose its unlawfulness is unquestionably established,
such as drinking wine, to be lawful (halal)—as opposed to [something not
intrinsically unlawful, such as] the property of another [which is not
unlawful in itself], for it is unlawful for an extrinsic reason [namely, the
other’s ownership of it];
(9) sarcasm about any ruling
of Sacred Law, [7] or quoting a statement of
unbelief—even jokingly, without believing it—when one’s intention is sarcasm
[about religious matters];
(10) demeaning any prophet,
or saying that prophethood is acquired [by spiritual works];
(11) calumny against ‘A'ishah
(radiyallahu’anha) the wife of the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam);
(12) or denying that the
Prophet’s message (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam)was
intended for the entire world
—in any of which cases a man
is an apostate, and must be asked to re-enter Islām , which he can either do
or else be killed, though a woman is merely incarcerated (al-Hadiyya
al-‘Ala’iyya, 424–25).
These legal criteria, with
the foregoing parts of this essay, reveal a number of fallacies in the
reckless charges of unbelief bandied about in our times, providing even stronger
reason for Muslims to avoid them and the groups enamored with them. Let us
now look more closely at three examples of fallacies of takfir all too
common in the present day: (1) the fallacy of hearsay evidence, (2) the
fallacy of imputed intentionality, and (3) the fallacy of guilt by
association.
The Fallacy of Hearsay Evidence
Accepting hearsay evidence
against people is forbidden by Allāh Most High, who says,
“O you who
believe: when a corrupt person brings you news, verify it, lest you harm
people out of ignorance and come to regret what you have done” (Al-Hujurat
49:6).
The Qur’ānic scholar Sulayman al-Jamal notes that this
does not merely apply to those who are corrupt, but rather Allāh calls such a
person corrupt in the above verse “to repel and shock people from
jumping to conclusions without checking” (al-Futuhat al-ilahiyya,
4.178).
The Prophet (Sallallāhu ‘alayhi
wasallam) said, “It is lying enough for a man to repeat everything he hears”
(Muslim, 1.10: 5. S), because as Imām Nawawi observes, “one generally
hears both truth and falsehood, and to repeat everything one hears without
checking will necessarily mean telling lies” (Sharh Sahih Muslim,
1.75).
Those familiar with testimony
in court know how frequently even well-intentioned eyewitnesses contradict
each other and, upon cross-examination, themselves. In the world in which we
live, not everyone is well-intentioned, especially towards those who are
envied for their accomplishments or possessions. “Spin,” the new polite phrase for lying innuendo, is a fact of media
politics. Reporters sometimes get things wrong, eliminate nuances that
indicate the context, or misunderstand the person they interview to improve
the story line or reader interest, or to make things “fit”
with received ideas. Love and hate still sell news. Daily printing
deadlines by their very nature often prevent a thorough checking of facts. If
we think about it, much of our everyday knowledge is acquired with
considerably less than the verification demanded by Islām. When we hear
something, or read it from a single source, we tend to accept such knowledge
because it usually works.
It does not work for judging
a Muslim. Sacred Law stipulates that to establish that someone has left Islām;
there must be at least two male witnesses who testify that they have heard
him make a statement of unbelief (Radd al-muhtar, 4.371). Though the
ruling cited is from the Hanafi school, the other schools of jurisprudence
similarly stipulate testimony from witnesses. Moreover, if the individual
then denies that he has made such a statement, he is legally considered as
having repented of it (Mukhtasar al-Tahawi, 259).
As for judging the belief or
unbelief of a particular historical individual of the past who ostensibly
died as a Muslim, it is no one’s responsibility, since the dead no longer
stand in our dock. As previously noted, such judgements are only given by the
qadi in view of this-worldly rulings and consequences, which are immaterial
to those now remanded by death to a higher court.
However, when a physical
individual is gone, his “historical person”
remains in the form of his written works, and it is this that ulema’
sometimes warn Muslims about when they mention “the kufr of
So-and-so,” intending not his person, but the historical personality that his
written legacy has effectively become.
This is legally quite a
different thing from judging the author himself. Why? Because whoever surveys
something of the vast corpus of Islām ic manuscripts extant realizes how many
works, even some of more important, are without rigorous authentication from
their authors. Though a few manuscripts are autographed, or have been related
by multiple channels from the author by students, or have ijazah's
that attest to a checked and contiguous transmission, perhaps as many as 75
percent do not, according to our teacher in hadith Sheikh Shu‘ayb al-Arna’ut,
who has made his living for the last more than forty years readying such
manuscripts for print. Even manuscripts optimistically labelled by indexers
as “in the author’s own handwriting” or “transcribed under the supervision of
the author” sometimes turn out to be otherwise. Oftener, a judgement in print
that a particular work has reached us through several copyists’ hands in the
form its author originally intended it represents the probabilistic
expectation of the editor after collating the oldest and best manuscripts
available to him. The point is that if ulema throughout Islāmic history have
agreed that this should not prevent Muslims from reading and benefiting from
such books, they also tell us that written works that have reached us through
copyists are leagues apart from the kind of forensic evidence demanded by Islāmic
law for judgements about a particular Muslim’s belief or unbelief.
Aside from honest mistakes,
there are intentional forgeries. Faction welcomes perfidy, and at the
personal level, envy is fact of life: the many prohibitions in the Qur’ān and sunnah against it attest to its presence
in human nature, and that if not overcome by religious motives at its onset,
it can burgeon into an obsession that will stop at nothing to destroy the
person envied. Thus historically we find that the greater numbers of followers
of Sufi sheikhs in comparison to other ulema’ sometimes engendered the most
egregious means of redress in the latter’s camp. In an Islāmic milieu where
orthodoxy was highly valued, interpolations of heretical beliefs or immoral
statements into hand-copied books easily lent themselves to the ends of
malice.
For example, after mentioning
a warning by the Supreme Ottoman Sultanate against reading Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Fusus al-Hikam [The
gem-settings of the wisdoms] which said spurious interpolations had been
added into it by enemies of Islām , Hanafi Imam Ibn ‘Abidin says that this
also happened to the Knower of Allāh [‘Abd al-Wahhab] al-Sha‘rani, against
whom envious people forged calumnies of kufr that they inserted into
some of his works, which they published as his. Whereupon the ulema’ of the
day met, and he produced his own copy of the book which had been signed by
scholars[8] and proved to be free of the lies
forged against him (Radd al-muhtar, 3.294).
Thus also, when the
litterateur and historian Burhan al-Din al-Biqa‘i stirred up controversy
among the ulema’ of ninth/fifteenth–century Cairo over some verses ostensibly
written by the mystical poet Ibn al-Farid, the hadith master (hafidz)[9] Sakhkhawi rejoined by saying:
The poetry ascribed to him
has not reached me through any rigorously authenticated chain of
transmission, and we do not declare the unbelief of anyone on the basis of
something merely possible, especially when there is no benefit in judging him
an unbeliever, for the sole benefit lies in making people shun the
words themselves (Maqalat al-Kawthari, 340).
“Making people shun the words
themselves” was also the reason for Imam
Dhahabi’s warning readers in Zaghal al-‘ilm [The counterfeiting of
Sacred Knowledge], in his chapter on Usul al-din or “the bases of religion,” of the example of his former sheikh Ibn Taymiyah,
cautioning students against losing their way in the mazes of philosophical
and cosmological arguments of the ancients,[10] as he felt Ibn Taymiyah had at the
end of his life. He tells anyone who imagines that studying such arguments
and refuting them is a necessary part of an Islāmic education:
I do not think you have
reached the rank of Ibn Taymiyah therein, or by Allāh, even approach it, yet
you saw what happened to him: the attacks on him,
people leaving him, and his being called misguided, a kafir, and a
liar—rightly and wrongly—while, before he got into this field, he was
illumined and enlightened, and bore the mark of the early Muslims on his
face; whereafter most people felt that he grew dark and eclipsed, and a
shadow fell upon him; becoming in the eyes of his enemies a liar, impostor,
and unbeliever; in the eyes of the intelligent and fair-minded an inaugurator
of blameworthy innovations (mubtadi‘) in religion, though personally
virtuous, painstaking, and skilled; and in the eyes of the majority of his
low-bred followers the ‘standard-bearer of Islām ’ and ‘defender of the
faith.’ I can tell this as a fact” (Zaghal al-‘ilm,
42–43).
Imam Dhahabi’s aim in saying
this was to caution upcoming ulema’ against delving in the kind of
philosophical speculation through which Ibn Taymiyah became “an inaugurator of blameworthy innovations” and “called
misguided, a kafir, and a liar—rightly and wrongly.” Dhahabi
did not to thereby intend to make a judgement against him, for he
acknowledges his good traits, but rather to warn others to take admonition
from the example of a good scholar who went wrong through studying and
writing about something Dhahabi deemed worse than useless.
In this, Imam Dhahabi was
like other ulema’ who mention the “misguidance” or “unbelief” of past Islāmic
figures. They are judging words and positions, not the people who may (or may
not) have said or held them. For no scholar would presume to transgress the
limits of the Qur’ān and sunnah that prohibit any accusation, let alone that
of kufr, on mere hearsay. Those in our day who make takfir of
Muslims of previous times commit the “fallacy of
hearsay evidence” by ignoring both the forensic standards of Islām
and the whole legal purpose of a
formal judgement of apostasy, which as we have seen is temporal and
this-worldly.
We have not mentioned the
comparatively recent phenomenon of printed books whose contents are
established by copyrights as the work of a particular author in archives such
as the Library of Congress or the British Library. For such works, the
thoroughness of documentation suggests that authors bear full legal
responsibility for what is in them. But it should be noted that if there is
any statement in an author’s printed work that seems to be kufr, it
must be plainly expressed, not merely implied, for otherwise the accuser has
committed another fallacy, to which we now turn
.
The Fallacy of Imputed Intentionality
Words are judged by what the
speaker intends, not necessarily what the hearer apprehends. If an utterance
is unambiguous and its context plain, there is normally only one possible
intention. But according to the Hanafi school, if a statement may conceivably
be intended in either of two ways, one valid, the other unbelief (kufr), it cannot be the basis for a
fatwa of the kufr of the person who said it. In the words of Imam
Haskafi in his al-Durr al-mukhtar,
A fatwa may not be given of
the unbelief of a Muslim whose words are interpretable as having a valid
meaning, or about the unbelief of which there is a difference of scholarly opinion,
even if weak (Radd al-muhtar, 3.289).
Only when the intention
entails kufr do such words take the speaker out of Islām. Context is
of the utmost importance in determining this intention, and taking someone’s
words out of context is universally considered dishonest, doing violence to
their intended meaning. The Qur’ān itself, for example, is filled with verses
quoting kafirs denying Allāh and His messengers (upon whom be peace),
yet reciting such verses is certainly not kufr, unless it is
accompanied with the intention of unbelief.
The need to contextualize
words to establish their intent is even more imperative in possible
utterances of kufr that insult Allāh Most High or the Prophet (Sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam). Something might be said that while outwardly
offensive to Allāh or His messenger (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam), was
nevertheless intended by the speaker to make a valid point, not as an insult.
Intentional and
Unintentional Insult
To deliberately insult Allāh
or His Messenger (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) is unquestionably kufr,
as borne out by Qur’ānic verses such as the word of Allāh:
“Those who
offend Allāh and His messenger are cursed by Allāh in this world and the
next, and He has prepared for them a humiliating chastisement” (Surah
al-Ahzab, 33:57);
in which the word adha
or “offend” means to hurt, vex, or bother someone in a way generally short of
causing them outright harm; while the certainty of a humiliating chastisement
in this world and the next pertains only to unbelievers, as Allah mentioned:
“A painful
torment awaits those who offend the Messenger of Allāh. They swear to you by Allāh,
to please you, though Allāh and His messenger are fitter for them to please,
if they are believers. Do they not know that the fire of hell awaits whoever
opposes Allāh and His messenger, dwelling therein forever? That is the great
humiliation” (Surah al-Tawbah, 9:61–63).
The latter verse shows that
offending the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam)amounts to opposing Allāh
and His messenger, which is without question unbelief
“Offending” however—as the
mujtahid Imam and hadith master (hafidz)[11] Taqi al-Din al-Subki says in his al-Sayf
al-maslul, a more than five-hundred-page work on the legal consequences
of insulting the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) —may be either
intentional or unintentional, while only if a person intends giving
offense to the Prophet (Sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) has he thereby committed
kufr:
One must be aware of this
rule, giving due consideration to the intention behind the offense (adha). For a person might do or say
something which offends another that he did not have the slightest intention
to offend him by, but rather intended something else, not thinking that it
might give offense to the other, or understanding it would necessarily do so.
Such cases do not entail the legal consequences of “giving offense”. . . .
This is proven by the word of
Allāh Most High about those who sat [too long] at the marriage feast of Zaynab [and the Prophet (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam)]
“O you who
believe, do not enter the dwellings of the Prophet unless you are given leave
to partake of the food, not waiting for it to be prepared, but rather enter
when given permission, and leave when finished eating; not [lingering because
of] enjoying conversation; truly, you offended (adha) the Prophet thereby” (Al-Ahzab, 33:53).
These were the greatest of
the Companions, who did not mean to give offense (adha) by doing this, so it
did not entail its legal consequences (al-Sayf al-maslul (c00), 135).
The “fallacy of imputed
intentionality” in such cases means to assume without decisive proof that an
offensive deed or utterance was deliberately intended to offend Allāh
or His messenger (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) and hence legally kufr.
Imam Subki’s restriction of unbelief to cases of deliberate offense is
attested to not only by the Qur’ān, but by many rigorously authenticated (sahih)
hadiths. Anas ibn Mālik (radiyalllāhu’anhu)
said:
I was walking
along with the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) , who was wearing a cape
from Najran with a thick edge, when a desert Arab caught up with him and
pulled him so hard that I looked at the side of his neck and saw the mark on
it from the violence of pulling the cape’s edge. The man said, “Order that I
be given some of the wealth of Allāh which you have!” The Prophet (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam) looked at him and laughed, then ordered he be given to” (Bukhari,
4.115: 3149).
Though the bedouin inflicted
palpable physical pain on the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam), it
was without legal consequence because he apparently only meant to stop the
Prophet to talk with him. Anas also
relates:
When Allāh gave
His messenger (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) the spoils from Hawazin, and he
began giving a hundred camels each to certain [noble] men of the Quraysh [so
that others like them might desire to enter Islām]. Certain people of the
Medinan Helpers (Ansar) then said of the Messenger of Allāh (sallallāhu ‘alayhi
wasallam), “May Allāh forgive the Messenger of Allāh. He gives to Quraysh and
neglects us, while our swords still drip with their blood.”
The Messenger
of Allāh (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) was told what they said, and he sent
for the Helpers and gathered them together in a leather tent, with no one
else there. When they had assembled, the Messenger of Allāh (sallallāhu ‘alayhi
wasallam) came and asked, “What is this that I hear you have said?” The
wisest replied: “Those of us whose opinion matters, O Messenger of Allāh,
have said nothing. As for some men of us whose teeth are new [the young],
they have said: “Allāh forgives the Messenger of Allāh (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam). He gives to
Quraysh and neglects the Helpers, while our swords still drip with their
blood.”
The Messenger
of Allāh (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) said: “Verily, I am giving gifts to
men who are but newly come from unbelief. Are you not satisfied that others
should get property, while you return to your saddles with the Messenger of Allāh
(sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam)? By Allāh, what you are getting is better than
what they are.” They answered, “We are well satisfied, O Messenger of Allāh.”
He told them, “Truly, when I am gone, you shall see rank favoritism; but have
patience until you meet Allāh and His messenger at the Watering Place.” Anas commented: “However we did not” (Bukhari,
4.114: 3147).
In this hadith, some of the
Medinan Helpers spoke words as offensive to the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi
wasallam) as any could be, entailing that he needed to be forgiven by Allāh
for wronging those who had fought in jihad by unjustly favoring his own
people. Yet, because they did not intend to thereby insult or demean him—for
their words rather proceeded from natural human distress at being left out
while others took the spoils—the Messenger of Allāh (sallallāhu ‘alayhi
wasallam)did not charge them with unbelief or even with sin, as would have
been obligatory if it had been. He merely told them why he did what he did,
and of the eternal reward they would receive. The insult and offense offered
thereby to the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) was plain, but without
legal consequences because it was unintentional.
Another example of the same
ruling is found in the hadith of ‘A'ishah
(radiyallāhu`anha), who said:
I became
jealous of the women who offered themselves to the Messenger of Allāh (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam) and said, “Does a woman offer herself?” And when Allāh Most
High revealed: Postpone [the daily turn of] whomever you will of them [your
wives], and draw near to you whomever you will; Whoever you wish [to return
to their original turn], of anyone you have set aside, it is no reproach
against you[12] (Al-Ahzab 33:51), I said, “I don’t see but
that your Lord rushes to fulfill your own whims” (Bukhari,
6:147: 4788).
This last, admittedly
jealous, remark was a reproach against her husband, the Messenger of Allāh (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam), but here too, because it was a mere emotional
protest that lacked the explicit intention to demean or offend him, it
entailed no legal consequences. There are many similar examples of unintended
offense in the sunnah. One of the most telling of them is in the hadith of Muslim:
“Truly, Allāh
rejoices more at the repentance of a servant when he repents to Him than one
of you would if riding his camel through a wasteland, and it wandered off,
carrying away his food and water, and he despaired of ever getting it back;
so he came to a tree and lay down in its shade, without hope of ever seeing
his camel again; then, while lying there, suddenly finds it beside him and
seizes its reins, so overjoyed that he cries, “O Allāh, You are my slave, and
I am Your lord”—making a mistake out of sheer happiness” (Muslim,
4.2104–5: 2747).
It is difficult to think of
an utterance more blasphemous or offensive to Allāh than the latter, had it
been intentional. But since it was not, the principle of Imam Subki necessarily applies that the person who says such an
expression without intending to revile Allāh or His messenger (sallallāhu ‘alayhi
wasallam) cannot be judged an unbeliever.
The
Barelwi-Deobandi Conflict on the Indian Subcontinent
Knowledge of the above
principle could have probably prevented much of the “fatwa wars” that took
place around the turn of the last century in India between Hanafi Muslims of
the Barelwi and Deobandi schools. They culminated in a number of fatwas published
by Ahmad Reza Khan Barelwi (d. 1340/1921) of the takfir of major
Deobandi ulema’ of his times such as Muhammad Qasim Nanotwi (d.1297/1879),
Rashid Ahmad Gangohi[13] (d. 1323/1905), Khalil Ahmad
Saharanpuri[14] (d. 1346/1927), Ashraf Ali Thanwi
(d. 1362/1943), and indeed, of anyone who did not consider them kafirs—fatwas
which have cast their long shadows down to our own times. In comparison, no
Deobandi scholar of note, to the author’s knowledge, has yet made takfir of
Barelwis.
Now, any issue that has been
debated back and forth between two parties of Islām ic scholars, both of whom
know the Qur’ān and hadith, Hanafi jurisprudence, and the ‘aqida of Islām,
is by that very fact not a central religious principle that is “necessarily
known to be of the religion of Islām,” but rather can only be something
peripheral that is “disagreed upon by ulema.” As such, it cannot be the
criterion for anyone’s kufr or Imān. Among the evidence for
this, as previously noted, is that Allāh has commanded us to “ask those
who know well, if you know not” (Al-Nahl 16:43), and the position of
Muslim orthodoxy is that no Muslim will go to hell for following what the
ulema’, “those who know well,” tell him to do in such a case, even in a
matter upon which scholars differ. Despite the acrimonious charges and
countercharges, an unbiased look at the polemical literature of the Barelwis and
Deobandis bears out its essentially peripheral nature in three ways:
First, the fiqh differences
between them, mostly about the acceptability or unacceptability of certain
practices of folk Islām in the Indian subcontinent, do not concern matters of
belief to begin with. I hope to clarify the mistake of thinking that such
differences do so in an essay I intend to write in the future, Allāh willing,
on “the
fallacy of considering ijtihad as ‘aqidah.”
Second, none of the six main ‘aqidah
issues fought over by Barelwis and Deobandis are central enough to be
“necessarily known of the religion,” as shall appear from the short
description of them that follows.
Third, the only substantive
pretext for takfir between them is an issue that illustrates the
“fallacy of imputed intentionality” we are expounding here, namely the charge
of Ahmad Reza Khan Barelwi in his Husam al-Haramayn and al-Fatawa
al-Rizawiyya that the Deobandi writers Khalil Ahmad Saharanpuri and
Ashraf Ali Thanwi committed kufr by insulting the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi
wasallam). After a brief glance at the six main ‘aqidah issues in the
following section, which may be skipped for brevity, we shall return in the
section after it, “The Imputed Insult,” to the remarks of these two scholars
in context, and show how Imam Subki’s distinction between intentional and
unintentional offense offers a compelling Islām ic legal solution to a debate
that has become a social problem.
The Six
Disputed ‘Aqidah Issues
Issues that one cannot
consider a Muslim to be a kafir for affirming or denying include all
the main ‘aqidah-related questions disagreed upon by Barelwis and
Deobandis, the most debated of which are the following:
(1) How
much knowledge of the unseen (‘ilm al-ghayb) did Allāh bestow upon the
Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) before his death? For example, Hudzaifah
(Radialllāhu`anhu) relates:
The Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi
wasallam) delivered an address to us in which he did not omit a single thing
until the Last Hour without mentioning it.[15] Whoever knew it [by remembering it
afterwards] would know, and whoever did not would not. Truly, I would see something
I had forgotten [that he had said] and then remember it, as someone recalls
something he has not seen for a while, but then sees and remembers (Bukhari,
8.154: 6604).
Even though Allāh directed
the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam)in the Qur’ān to say:
“I am only a human being like any of you, who is divinely
inspired that your God is but One God” (Al-Kahf 18:110),
No one ever again received
the divine prophetic wahyu or “inspiration” that he did. There is
little comparison between any other man’s knowledge of the unseen and that of
someone who could relate everything that was going to happen until the end of
the world and “not omit a single thing,” even if he was “only a human being
like any of you.” The Barelwis hold the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam)
was given incomparably vast knowledge of the unseen, while the Deobandis say
he had only limitary knowledge of it.
(2) Does Allāh show
everything that happens in this world to the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi
wasallam)in the barzakh or “interworld” between this life and the
Judgement Day, such that he is as though hadir or “present” and nadhir
or “watching” all we do? Ibn Mas‘ud (Radialllāhu`anhu) relates that the
Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam)said,
“My life is better for you,
for you bring up new matters, and we speak to you [about them]; and my death
is better for you, for your works shall be shown to me, the good ones of
which I see I shall praise Allāh for, while the bad ones I see I shall ask Allāh
Most High to forgive you for” (Musnad al-Bazzar (c00), 5.308–9: 1925).[16]
For any of us, being present
and beholding something are merely conventional means (asbab ‘adiyya) by
which Allāh brings about their usual effect: awareness of what is happening.
He could also bring about this effect in anyone, alive or dead, without such
means, solely through His omnipotent power. The above hadith shows that He
has chosen to do so for the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) after his
death, “for your works shall be shown to me,” who is therefore effectually as
though present (hadir) and watching (nadhir) our actions. Thus the Barelwis
affirm, though Deobandis deny this formulation, which they say makes the
Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) as though omnipresent and omniscient.
(3) Allāh made the Prophet (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam) the most influential human being who ever lived. To obey
him was to obey Allāh, Master of the entire universe, and to disobey him was
to disobey Allāh. By creating paradise and hell and revealing the religion of
Islām, Allāh made the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) the gateway for
all time to the greatest part of human existence. Alongside this momentous
effect upon every human being’s destiny, and with the inimitable miracles
(mu‘jizat) vouchsafed to him in this life, the answering of his prayers and
his being the dearest of creation to God—it can be asked: What else did Allāh
place at his disposal in this world? Was he someone for whom Allāh effected
anything he chose (mukhtar al-kull)? The Barelwis believed so, adducing that
the Prophet’s will (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam)though created by Allāh and
without any causal effect in and of itself, was in conformity with Allāh’s
will in every particular; while Deobandis say that it is unbelief to affirm
that Allāh has granted complete control over creation to anyone besides
Himself.
(4) It is rigorously
authenticated in Bukhari and Muslim that on Judgement Day the Prophet (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam) shall be granted supreme intercession with Allāh for all
believing mankind; indeed, seeking this intercession in the afterlife is
recommended by the sunnah.[17] The question arises: Does the
Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) also intercede for matters prior to the
Judgement Day? Barelwis say that his intercession (sallallāhu ‘alayhi
wasallam) is for both this world and the next, so one should ask for both.
Some Deobandis agree, while others aver that his intercession, now that he is
dead, shall only occur in the next world; and still others say that it is
blameworthy to ask for his intercession or help in this world.[18]
Two more ‘aqidah-related
questions remain to be mentioned, and to understand them, we have to return
for a moment to a previously made distinction from the “Letter to ‘Abd
al-Matin.”[19]
There we said, first, that Allāh’s
omnipotent power (qudrat) only relates to what is “intrinsically possible”
(ja’iz dhati), meaning possible in itself, not logically absurd or
self-contradictory. It is sometimes termed the “hypothetically possible”
(ja’iz ‘aqli) in view of the fact that it refers to anything that can in
principle exist.
Second, Allāh’s omnipotent
power does not relate to what is “intrinsically impossible” (mustahil dhati),
meaning something logically absurd or self-contradictory, such as “creating a
square circle” or “a round triangle,” for these are mere jumbles of words
that do not mean anything that can possibly exist.
Third, we saw that there is
also another class of the impossible, namely things which, while not
impossible in themselves (mustahil dhati), become impossible because
of Allāh’s eternal decision that they are not to be, such as the Imān of Abu Lahab, which is negated by Surah
al-Masad in the Qur’ān . Though intrinsically possible in themselves, such
things are termed “contingently impossible” (mustahil ‘aradi), since their
impossibility is due to the contingency of Allāh’s deciding that they
shall never exist, and informing us so in revelation.
These distinctions are
necessary because they directly enter into two of the most heated issues
debated by Barelwis and Deobandis.
(5) The first is: Is it
possible for Allāh to lie? Here, both Barelwis and Deobandis, and indeed all
Muslims, agree that Allāh never lies, while the only disagreement is whether
(a) this is intrinsically impossible (mustahil dhati), or whether (b) this is
not intrinsically impossible, but only contingently impossible
(mustahil ‘aradi), that is, because of His own decision and knowledge that He
never lies, which He has informed us of by saying, “His word is the truth” (Qur’ān
6:73), and many other Qur’ān ic
verses.
Rashid Ahmad Gangohi of the Deobandis
seems to have held the latter position, that while a lie told by God is
hypothetically possible (ja’iz ‘aqli) in the very limited sense of not being
intrinsically impossible (mustahil dhati),[20] it is nevertheless contingently
impossible, since He has informed us of His truthfulness in the Qur’ān .
Unfortunately for Muslim
unity in India, Gangohi’s concept of the jawaz ‘aqli or “hypothetical
possibility” of God’s lying was mistakenly translated into Arabic by Ahmad
Reza Khan as imkan al-kadhib, which in Arabic means the “factual
possibility of [God’s] lying” (Husam al-Haramayn (c00), 19)—a position
that neither Rashid Ahmad Gangohi nor any other Muslim holds, for it is
unbelief.[21]
Whether this mistranslation
was due to Ahmad Reza Khan’s honest misapprehension of Gangohi’s position, or
directly carrying into Arabic a similar Urdu phrase without understanding the
resultant nuance in Arabic, or some other reason, is not clear. But it is
plain that to Ahmad Reza, it seemed to amount to a denial of the basic Muslim
belief that Allāh never lies, something no Muslim denies, nor did
Gangohi, if one but reflects for a moment upon what the above distinction
entails.
This mistaken construing of
Gangohi’s position in turn became the basis for Ahmad Reza’s declaring that
Gangohi was a kafir, nicknaming those who subscribed with him to this
view Wahhabiyya Kadhdhabiyya or “Liar Wahhabis,” and giving the tragic
fatwa that all who did not consider Gangohi to be a kafir themselves
became kafir.
Muslims can rest easy about
this fatwa because it is simply mistaken. The fatwa’s deductions are wrong
because its premises are based on inaccurate observation and inattention to
needful logical distinctions that exculpate Gangohi from the charge of kufr—even
if we do not accept the latter’s conclusions. So while Ahmad Reza should be
regarded as sincere in his convictions, in his own eyes defending the
religion of Islām , and morally blameless, he did get his facts wrong, and it
is clearly inadmissible for Muslims to follow him in his mistake, even if
made out of sincerity.
(6) The final issue, which
can be analyzed according to similar considerations, is the question of
whether Allāh can create another like the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi
wasallam). Though hypothetically possible (ja’iz ‘aqli), for example, if Allāh
were to create a second universe precisely like ours in every particular; it
is contingently and effectively impossible (mustahil ‘aradi), because
the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) is the Seal of the Prophets, whom Allāh
has determined that there shall be no prophet (nabi) after, or any prophetic
messenger (rasul). Allāh says:
“Muhammad is
not the father of any of your men, but the Messenger of Allāh and the Seal of
the Prophets” (Qur’ān 33:40),
where the word khatim
or “seal” in Arabic, when annexed (mudaf) to a series, as in the expression
“Seal of the Prophets,” can only mean the final member of that
series through which it is complete and after which nothing may be added.
This is the only possible lexical sense of the word in the context. Were
there any doubt about this, it is also unanimously agreed upon by scholarly
consensus (ijma‘), and explicitly stated by the Prophet himself (sallallāhu ‘alayhi
wasallam)in many rigorously authenticated (sahih) hadiths, such as that in
the Musnad of Imam Ahmad
Prophetic messengerhood
(risalah) and prophethood (nubuwwa) have ceased: there shall be no messenger
after me, or any prophet (Ahmad (c00), 3.267: 13824.
The hadith master (hafidh)
Ibn Kathir says that corroboratory versions of this hadith are, like the Qur’ān
itself, mutawatir or related
through so many intersubstantiative and rigorously authenticated channels of
transmission that they are incontestable (Tafsir al-Qur’ān (c00), 6.2823).
Here, as in the preceding
question, both Barelwis and Deobandis agree about the actual result—that no
one like the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) shall ever be created
again—and that to believe otherwise is infidelity (kufr). For even though the
Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) is merely a contingent and created
human being, whom it is hypothetically possible (ja’iz ‘aqli) that Allāh
could create others exactly like, it is contingently impossible
(mustahil ‘aradi) that Allāh should do so, since He has informed us in the Qur’ān
and mutawatir sunna that no more prophets or messengers shall ever be
created. And a duplicate of the Prophet Muhammad (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam)
who was like him in everything except prophethood would not in any meaningful
sense be “like” him at all.
So those who say, as did some
of the Deobandis, that Allāh’s creating a “like” is hypothetically possible,[22] are correct, in the very limited
sense that it is logically within Allāh’s almighty power to do so—had He not
already decided and declared that He never shall. And those who say, like the
Barelwis, that this is effectively and contingently impossible, are also
right, for Allāh has decided that no one like the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi
wasallam) shall ever be again. Muhammad (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) is the
final prophet and messenger according to the Qur’ān, scholarly consensus
(ijma‘), and his own words “there shall be no messenger after me, nor any
prophet.”
In any case, it is plain from
the logical distinction just described that here too, the disagreement
between Barelwis and Deobandis is about something that does not affect the kufr
or Imān of either, and that those who say otherwise are simply
mistaken.
The point of mentioning these
six questions is that not one of them is a genuine ‘aqida issue, in
the sense of being a central tenet of faith that no one can disagree about
and remain a believer. Rather, the entire main ‘aqidah-related issues
the Barelwis and Deobandis disagree about can be legitimately debated and
differed upon by Muslims without either side having left Islām.
As previously noted, this
applies with even greater force to fiqh issues differed upon by Barelwis and
Deobandis, such as Milad celebrations of the birthday of the Prophet (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam), the definition of bid‘a or “reprehensible
innovation,” or the practice of setting aside particular days to send the
reward of spiritual works to the souls of the departed. Imam Ghazali, Ibn
al-Qayyim, Ibn Qudamah al-Maqdisi, and other scholars have noted that things
whose blameworthiness Imams of fiqh disagrees about are not permissible to
condemn, since it is a condition for something to be considered munkar
or “condemnable” that this be concurred upon by all, not merely established
through ijtihad of one scholar rather than another.
Because the foregoing
questions in both ‘aqida and fiqh may be legitimately disagreed upon
by Islām ic scholars, only one issue remains that offers either side a
pretext for takfir; namely, whether some words written by Deobandi
scholars constitute insulting the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam)or
not.
The Imputed
Insult
To understand what was said,
and what was meant, one has to look at the context, which were various
Deobandi scholars’ rebuttals of Ahmad Reza Khan’s belief in the Prophet’s (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam) incomparably vast knowledge of the unseen. This seemed to
the Deobandis to blur the distinction between Allāh’s knowledge and human
knowledge; or more specifically, between the knowledge of the absolute
unseen and the relative unseen.
The absolute unseen (al-ghayb
al-mutlaq) is that which no one knows but Allāh, such as when the Final Hour
will come, or the knowledge of every particular of being, unobscured by
limitations of past or future, this world or the next, time or space, or the
other cognitive categories that limit and structure human perception of
reality.
The relative unseen (Al-Ghayb
Al-Nisbi) is a fact of everyday life, and is merely that each individual
knows things others are unaware of, hence “unseen” in relation to them.
Certain Deobandi ulema felt
that Ahmad Reza Khan wanted to say that the Prophet’s knowledge (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam)went beyond the relative unseen, that the Prophet knew the
particulars (juz’iyyat) of all being, as only Allāh does. They regarded this
as tantamount to associating others with Allāh (shirk) and a grave innovation
(bid‘ah). Their response was strident and hyperbolic, comparing the knowledge
of Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam)to that of various lower creatures in
a way that probably no Muslim had ever compared him before, and giving the
offense whose kufr or Imān we are discussing in this section.
Before presenting what they
said in detail, let us cast a glance at Ahmad Reza Khan’s prophetology. What
were their utterances an answer to? Did Ahmad Reza actually ascribe Allāh’s
knowledge to the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam), inaugurating a bid‘ah
that nothing but such retorts could extinguish?
Ahmad Reza and
the Prophet’s Knowledge of the Unseen
There is no doubt that Allāh
vouchsafed His messenger (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) a great deal of
knowledge of what was unseen in relation to the rest of mankind. We have
mentioned the above hadith of Bukhāri that the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi
wasallam) told the Companions everything of consequence that would happen
until the end of time. Despite which, there are many Qur’ān ic verses that
show that no one but Allāh knows certain things, not even the Prophet (Sallallāhu
'alaihi wa sallam), such as:
“No one knows
the hosts of your Lord but He” (Al-Muddathir,
74:31),
and
“No soul knows
what it shall earn tomorrow, and no soul knows in what land it shall die” (Luqman 31:34),
and
“They ask you about the Final
Hour, when it shall take place. Say: Only my Lord has knowledge of it: no one
shall reveal it in its time but He. It weighs heavily on the heavens and
earth; it shall not come upon you, but of a sudden. They ask you as if you
knew all about it. Say: Its knowledge is only with Allāh, but most people
know not. Say: I am not able to either benefit or harm myself, except as Allāh
wills. If I had had knowledge of the unseen, I would have had great good from
it, and no harm touched me. I am naught but a warner and a bearer of good tidings
to people who believe” (Al-A’raf
7:187–88).
There are many similar Qur’ān
ic verses, all of which Ahmad Reza Khan interpreted as referring to the
earlier life of the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam),
before Allāh bestowed on him greater knowledge, until, in the final years of
his life, Allāh disclosed to him everything that was and everything that will
be until Judgement Day. By this interpretation Ahmad Reza was able to reach
an accord between verses like those above, and the hadiths which mention the
Prophet’s vast knowledge of the unseen (Sallallāhu 'alaihi wa sallam).
There is, for example, a rigorously authenticated hadith related by Tirmidhi
that Mu‘adh ibn Jabal (Radialllāhu`anhu) said:
One morning the Prophet (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam) was kept back from us, and he delayed the dawn prayer until
we could almost see the sun, when he came out in a hurry and commenced the
prayer. The Messenger of Allāh (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) performed it
quickly, and when he had closed with Salāms, called out, “Stay as you are, in
your rows.” He then turned to us and said, “I shall now tell you what kept me
from you this morning. I rose last night, made ablution, prayed what had been
destined for me to pray, but then became so drowsy in my prayer that lassitude
overcame me. And lo, I was with my Lord, Blessed and Exalted, in a
surpassingly beautiful form, [23] and He said, ‘O Muhammad,’ and I
said, ‘Ever at Your service.’ He said, ‘What is the Supreme Assembly [of
archangels] debating about?’ and I said, ‘I do not know.’ He asked this
thrice. Then I saw Him place His hand between my shoulders until I felt the
coolness of His fingertips between my breasts, and lo, everything was
revealed to me, and I knew. He said, ‘O Muhammad, what is the Supreme
Assembly debating about?’ I said, ‘About expiations.’ He said, ‘What are
they?’ and I said, ‘The walking of one’s feet to good deeds, sitting in
mosques after prayers, and making a thorough ablution when most unpleasant.’
He said, ‘And then?’ I said, ‘Feeding others, speaking affably, and praying
the night when people sleep.’ He said, ‘Ask, saying: O Allāh, I ask You that
I may do good works, shun bad, and love the unfortunate; I ask that You may
forgive me and show me mercy. And when You try a people, take my soul
unafflicted. I ask Your love, the love of whoever loves You, and the love of
works that bring one closer to Your love.’”
The Messenger of Allāh (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam) said. “It was the truth. Study and learn it” (Tirmidhi
(c00), 5.368–69: 3235).[24]
The words of the Prophet (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam) at this tremendous event, “and lo, everything was
revealed to me, and I knew,” were understood by Ahmad Reza Khan to mean
just that: that the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) had been endowed
with such vast knowledge of the unseen that he knew even what the Supreme
Assembly of archangels were speaking about. This alone enabled him (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam)to give the address, as we have previously related from Hudzaifah
(Allāh be well pleased with him), that was also described by ‘Umar ibn
al-Khattab (Radialllāhu`anhu) in the words,
The Prophet (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam)stood before us and told us of [everything from] the very
beginning of creation until the inhabitants of paradise have taken their
places and the denizens of hell theirs—whoever memorized it memorized it; and
whoever forgot it forgot it” (Bukhari (c00), 4.129: 3192).
The Deobandis’ impression
however seems to be wrong that Ahmad Reza Khan wanted to go beyond this and
say that the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) knew the particulars
(juz’iyyat) of all being, as Allāh alone does.[25] It is certainly not borne out by
Reza’s major work on the question al-Dawla al-Makkiyya li al-madda
al-ghaybiyya [The Meccan realm: on the matter of the unseen], in which he
plainly says:
We do not hold that anyone
can equal the knowledge of Allāh Most High, or possess it independently, nor
do we assert that Allāh’s giving [of knowledge to the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi
wasallam)] is anything but a part.[26] But what a patent and tremendous
difference between one part [the Prophet’s] and another [anyone else’s]: like
the difference between the sky and the earth, or rather even greater and more
immense (al-Dawla al-Makkiyyah (c00), 291).
Despite such unambiguous
words, certain Deobandi ulema made rebuttals of what they viewed as the grave
innovation of confusing the extent of the Prophet’s knowledge (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam)with Allāh’s. In the heat of argument, some of them met what
they deemed exaggerated statements about the Prophet’s knowledge (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam)with equally exaggerated statements about of his lack of
knowledge; reaching a degree that, by any ordinary measure, can be only be
described as far below the standards of normal Islām ic scholarly discourse.
What Khalil
Ahmad Said
Thus the Deobandi scholar
Khalil Ahmad Saharanpuri wrote in his al-Barahin al-qati‘a [The uncontestable
proofs][27] that there is no clear,
unequivocal text in the Qur’ān to
support the belief that the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam)has vast
knowledge, though there is such evidence in regard to Satan and the Angel of
Death. The most salient points of his discussion are the following:
(1) That Ahmad Reza’s proof
of the vastness of the Prophet’s knowledge (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam)is
based on a false analogy between the Prophet’s merit (fadl) and his
knowledge; namely, that because the Prophet’s merit was greater than that of
the Angel of Death or Iblis, both of whom have exceptionally vast knowledge
according to the Qur’ān itself,[28] it follows a fortiori that
the Prophet’s knowledge (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam)must be greater than
theirs (al-Barahin (c00), 54–55).
(2) The invalidity of such an
analogy is shown by the story of Khidir and Moses in the Qur’ān (18:60–83),
for even though Khidir had greater knowledge than Moses, Moses had far
greater merit, and he was both a prophet (nabi) and a prophetic messenger
(rasul), while Khidir was only a friend of Allāh (wali) (al-Barahin (c00),
54). The analogy’s invalidity is also shown by three other matters that
Khalil Ahmad mentions in the following quotation, whose paragraphs, though
contiguous in the original, we have separated and numbered here to facilitate
reference in our subsequent discussion:
(3) “First, tenets of faith
[like this one] are not analogical (qiyas), that they may be established by
analogy. Rather, they are decisive (qat‘i), or established by decisive
scriptural texts, to such a degree that even a single hadith (khabar wahid)
is of no use as a proof in this context. In consequence, the affirmation [of
the vastness of the Prophet’s knowledge of the unseen (sallallāhu ‘alayhi
wasallam)] is only worthy of attention once the author establishes it through
decisive proofs. If he contradicts the entire Muslim Umma [who presumably do
not believe this] and seeks to establish people’s belief as being incorrect
through an invalid analogy, how can this be worthy of attention?
(4) “Secondly, the Qur’ān and
hadith establish the contrary, so how can his disagreement be admissible?
Rather, all [such] of the author’s statements are inadmissible. The Pride of
the World (upon whom be peace) himself says, “By Allāh, I do not know what
will be done with me or with you”—the hadith. Sheikh ‘Abd al-Haqq relates
[the hadith]: “I do not even know what is behind this wall.” The issue of the
marriage session has also been written in Al-Bahr Al-Ra’iq and other
works.[29]
(5) “Thirdly, if greater
merit really entails this [greater knowledge], then all Muslims, even if corrupt,
and the author himself, are better than Satan [who is a kafir], in
view of which greater merit, the author, by his own premises, must affirm
that all ordinary Muslims have an equal if not greater knowledge of the
unseen than Satan. And if the author has, as he claims, a high level of
perfection in faith, then being superior to Satan, he must definitely be more
knowledgeable than Satan—Allāh be our refuge [from affirming this]! I am
shocked and grieved by this example of the author’s ignorance. How far such
stupid words are from knowledge and intelligence.
(6) “The upshot is that we
should carefully note that if, after seeing the state of Satan and the Angel
of Death, we affirm that the Pride of the World (upon whom be blessings and
peace) has all-encompassing vast knowledge of the earthly sphere,
contravening without proof decisive scriptural texts and proceeding solely
from false analogy, then if this is not outright shirk, how should it
be a part of faith? Such vastness [of knowledge] is established for Satan and
the Angel of Death through scriptural texts. Through what decisive scriptural
text has the Pride of the World’s vastness of knowledge been established,
that one should affirm an act of shirk by rejecting all scriptural
texts?” (Al-Barahin (c00), 55).
This final rhetorical
question, denying any evidence of the Prophet’s (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam)vast
knowledge after affirming it of the Devil and the Angel of Death, was what
made Ahmad Reza Khan Barelwi say that Khalil Ahmad Saharanpuri had thereby
demeaned and insulted the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam)and left Islām
.
A Discussion of
Khalil Ahmad’s Evidence
Because takfir is
divisive and dangerous, it is worth reflecting for a moment on the five
points that led to Khalil Ahmad’s judgement (in (6) above) that believing the
Prophet’s knowledge (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) to encompass the
terrestrial realm, and to be incomparably vaster than the Devil’s or the
Angel of Death’s, constitutes “an act of shirk,” and “rejecting all
the scriptural texts.”
First of all, Khalil Ahmad is
correct in pointing out in (1), (2), and (5) above that there is no necessary
analogy between the two individuals’ respective merit, meaning their
closeness to Allāh, and their respective knowledge. His comparison of
Khidir with Moses, as well as the knowledge possessed by Satan and the Angel
of Death, conclusively proves that there is no strict analogy between the two
things.
To imply however that Ahmad
Reza’s whole argument hinges on this erroneous analogy is attacking a straw
man. Even if the analogy was adduced by Reza, his belief in the Prophet’s
vast knowledge (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) did not depend on “proceeding
solely from false analogy” from the Prophet’s merit (sallallāhu
'alayhi wasallam), but rather on the sahih hadiths of
eyewitnesses who heard the Messenger of Allāh relate such wonders as the
events of the world from beginning to end. This was reported by Hudzaifah:
“The Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) addressed us in a speech that
omitted nothing until the Final Hour except that he mentioned it” (Bukhāri
(c00), 8.154: 6604); by ‘Umar Ibn Al-Khattab: “[He] told us of [everything
from] the very beginning of creation until the inhabitants of paradise have
taken their places and the denizens of hell theirs” (Bukhāri (c00),
4.129: 3192); by Abu Zayd ‘Amr ibn Akhtab: “He informed us of all that was
and all that would be, the most knowledgeable of us being whoever remembered
best” (Muslim (c00), 4.2217: 2892); and by Abu Sa‘id Al-Khudri: “He
stood up and spoke, leaving out nothing until the coming of the Final Hour
save that he mentioned it” (Tirmidzi (c00), 4.483–84)—all of which are
rigorously authenticated (sahih).
Apart from these hadiths, the
previously related dream-vision of the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) in
which Allāh imparted to him all-encompassing knowledge has also been attested
to by a number of his Companions. As noted above, Tirmidzi reports with a
rigorously authenticated (sahih) chain of transmission from Mu‘Adz Ibn Jabal
that the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam)said of this experience, “And
lo, everything was revealed to me, and I knew” (Tirmidzi (c00),
5.368–69: 3235); and said in a well-authenticated (hasan) version from Ibn
‘Abbas, “I knew everything between the East and West” (Tirmidhi (c00),
5.367–68: 3234).
Second, while Khalil Ahmad is
correct in asserting in (3) above that analogy (qiyas) cannot establish a
tenet of faith, his saying that all tenets of faith must be established by
“decisive scriptural texts”—meaning those unequivocally evidentiary (Qat‘i
Al-Dalala) and incontrovertibly authentic (Qat‘i al-Wurud)—and that “even a
single hadith (khabar wahid) is of no use as a proof in this context” is
inadmissible and misleading. It is misleading because the hadiths about the
Prophet’s vast knowledge (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) are not one but many,
and rigorously authenticated. It is inadmissible because the rule he mentions
pertains to fundamentals of faith (Usul al-‘aqa’id), not its details
(Furu‘ Al-‘aqa’id) such as issues of prophetology like this one, which are
established by single hadiths, as Imam Ghazali notes:
Everything [of the religion]
heard [from an authoritative prophetic text] is examined, and if rationally
possible, is obligatory to believe: [being either] undeniably
obligatory, if the evidence for it is incontestable in its text and
transmission, and it can bear no other interpretation; or provisionally
obligatory if its evidence is merely probabilistic.[30] For the obligation to espouse
belief in something with tongue and heart is a spiritual work like
other works, and so too is established by evidence that is probabilistic (Al-Iqtisad
(c00), 132–33).
Thus the difference between a
tenet of faith established by a single hadith and a tenet of faith
established by a “decisive scriptural text” (an unequivocal Qur’ānic verse or
mutawatir hadith) is not that the former is not a tenet of faith—but
merely that someone who denies it is a fasiq or “sinful Muslim” for
not fulfilling the obligation of believing in it, while someone who denies a
tenet of faith established by an undeniably decisive scriptural text that is
impossible to misunderstand or be ignorant of is a kafir, for
rejecting something necessarily known to be of the religion (Reliance
of the Traveller (c00), 626–27).
Third, Khalil Ahmad’s claim
that belief in the vastness of the Prophet’s knowledge (sallallāhu ‘alayhi
wasallam) is baseless because “the Qur’ān and hadith establish the contrary”
is also incorrect. All of the texts Khalil Ahmad has cited about the
limitariness of the Prophet’s knowledge (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) can be
interpreted, as Ahmad Reza did, to refer to before Allāh disclosed to
him the vast knowledge that he affirmed of himself and patently demonstrated
(blessings and peace be upon him) in the above sahih hadiths. Khalil
Ahmad’s evidentiary texts are thus subject to the rule from the science of Islām
ic legal proof (‘ilm al-dalala) that “when a received evidence may bear two
or more different interpretations, it cannot be used to prove just one of
them,” since, in Imām Shāfi‘i's words,
When the circumstances
governing an evidence cannot be made certain of, they reduce it to a
generalization requiring other details to be properly understood, rendering
it unfit [alone by itself] to prove something in particular[31] (al-Qawa‘id (c00), 193).
The texts from the Qur’ān and
hadith about the Prophet’s not knowing things (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam)
do indeed bear the possible interpretation that they refer to an earlier part
of his life before Allāh revealed to him the vast knowledge attested to by
other rigorously authenticated texts, so they are invalid as evidence for the
limitariness of the prophetic knowledge that Khalil Ahmad is trying to prove.
Finally, Khalil Ahmad’s
conclusion that
if, after seeing the state of
Satan and the Angel of Death, we affirm that the Pride of the World (upon
whom be blessings and peace) has all-encompassing vast knowledge of the
earthly sphere, contravening without proof decisive scriptural texts and
proceeding solely from false analogy, then if this is not outright shirk,
how should it be a part of faith? Such vastness [of knowledge] is established
for Satan and the Angel of Death through scriptural texts. Through what
decisive scriptural text has the Pride of the World’s vastness of knowledge
been established, that one should affirm an act of shirk by rejecting
all scriptural texts?” (Al-Barahin (c00), 55).
As we have seen, Ahmad Reza’s
position is neither “against decisive scriptural texts,” for such texts are
not “decisive” but rather interpretable as being prior in time to others that
abrogate them; nor “without proof,” since his position is borne out by
numerous intersubstantiative rigorously authenticated (sahih) hadiths; nor
“proceeding solely from false analogy,” for it rather proceeds from the
Prophet’s very words (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) in these hadiths.
Moreover, it is difficult to see how the attribute of knowledge that Khalil
Ahmad ascribes to Satan and the Angel of Death should become “shirik”
when affirmed of the Messenger of Allāh (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam): either
it is a divine attribute that is shirik to ascribe to any creature, or
it is not.
But even if we overlook these
mistaken innuendos, Khalil Ahmad’s point as a whole, denying that the Prophet
(sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) had vast knowledge, after affirming it of the
Devil and the Angel of Death, is erroneous, for at least three reasons.
First, the Qur’ān in its
entirety is “vast knowledge” which Allāh taught the Prophet (sallallāhu
'alayhi wasallam), containing everything important for mankind
to know in this life and the next, as well as things about the unseen world,
past nations, and their prophets that no one but a prophet could possibly
know. This is explicit in the Qur’ān.
Second, many unequivocal
verses command us to follow the sunnah of the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi
wasallam), which is equally vast, answering all questions about the ethical
implications of every possible human action until the end of time.
Third, it is disingenuous for
an Islām ic scholar to mention the lack of explicit textual evidence in the Qur’ān
without mentioning that there is such evidence in hadith. The
above-mentioned rigorously authenticated hadiths of Tirmidzi, Bukhāri, and
Muslim about the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam)knowing everything from
the beginning of creation to the end of time, to even the debates within the
Supreme Assembly of the archangels, conclusively decide the question.
In sum, Khalil Ahmad
Saharanpuri’s disadvantageously comparing the Prophet’s knowledge (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam)to Satan’s, the vilest creature in existence—regardless of
the point he was making—is something few Muslims can accept. Whether Khalil
Ahmad regarded it as a feat of ingenuity to show that because the Prophet’s
knowledge was less than the Devil’s, it was a fortiori less than Allāh’s,
or whatever his impulse may have been, he badly stumbled in this passage. In
any previous Islām ic community, whether in Hyderabad, Kabul, Baghdad, Cairo,
Fez, or Damascus—in short, practically anywhere besides the British India of
his day—Muslims would have found his words repugnant and unacceptable.
The Words of
Ashraf Ali Thanwi
The same is true of the
Deobandi teacher Ashraf Ali Thanwi, who in a written objection to Ahmad Reza
Khan’s calling the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam)“Knower of the
Unseen” (‘Alim al-Ghayb), asked whether this “unseen” refers to merely some
of the unseen or part of it:
If it refers to but some
of the unseen, then how is the Revered One [the Prophet] (sallallāhu ‘alayhi
wasallam) uniquely special, when such unseen knowledge is possessed by Zayd
and ‘Amr [i.e. just anyone], indeed, by every child and madman, and even by
all animals and beasts? For every individual knows something that is hidden
from another individual, so everyone should be called “knower of the unseen.”. . . [And]
if it refers to all of the unseen, such that not one instance of it
remains unknown, then this is incorrect because of scriptural and rational
proofs (Hifdh al-Imān (c00), 15).
Thanwi apparently meant that
the Prophet’s (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) knowledge of the unseen was the
same in kind as that any of the others mentioned, that is, the knowledge
of the relative unseen, which, as explained above, merely means that
each of Allāh’s creatures knows something that is “unseen” to others, while Allāh
alone has absolute knowledge of all of the unseen.
Aside from Thanwi’s artless
comparison of the highest of creation with the lowest, the very point of
saying it in refutation of Reza is not plain, in view of the latter’s
explicit acknowledgement that no one can equal Allāh’s knowledge or possess
it independently or be given anything but a part of it, even if, as Reza
says, “what a patent and tremendous difference between one part [the
Prophet’s] and another [anyone else’s]: like the difference between the sky
and the earth, or rather even greater and more immense” (al-Dawla
al-Makkiyya (c00), 291).
This “patent and tremendous
difference” is clear, as we have seen, from the great knowledge of the unseen
given to the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam)in the hadiths of Bukhari,
Muslim, and Tirmidhi, which, taken with the vastness of the revelation of the
Qur’ān and sunna as a whole, make it
easy to see why Reza and others called him “Knower of the Unseen”—meaning in
comparison to the rest of mankind, not to Allāh—and that by any measure, he
possessed knowledge plainly not of the same order as that possessed “by every
child and madman, and even by all animals and beasts,” to use Thanwi’s
phrase.
At the latter words, the
fiery pen of Ahmad Reza Khan wrote his Husam al-Haramayn [Sword of the
Meccan and Medinan Sanctuaries], in which he condemned Thanwi, Saharanpuri,
and other Deobandis—without referring to the context of their remarks, or
what they had been written in reply to—and said: “All these groups [i.e. they
and their followers] are kafirs, apostates, and renegades from Islām ,
by unanimous consensus of all Muslims” (Husam al-Haramayn (c00), 31),
and that “whoever has doubts about [such a person’s] unbelief, or his being
[eternally] punished, has himself committed kufr” (ibid.). Now, the
temperament of Ahmad Reza Khan, with his acknowledged brilliance, doubtless played
a role in this judgement, as did his love of the Prophet (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam), which entailed withering scorn of those who
did not share his somewhat exotic prophetology, and finally outright anathema
(takfir) of those who had emphasized the Prophet’s humanity (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam) with what appeared to be at the expense of his dignity.
His fatwa of kufr
against the Deobandis, however, was a mistake. It was not legally valid in
the Hanafi school for the two reasons named by Imam Haskafi at the beginning
of this essay, namely,
A fatwa may not be given of
the unbelief of a Muslim whose words are interpretable as having a valid
meaning, or about the unbelief of which there is a difference of scholarly
opinion, even if weak (Radd Al-Muhtar, 3.289).
First, the Deobandis’ words are
interpretable as “having a valid meaning,” for they can be construed as
making a distinction, however crudely, between Allāh’s knowledge of the
“absolute unseen” and man’s knowledge of the “relative unseen.” Saharanpuri
and Thanwi both later explicitly mentioned this in their defense of
themselves and other Deobandi figures.
Secondly, there is a
valid “difference of scholarly opinion” about the unbelief of such words, for
“even if weak” in the above Hanafi text means, according to commentator Ibn
‘Abidin, “even if the difference of opinion is found only in another school
(madzhab) of jurisprudence” (Radd al-muhtar, 3.289). As we have seen,
a difference of opinion does exist in another school, namely the
position of the Shafi‘ie Imam Subki that one must give “due consideration to
the intention behind that which gives offense” (al-Sayf al-maslul
(c00), 135)—that is, even when offense has been given. In this
instance, “due consideration” means that if it is possible that Deobandi
scholars intended something besides insult to the Prophet (Sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam) -- for example, a heated
rebuttal of supposed innovation (bid‘ah)—this legally prevents the judgement
of kufr against them.
The sahih hadiths we
have cited above show how strong this position of Subki’s is, for the Prophet
(sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) was in one instance reproved by an upset wife
with the words “I don’t see but that your Lord rushes to fulfill your own
whims” (Bukhari, 6:147: 4788); in another, accused of favoritism by
those who said, “May Allāh forgive the Messenger of Allāh: he gives to
Quraysh and neglects us” (Bukhari, 4.114: 3147); and in another,
actually seized and choked by a bedouin demanding charity (Bukhari,
4.115: 3149)—none of which did he consider a deliberate offense or kufr,
because each was interpretable as an unintentional insult.
It is also noteworthy that in
each of these instances, the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) with
instinctive compassion and wisdom gave due consideration to the emotional
states that pushed people beyond the ordinary bounds of adab or
manners with him. The vehemence of Deobandi writers “defending Islām against shirik,” however misplaced,
plainly affected the way they spoke about the Messenger of Allāh (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam).The above hadiths suggest
that due consideration should be given to the emotions aroused by the “fatwa
wars” of their times, just as the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) gave
consideration to people’s emotions.
This does not mean that the
words chosen by these writers were acceptable, even if “retorting against bid‘a,”
or “fighting shirk.” As we have seen, there was no shirk in the
position of Ahmad Reza Khan, who held that the Prophet’s knowledge (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam) differed from Allāh’s divine knowledge not only in its
extent, as quoted above, but in its very nature, for he was careful to
emphasize that, “Allāh’s knowledge is intrinsic, creatures’ knowledge is
given to them; Allāh’s knowledge is a necessary attribute of His being,
creatures’ knowledge is merely possible; Allāh’s knowledge is beginningless,
endless, eternal, and true, creature’s knowledge originates in time; . . . Allāh’s
knowledge is uncreate, creatures’ knowledge is created” (Al-Dawla al-Makkiyya
(c00), 277).
Looking back, one cannot help
wondering why Khalil Ahmad’s and Ashraf ‘Ali Thanwi’s own students and
teachers and friends did not ask them, before their opponents asked them:
When did any Islām ic scholar ever compare the knowledge of the Prophet (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam)to the depraved, to the mad, or to animals—even to make a
point? Few Muslims would suffer such a comparison to be made with their own
father, let alone the Emissary of God (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam). But
while such words were indefensible breaches of proper respect, they were not kufr,
because the intention behind them was not to insult the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi
wasallam), but to defend Islām from what the writers viewed as a serious
threat.
Conclusions
Imputed intentionality is a
fallacy because the rigorously authenticated proofs we have seen are too
clear to misunderstand that sometimes offense may be given to Allāh or His
messenger (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam)that was not originally intended as an
offense—and is therefore without the legal consequences it would have had if
it had been intentional. The fatwas of Ahmad Reza Barelwi about the Deobandis
are mistaken because they ignore this crucial legal distinction. Khalil
Ahmad’s and Ashraf ‘Ali Thanwi’s comparisons of the Prophet’s knowledge (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam) were offensive in their wording, and certainly not
of the “ordinary scholarly discourse” acceptable among Muslims. But because
they were intended as scholarly discourse, to emphasize the human
limitations of the Prophet’s knowledge (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam)which
these men regarded as an important and insufficiently understood religious
truth—not as an insult against the Prophet—their words did not entail the
judgement of kufr that Ahmad Reza Khan issued against them.
The other ‘aqidah-related
issues outlined above upon which Qasim Nanotwi and Rashid Ahmad Gangohi
differed with Ahmad Reza are things that Muslim theologians can disagree
about and still remain Muslim. They are not fundamentals of Islām, but rather
inferences drawn through ijtihad from Qur’ānic verses and hadiths about
issues that have been historically disagreed upon by scholars greater than
these. To consider such details a basic criterion of kufr and Imān is
to commit “the fallacy of ijtihad as ‘aqidah,” which we hope to
discuss in a forthcoming treatment of the Wahhabi sect.
As for Ahmad Reza’s
contention on the last page of Husam al-Haramayn that whoever does not
declare the kufr of an unbeliever—here meaning the Deobandis—himself
becomes an unbeliever, this is the Islām ic legal ruling only in
certain cases of uncontestably certain kufr, such as followers of
other faiths, who explicitly deny the messengerhood of the Prophet (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam), not in all cases. Imam Ghazali gives the details in his Al-Iqtisad
fi al-i‘tiqad, in a passage we shall translate in the future in an essay
on “the fallacy that not declaring another’s unbelief is unbelief.”
To conclude, the Barelwi
response to the Deobandis was probably far worse than the initial
provocation, raising for the first time in Indian history the banner of takfir
of one major group of Hanafi Muslims by another. The sad irony in this was
that the greatest Wahhabi bid‘ah of all, takfir of fellow
Muslims, was unleashed in India by denunciations of “Wahhabism.” Ahmad Reza’s
fatwas depicted his opponents as “Wahhabi sects,” which his latter-day
followers came to declare all Deobandis to belong to through a sort of “guilt
by association.” This is a separate fallacy, which we shall examine next.
The Fallacy of Takfir by Association
Unlike Christianity, in Islām
no one else can atone for one, for the
same reason that no one can sin for one; namely the divine decree
“No bearer of
burdens shall bear the burden of another” (Qur’ān 6:164),
which is also why a Muslim’s
membership in a particular group or sect is not legal evidence that he is a kafir
even when the tenets of the group include ideas that are kufr. One
enters one’s grave alone, and is only responsible for one’s own beliefs, not
those of others, although one is obliged to inform them of the truth when
they are wrong on a religious matter. Subki, the mujtahid Imam we have cited
in the previous section, whose duties as the head of the Islām ic judiciary
(qadi al-qudah) in Damascus in his time included deciding cases of kufr,
was asked about judging members of certain Islām ic sects as unbelievers and
he answered:
We consider it a very serious
matter to declare someone [outwardly a Muslim] to be a kafir, because it
requires two things seldom found:
[a] The first is determining
exactly what he believes. This is difficult in respect to seeing what is in
the heart, distinguishing it from what merely resembles it, and accurately
reporting it. Indeed, it is almost difficult to assess one’s own convictions,
let alone someone else’s.
[b] The second is judging
that it is actually kufr, which is very difficult because of the
difficulty of scholastic theology (‘Ilm al-Kalam) and the evidence it derives
from, and discerning the correct in it from what is otherwise. This is only
attainable by a man who combines in himself sound intellect, rigorous
self-discipline, a balanced temperament, training in logical analysis,
mastery of the religious sciences, and lack of prejudice or personal
interest.
Only when both of these exist
is it possible to decide whether kufr has been committed or not.
Moreover, such a judgement
may either apply to a particular person—which requires further that he
confess it (and how unlikely that is); for any other proof of it would be
difficult to accept, since evaluating it would require the above-mentioned
conditions, though if proof were given or a confession made, its legal
consequences would be entailed—or such a judgement may apply to a sect.
In the latter case, the judgement may only be given as a general statement
[that the tenets of the sect constitute kufr]. As for giving such a
judgement against particular individuals, this is not legally possible unless
there is a confession or evidence [about the specific person].
It is insufficient to say,
“This person belongs to that sect,” because in addition to the difficulty of
the above, there is another consideration; namely, that most sects are
composed of common people who know little about tenets of faith. They but
love a particular group and consider themselves to belong to it, without
comprehending what it really is. Were we to declare them unbelievers, it
would cause tremendous and unjustifiable harm.
This is the proper response
to Nawawi’s saying, “If the kind of kufr that takes one out of Islām were meant, such people [members of deviant
sects] would be fought and killed,” the answer to which is that the latter
has never been done because it was not obligatory [as it would have been if
the kufr of a sect’s beliefs were legally sufficient to establish that
all its individual members were kafirs], even though we do make the
generalization that “whoever holds that belief is a kafir.”[32] The point is to identify it—while
declaring a particular individual a kafir is exceedingly difficult,
even if undeniable when its [above-mentioned] conditions exist (al-Fatawa
al-Halabiyya (c00), 524–25).[33]
“Guilt by association” is a
fallacy because, in Subki’s words, “it is insufficient to say, ‘This person
belongs to that sect.’” While the fallacy of guilt by association is by no
means rare in our times, one the most extreme examples is provided by the
following fatwa, published in the contemporary monthly magazine Kanz al-Imān
in Delhi, India,[34] from a work by the Barelvi mufti
Jalal al-Din Ahmad Amjadi:
(Question :) Zaid is a Sunni
[Barelvi] of sound beliefs. He wants to marry the daughter of a Deobandi. The
woman is willing to become a Sunni. Would such a marriage be allowed?
(Answer :) Mawlawis
[Religious scholars] Ashraf Thanvi, Qasim Nanotvi, Rasheed Ahmad Gangohi, and
Khalil Ahmad Saharanpuri were declared to be apostate unbelievers (kafir
murtadd), by numerous noble scholars and venerable muftis of venerable Mecca,
Medina Munawwara, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma,[35] because of their decisive
statements of disbelief (kufriyyat qat‘iyya), as in Hifz al-Imān (p. 8), Tahzir al-Nas (p. 2, 14, 28),
and Barahin Qat‘iyya (p. 15). The details regarding this may be found
in [Ahmad Reza Khan Barelvi’s] Fatawa: Husam al-Haramayn and al-Sawarim
al-Hindiyya.
All the Deobandis consider
them their exemplars and [to be] Muslims, and defend them. As a result, they
too take the ruling of being apostates. It is not valid for anyone to marry
an apostate, as mentioned in Fatawa Alamgiriyya [al-Fatawa al-Hindiyya]
from al-Khaniyya (1.282). It says:
“It is not permitted for
apostates to marry other apostates, nor [to marry] a Muslim or originally
believing woman. Likewise, it is not permitted for a female apostate to marry
anyone, as mentioned in al-Mabsut.”
In the case being asked
about, the marriage of Zaid, a man of sound Sunni beliefs, to the daughter of
a Deobandi is absolutely impermissible (hargiz nahin ho sakta). If she wants
to become a Sunni, then if she and her entire household do so and it is then
seen in two or three years that they are firm on the way of Ahl al-Sunna,
then it would be permitted for Zaid to marry her. Otherwise, it would not be
permitted.
It is absolutely not possible
to permit marriage based on the deceptive words of someone who is legally an
apostate. Otherwise, their very faith may be lifted [taken away from them].
If they go ahead, this would not affect Islām and the Sunna in any way.
Rather, the person would be ruining his own life, and becoming of the people
of hell (jahannami ho jayen ge).
If in the above-mentioned
case the marriage is going to take place, then no qadi can perform their
marriage. After this, all Muslims would be obliged to sternly boycott them,
for Allāh Most High says,
“And if the Devil makes you
forget, then do not sit after the remembrance with wrongdoing people” (Qur’ān
6:68).
(Kanz al-Imān (c00),
00).
It suffices as to its worth
to reflect that according to this, a Hanafi Muslim man may marry a Jewish or
Christian woman, but not a Hanafi Muslim woman from a Deobandi family, even
if she rejects the Deobandi positions upon which the Barelvi’s mistaken takfir
of them is based. The woman is supposed to be ineligible for marriage because
of her mere association with Deobandis, and moreover remains guilty until
proven innocent. This is not a fatwa, but a social problem. Such sentiments
should be politely but firmly rejected by anyone who believes in Islām and the Prophet of Islām (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam), who said,
The disease of [previous]
nations has crept up upon you: envy and hatred. Truly, hatred is a shaver:
it shaves away not hair, but religion. By Him in whose hand is my
soul, you shall not enter paradise until you believe. And you shall not
believe until you love one another (Musnad al-Bazzar (c00),
6.192: 2232).[36]
The above fatwa is but an
example. Otherwise, it is all too common to hear, for instance, that
“So-and-so is a kafir because he is a Wahhabi,” or “a Shiite,” or “a
Deobandi, or “a Salafi,” or “a Sufi,” or something else. In all such cases,
even when the speaker’s impression of a group is not mere prejudice or
hearsay, it is legally invalid to judge particular individuals according to
the tenets of the group or to the words or deeds of other members.
Because Allāh has decreed
that “no bearer of burdens shall bear the burden of another” (Qur’ān 6:164), no Salafi, for example, has to
acquit himself of the massacres of Muslims historically committed by Wahhabis
in the past; or any Shiite for the practices of other Shiites; or any Sufi
for utterances of other Sufis; and so on. The individual Muslim is only
answerable for what he personally believes and does.
Members of other faiths, it
should be noted, do not come under this rule because their very religions
deny the veracity of the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam), which, as we
shall see from Imam Ghazali below, is the very essence of kufr, and so
they are obligatory to consider unbelievers. Subki notes:
The criterion is that as long
as someone acknowledges the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) and
inwardly submits to following him (ittiba‘), then that person’s doing
otherwise (ibtida‘) is because of something he mistakenly considers as
evidence. As for someone who wholly dismisses this noble Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi
wasallam), his kufr is an absolute certainty, and he faces the sword
unless he pays the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya) under its conditions (al-Fatawa
al-Halabiyya (c00), 525–26).
To summarize, various classes
of geometrical figures such as circles, squares, or triangles each have
definitions that precisely entail the properties of every possible member,
such as a circle, for instance, which is always and everywhere “a figure on a
plane whose circumference is equidistant to its center.” The ‘aqidah
of a particular Muslim, however, is not a precisely defined by his membership
in a group, but rather comes about through his own personal initiative and choice.
To presume otherwise is to commit the fallacy of guilt by association.
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Footnotes
[1] Though the great danger of
declaring a Muslim an unbeliever is plain from the hadiths, the ostensive
sense the latter hadith, according to Imam Nawawi, is not intended, for the
position of Muslim orthodoxy is that no Muslim becomes a non-Muslim through
sin, even that of calling a Muslim a kafir. Rather, of the probable
meanings of the hadith is that “his demeaning his brother, and the sin of
declaring him an unbeliever return against himself” (Sharh Sahih Muslim,
1.49–50)
[2] In the Shafi‘i school, when
a husband or wife leaves Islām , a waiting period (normally after three
intervals between the wife’s menstruations have occurred, or when a pregnant woman
has given birth) must intervene before the marriage is annulled. If both
husband and wife are or become Muslim again before the waiting period
finishes, their marriage simply continues as before. If not, the marriage is
considered to have been over since the time when either or both left the
religion (Reliance of the Traveller, 532).
[3] Islāmic jurists have
received this hadith with acceptance and concurred upon applying it, and
although its chain of transmission as a prophetic hadith is weak (da‘if), Ibn
Hajar al-‘Asqalani notes that it has been conveyed from more than one of the
Sahabah, and that Ibn Hazm has reported it in his Kitab al-Isal with a
rigorously authenticated (sahih) chain of transmission from ‘Umar ibn
al-Khattab (Talkhis al-habir, 4.63), the most central figure in Islāmic
jurisprudence after the Prophet himself (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam), and
personally taught by his precept and example.
[4] As mentioned above, a mutawatir
hadith is that which is “established by so many channels of transmission,
generally held to be at least four, that it is impossible that all could have
conspired to fabricate it.”
[5] Ar. qat‘i al-dalala, meaning,
as also above, “a plain text which does not admit of more than one meaning,
and which no mujtahid can interpret in other than its one meaning or construe
in other than its apparent sense.”
[6] “Pretext” meaning such as
the existence of an apparently contradictory scriptural evidence that to the
person disagreeing seems to give grounds to do so.
[7] When one knows it to be the
ruling of Allāh, as opposed to when one believes it the mistaken judgement
(ijtihad) of a jurist, which, though bad manners (adab), does not reach
outright unbelief; and “sarcasm” (istikhfaf) meaning that scorn and derision
enter into one’s motive.
[8] From Sha‘rani’s own account,
it appears that the production of two copies, each signed by ulema who had
inspected them, one to be retained by the author and the other by al-Azhar,
was a means of documentation in his day (al-Yawaqit wa al-jawahir, 1.4).
[9] The Shafi‘i Mufti of Mecca
of his day Ibn ‘Allan al-Bakri (d. 1057/1647), defines a “hadith master”
(hafidh) as “someone whose knowledge encompasses [at least] 100,000 hadiths
in both their texts and chains of transmission” (al-Futuhat al-rabbaniyya
(c00), 1.25).
[10] Examples may be found in Ibn
Taymiya’s Radd Asas al-taqdis [Rebuttal of “The basis of exalting Allāh
above the traits of created things”], his Minhaj al-sunna [Methodology
of the sunna], and other works, which furnish some of the points covered in a
fatwa about Ibn Taymiya by Shafi‘i Imam Ibn Hajar al-Haytami in his al-Fatawa
al-hadithiyya (116–17).
[11] For the meaning of “hadith
master,” see note 0 on page 00 above.
[12] Jalal al-Din al-Mahalli
notes, “He [alone among all believers] was given free choice, after it had
previously been obligatory to allot to each wife a day in turn [as other men
must do]” (Tafsir al-Jalalayn, 558).
[13] Nanotwi and Gangohi were the
founders of the Deoband School.
[14] Saharanpuri was also widely
known as Khalil Ahmad Ambhetwi.
[15] ‘Amr ibn al-Akhtab (Allāh be
well pleased with him), who was also present, described it as lasting from
the dawn prayer (subh) until noon (dzuhur), when the Prophet (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam)came down from the pulpit (minbar) and prayed, after which
he continued until midafternoon, then came down and prayed, then continued
until sunset (Muslim, 4.2217: 2892).
[16] The hadith master (hafidh)
Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti judged this hadith to be rigorously authenticated
(sahih) in his al-Khasa’is al-kubra (2.281), and hadith master Zayn
al-Din al-‘Iraqi said, “Bazzar related this hadith in his Musnad with
a well authenticated (jayyid) chain of transmission” (Tarh al-tathrib,
3.297).
[17] The Prophet (sallallāhu
‘alayhi wasallam)for example said: “When you hear the muezzin, repeat after
him, then say the Blessings upon me, for whoever blesses me once, Allāh
blesses ten times. Then ask Allāh to grant me Nearness (al-Wasila) to Him,
for it is a rank in paradise that befits none but one of Allāh’s slaves, and
I hope to be him. Whoever asks Nearness for me shall deserve my intercession”
(Muslim, 1.288–89: 384).
[18] We shall examine in detail
the question of seeking his intercession in this life (sallallāhu ‘alayhi
wasallam) in “Wahhabism and Tawassul,” in chapter 00 below.
[19] See page 00 above.
[20] “In which he followed,”
according to Ahmad Reza, “the sheikh of his sect, Isma‘il al-Dahlawi [d.
1246/1830]” (Husam al-Haramayn (c00), 19), but which in reality other
major Muslim scholastic theologians (mutakallimun) had espoused before them,
such as Imam Muhammad ibn Yusuf al-Sanusi (d. 895/1490) of the Ash‘ari school
of ‘aqida on pages 455, 456, and 465 of his ‘Umda ahl al-tawfiq wa
al-tasdid (c00), one of the most important reference works of the school.
[21] Gangohi explicitly states in
a fatwa that “whoever believes or states that Allāh Most High lies is without
a doubt an accursed unbeliever who contradicts the Qur’ān , the sunna, and
the consensus of the Umma” (al-Muhannad ‘ala al-mufannad (c00) 72).
[22] Ismail al-Dahlawi, for
example, said of Allāh, “His greatness is [such] that He can bring into being
crores [tens of millions] of prophets, friends [awliya’], jinn, and angels
equal to Jibril and Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allāh be upon him), and
to disorder the entire world from earth to sky and create a new world in its
place just by saying, Kun [‘Be’]” (Taqwiat-ul-Imān (c00), 37–38).
[23] The substance of human
dream-visions is khayyal or “imagination,” so that things often appear
in them in an “imaginal” mode of their own reality, such as one’s religion
being shown to one as a garment (Bukhari (c00), 9.45: 7006), or
religious knowledge as milk (Bukhari (c00), 9.45: 7008), to give two
examples from hadith. So while Allāh in reality has no “form”—which would
negate His having said, “There is nothing whatsoever like unto Him” (Qur’ān 42:11), since to be otherwise would make
inumerable things like Him in the point of having forms—in a dream-vision it
is quite possible for Allāh to appear in an imaginal “form,” even, as here,
one with a “hand” and “fingertips”; not because that is the nature of God,
but because that is the nature of dreams.
[24] Tirmidhi said, “I asked
Muhammad ibn Isma‘il [al-Bukhari, his sheikh in hadith] about this hadith,
and he said, “This is a well and rigorously authenticated (hasan-sahih)
hadith” (Tirmidhi (c00), 5.369), a designation is used by many hadith
Imams to indicated a hadith that is between well authenticated and rigorously
authenticated, though Nawawi says that for Tirmidhi it means a hadith related
through both a well and a rigorously authenticated channel of
transmission (Tadrib al-rawi (c00), 1.161).
[25] Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, for
example, prohibited his followers from accepting as an imam anyone who denied
that the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam) did not share the knowledge of
the unseen that rightfully belonged to Allāh Most High alone (Fatawa
Rashidiyyah (c00), 62).
[26] Indeed, for Allāh to give
more than a part of His knowledge to anyone would be pointless, for although
knowledge in general ennobles its possessor, knowing many things confers
little distinction upon anyone besides their Maker. Whether a rock has fallen
down on the other side of the moon, for example, concerns no one except Allāh,
and it is well authenticated that the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wasallam)
said, “The excellence of a man’s Islām includes leaving what does not concern
him” (Tirmidhi, 4.558: 2317). It is a religious shortcoming for a
Muslim to even care about such things—which upon reflection, include most
particulars of created being, as opposed to knowing its universal laws and
principles, which does confer some distinction—and there would be no point or
honor in Allāh’s bestowing more than a part of His absolute knowledge
of particulars upon another.
[27] The author would like to
thank Hamza Karamali for his English translation of the pages quoted in this
section from the Urdu of Khalil Ahmad Saharanpuri’s al-Barahin al-qati‘a
and Ashraf ‘Ali Thanwi’s Hifz al-Imān .
[28] There is no explicit Qur’ān ic
text about the vastness of their knowlege, though verses such as “Truly, he
[Satan] and his minions see you from whence you see them not” (Qur’ān 7:27), and “Say: the Angel of Death who has
been assigned to you shall take your lives” (Qur’ān 32:11), show that both Satan and the Angel
of Death must be aware of every human being at some time or another, which is
“vast knowledge” of a sort, even if only of particulars, that is unknown to
others.
[29] The first hadith is found in
Bukhari with the wording “By Allāh, I do not know, and I am the Messenger of Allāh,
what shall be done with me” (Bukhari (c00), 9.33: 7003). The author
was unable to identify the other two references cited here, though similar
examples abound in the Qur’ān and sunna.
[30] “Merely probabilistic”
including single hadiths that are well (hasan) or rigorously
authenticated (sahih) and do not conflict with other incontrovertible primary
texts.
[31] In Arabic, “Hikaya
al-hal, idha tatarraqa ilayha al-ihtimal, kasaha thawb al-ijmal, wa saqata
minha al-istidlal.”
[32] Nawawi seems to have thought that the caliphs’ not fighting and
killing deviant sects of their times such as the anthropomorphists,
Mu‘tazilites, extreme Shiites, and others shows that the Islāmic state and
its ulema’ did not consider them outright unbelievers. That is, even though
the ulema’ called such sects “kafir,” they did not mean thereby the
“real kufr” which takes one out of Islām , but rather the “lesser kufr”
(kufr duna kufr) of doing something as despicable as unbelievers do—a
figurative usage of the word kufr that appears in such hadiths as “Reviling a Muslim is corruption, and fighting him is kufr”
(Bukhari (c00), 9.63: 7076), in which the word kufr does not
mean leaving Islām , but committing the wickedness of kafirs, who also
fight against Muslims. Subki’s answer is that Nawawi was mistaken about this.
The real reason the caliphs did not war against sects was not because some of
their beliefs were not kufr, for some undoubtedly were, but rather
that the “takfir” of such a sect cannot exceed a general statement
that “whoever holds such and such a belief is a kafir.” The caliphs’
not following up such pronouncements by fighting and killing sectarians for
apostasy shows that the ulema of their times agreed with Subki’s position
that takfir of a group is legally insufficient to establish the kufr
of its individual members, for otherwise, killing them would have been
obligatory.
[33] The author has corrected a
number of mistakes in the Arabic text of the work cited by comparing it to an
excellent manuscript of the work ((c00), fols. 101–102) from the library of
al-Masjid al-Aqsa in Jerusalem. One of the most accurate extant, it was
collated with Subki’s own copy during his lifetime.
[34] The author’s thanks to Faraz
Rabbani, who translated the fatwa’s text from Urdu to English.
[35] That is, scholars and muftis
whose understanding of the matter derived from Ahmad Reza Khan’s sending them
his own Husam al-Haramayn to ask for endorsements, which a number of
them gave, then subsequently withdrew when Deobandis presented their side,
some of the most salient points of which have been coveyed in the previous
section.
[36] The hadith’s chain of
transmission is well authenticated (jayyid) according to hadith master (hafidz)
Mundhiri (al-Targhib wa al-tarhib (c00), 3.425) and hadith master Nur
al-Din al-Haythami (Majma‘al-zawa’id (c00), 8.30).
|
[Via
Al-Maghrib Institute; N. Keller MMVII]
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