By Babatunde Jose
The term Islamic tradition may refer to: Islamic Traditionalist theology, Islamic scholarly movement, originating in the late 8th century CE. Ahl al-Hadith, “The adherents of the tradition”, Traditional Islamic schools and branches, Islamic mythology, and the body of traditional narratives associated with Islam.
Sunnis regard themselves as the orthodox branch of Islam. The name is derived from the phrase “Ahl al-Sunnah”, or “People of the Tradition”. The tradition or sunnah in this case refers to practices based on what the Prophet Muhammad said, did, agreed to or condemned.
Traditional Islamic law, or Sharia, is interpreted in four different ways in Sunni Islam. The schools of law, or madhab, developed in the first four centuries of Islam. The four schools of law are the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali traditions, each based on the beliefs of their founders.
Even though the main split in Islamic practice is between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, there are several rifts within the Sunni community raging from the so-called fundamentalist or extremists, Islamists and the ultra conservatives who seek a return to the era of the caliphate.
There are some liberal and more secular movements in Sunni Islam that say that Shari’a is interpreted on an individual basis, and they reject any fatwa or religious edict by religious Muslim authority figures.
There are also several fundamentalist movements in Sunni Islam, which reject and sometimes even persecute liberal Muslims for attempting to compromise traditional Muslim values.
The Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami organizations are fundamentalist Islamic groups that have given rise to offshoot groups like Hamas who wish to destroy secular Islam and Western society through terrorism to bring back to the world a period of religious Muslim rule.
Sunnism is one of two broad movements that evolved in the Muslim community after the Prophet’s death in 632 c.e. Disagreement over who was Muhammad’s legitimate successor led to a schism between two groups, Sunnis and Shiites, resulting in two interpretations of Islam and two different sacred histories.
Sunnis were not the only Muslims who embraced the Shari’a as a spiritual guide, but because Sunnism provided the foundation for its development, the Shari’a became inextricably connected to how people understood Sunnism.
When scholars speak of the classical period of Islam (900–1200 c.e.), they are usually referring to a time when consciousness of the Shari’a combined with other great achievements throughout the Muslim world, forming the pinnacle of Islamic, and Sunni, civilization.
By the end of the classical period, however, Sunnis faced an important question: whether new perspectives could be incorporated without seriously modifying the assumptions of its system. Some ulama argued that the door to new insights should be closed, and the result was a social order that found it difficult to confront changes associated with modernity. Since then, Sunni Muslims started living in the past.
Beginning in the thirteenth century a unified sense of Sunnism was also challenged by the emergence of independent states and emirates, who relied less on an international Sunni value system. That, along with the loss of any real power behind a unifying figure like the caliph, led to political fragmentation in the Islamic world, which signaled a weakening of Muslim cohesion. By the time of the Renaissance in Europe in the 1500s, when the West challenged Muslim civilization, the word Sunni had taken on a meaning close to “doctrinaire.” Thus, Sunnism often appeared to Western commentators as Islam’s “orthodoxy.”
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries political issues increasingly dominated Sunnism. As a result of Western colonialism, the Muslim world was severed into small nation-states, each vying for legitimacy, further weakening Muslim cohesion. By the end of the twentieth century most Muslim countries were dealing with militant fundamentalist groups bent on reform.
These anti-Western and anti-regime movements were characterized by a commitment to the international triumph of Islam and a rigid opposition to all things not of Islamic origin. Although such groups considered themselves Sunni, their views were not shared by the majority of Sunnis; instead, they represented a new Islamic identity that could not be understood in terms of classical Sunnism. Today, we see them as the Islamists, fundamentalists and extremists who prefer violent interpretations of the Quran and hadith.
Early in the classical age of Islam another view of the religion, known as Mu’tazilism, developed within Sunnism. The scholars who shaped this perspective tried to apply a rational and allegorical interpretation to the Quran. Ultimately Sunnis rejected their approach, insisting that the Quran was not a matter for philosophical speculation but rather a set of codes by which one should live. This is why some commentators do not speak about orthodoxy in Islam but “orthopraxy,” meaning a standard way of living.
Islamic law does not function as law in the West does. Sunnis generally practice according to one of four schools of jurisprudence, which vary on some issues and are distributed regionally: Hanafi (Iraq, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan), Maliki (North and West Africa), Shafi’i (Yemen, Egypt, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines), and Hanbali (Saudi Arabia). Because of historical factors such as population movements and changes in the ruling dynasties, Muslims in areas such as Syria or the West may find multiple schools in the same location.
While the Kaaba serves as the prime symbol for all Muslims, it has always been in the hands of Sunnis, with the King of Saudi as the custodian of the Holy Mosques.
An important leader at the pinnacle of Islam’s classical period was Harun al-Rashid (786–809), whose caliphate in Baghdad was seen as taking Sunnism to unsurpassed excellence and splendor.
Sunnism was also invigorated by Akbar (1556–1605), a Mughal emperor who firmly established Islam in northern India.
Mustafa Kemal, known as Ataturk (1881–1938), was responsible for a major rethinking of traditional Islamic statehood. His reforms in Turkey shifted the state’s goals away from embodying religious ideology and toward adapting Sunnism to a modern society.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948) founded the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in 1947, attempting to maintain a Sunni identity within a Western political structure.
Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–70) applied a socialist ideology to the Islamic state when he established a republic in Egypt in 1956.
Backlashes against non-Islamic trends have resulted in Sunni reform movements. One of the most important was Wahhabism, a conservative reform movement founded by Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (1703–92).
A second movement emerged around Hasan al-Banna (1906–49), whose Sunni Egyptian organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, spread throughout the Arab world, providing institutional growth for Islamism, or fundamentalism.
Sunni radical leadership has continued to express a wide variety of perspectives. Osama bin Laden (born in Saudi Arabia in 1957), Al-Qaeda encouraged the use of terror and indiscriminate violence to overthrow Western culture and political structures.
Of perhaps equal relevance, though representing a different outlook, is Wallace Warith Din Muhammad (born in 1933), head of an Islamic movement in the United States—first called the Nation of Islam and then the American Muslim Society—begun by his father, Elijah Muhammad (1897–1975). Warith has dramatically changed an American sectarian movement into one of the most respected Sunni organizations in the Western world. In the United States the Muslim feminist perspective has been expressed effectively in the writings of Egyptian-born Leila Ahmed (born in 1940).
Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111), head of a school in Baghdad, underwent such a spiritual revolution that he abandoned his career and wrote books reconciling the mystical tradition with Sunni legal thinking.
Sunni civilization was also influenced by writers such as Jalal al-Din al-Rumi (1207–73), a Sufi poet and savant; Ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240), a theosophist and metaphysical thinker; and Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), who founded the study of societies (and by extension, sociology) with his concept of ‘asabiyya (group cohesion).
Modern religious reformists include Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–97), a political revolutionary who resisted British imperialism in Islamic territories; Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–98), a Muslim modernist and advocate of Westernizing reform in India; Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905), an advocate of Islamic modernism in Egypt; Sayyid Abdul Ala Mawdudi (1904–79), a neoconservative reformer and fundamentalist ideologue in Pakistan; and Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), the principal theorist of the contemporary radical Islamist movement.
Because Sunnism has no priesthood and no explicit religious hierarchy, there is no one spokesperson for the tradition. Over the course of history, the ulama have come to be considered official authorities of Islamic learning, and they have often represented Sunnism.
The scholarly class has exercised more control over the Sunni point of view than any other group, except, perhaps, until the rise of Islamism, or fundamentalism, in the contemporary period. Under the influence of Islamism another aspect of contemporary Sunni life has come to the fore: a small number of people, using media and technology, have been able to have a disproportionate power over public opinion.
Finally next week we look at Sufism and Islamic mysticism; the various Islamic orders, especially Qadiriyya and Tijaniyya.
Barka Juma’at and a happy weekend.
SEEKING ALLAH’S PROTECTION:
I seek the protection of Allah’s perfect words from the
evil of whatever He has created. (Muslim)
I seek protection in the perfect words of Allah – which neither the upright nor the corrupt may overcome – from the evil of what He created, of what He brought into existence, and of what He scattered, from the evil of what descends from the heavens, and of what rises up to them, from the evil of what He scattered in the earth and of what emerges from it, from the evil trials of night and day, and from the evil of every night visitor, except the night visitor who comes with good, O Merciful One. (Ahmad)
I seek the protection of Allah the Supreme, than whom there is nothing greater. And I seek the protection of the perfect words of Allah which no man – virtuous or evil – can even transcend; and I seek the protection of all of The Most Beautiful Names of Allah – the ones I know and the ones I do not know – from the evil of everything He created, brought into existence, and spread over the earth. (Muwatta)
I seek protection in the perfect words of Allah from His anger and punishment, from the evil of His servants, and from the evil suggestions of the devils and from them appearing to me. (Ahmad)
Life is bread, water, and shade; so, do not be perturbed by a lack of any other material thing. And in heaven is your provision, and that which you are promised. (Quran 51: 22)
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