Download PDF | Forbidding Wrong In Islam Cambridge University Press ( 2003)
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Forbidding Wrong in Islam An Introduction Michael Cook’s massive study in Islamic ethics, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought, was published to much acclaim in 2001. It was described by one reviewer as a masterpiece. In that book, the author reflected on the Islamic injunction, incumbent on every Muslim, to forbid wrongdoing. The present book is a short, accessible survey of the same material. Using anecdotes and stories from Islamic sources to illustrate the argument, Cook unravels the complexities of the subject. Moving backwards and forwards through time, he demonstrates how the past informs the present. By the end of the book, the reader will be familiar with a colourful array of characters from Islamic history ranging from the celebrated scholar Ghazzlı, to the caliph Hrün al-Rashıd, to the ◊yatullh Khumaynı. The book educates and entertains. At its heart, however, is an important message about the Islamic tradition, its values, and the relevance of those values today.
Michael Cook is Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University. His publications include Early Muslim Dogma (1981), The Koran: A Very Short Introduction (2000), and Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (2001).
Preface
In May 2000 the British police were searching the home of a suspected member of al-Qfiida in Manchester, and chanced on a terrorist manual written in Arabic. After the events of 11 September 2001, extracts from this manual were made available in an English translation. These extracts included instructions to be followed by undercover members of the organisation in order not to blow their cover; such a member should avoid manifesting his religiosity through his appearance or conduct. One point underlined in this connection was, in the wording of the translation, that he should ‘not get involved in advocating good and denouncing evil in order not to attract attention to himself’. In the same way, a brother travelling on a special mission ‘should not get involved in religious issues (advocating good and denouncing evil)’.1 The duty which the terrorist manual thereby set aside is a central, and in some ways distinctive, feature of Islamic ethics. As the celebrated Sunnı scholar Ghazzlı (d. 1111) put it, every Muslim has the duty of first setting himself to rights, and then, successively, his household, his neighbours, his quarter, his town, the surrounding countryside, the wilderness with its Beduin, Kurds, or whatever, and so on to the uttermost ends of the earth.2 Of these demanding activities, all bar the first fall under the rubric of ‘commanding right and forbidding wrong’ (al-amr bi√l-mafirüf wa√l-nahy fian al-munkar) – roughly speaking, the duty of one Muslim to intervene when another is acting wrongly. This book is an epitome of a research monograph I recently published on this duty under the title Commanding right and forbidding wrong in Islamic thought (Cambridge 2001).
The original monograph was a detailed presentation of the results of some fifteen years of research. Its seven hundred pages were weighed down with several thousand footnotes and over fifty pages of bibliography. Moreover, the large-scale organisation of the material was according to the various sects and schools that make up the Muslim community, not by topic. In short, the monograph was written primarily for specialists. The text (as opposed to the footnotes) was not in principle inaccessible to non-specialists, but it would have taken considerable courage and persistence for anyone other than a specialist to read it from cover to cover. The present epitome is designed specifically for the non-specialist. As can be seen from the table of contents, the material has been drastically rearranged to make the organisation thematic; only the last four chapters replicate the organisation of the monograph. No one who has read the monograph need read this epitome. Except in a small number of cases readily identifiable from the notes, there is no new material here. I have often rearranged the data, and occasionally this leads to new and perhaps better ways of looking at things. But there is nothing here that would count as a novel theory. At the same time, no non-specialist who reads this epitome has any need to go to the monograph. Everything that really matters about the subject is covered here. Perhaps the only exception would be someone with an interest in one particular sect or school; for such a purpose, the organisation of the monograph is more helpful.3 This epitome is subject to all the numerous debts set out in the ‘Acknowledgements’ and footnotes of the monograph. Some further information used here was kindly given to me by Sµkrµ Hanioÿlu, Barbara von Schlegell, Matti Steinberg and ≈ Nenad Filipovi´c. I have benefited considerably from the comments of Patricia Crone and Bob Moore on the typescript, and I regret that at the time I was working on this epitome, few reviews of the monograph had yet appeared. Finally, I would like to thank Janet Klein for preparing the index.
Introduction
In the early evening of Thursday 22 September 1988, a woman was raped at a local train station in Chicago in the presence of several people.1 A brief account of the incident appeared that Sunday in the New York Times, based on what the police had said on the Friday. The salient feature of the incident in this account was that nobody had moved to help the victim, and her cries had gone unheeded – for all that the rape took place during the rush hour. As Detective Daisy Martin put it: ‘Several people were looking and she asked them for help, and no one would help.’ A longer account which likewise appeared on the Sunday in the Chicago Tribune placed the matter in a very different light. Quoting what the police had said on the Saturday, the article began by stating that six bystanders were to be recommended for citizen’s awards for their work in helping the police arrest and identify the suspect. The account which followed emphasised two features of the situation that did not emerge from the notice in the Times. The first was that the rape took place in a part of the station to which access was blocked by an exit-only turnstile. The second was that the bystanders were confused in their understanding of what was going on: the rapist had ordered his victim to smile, which she did. Although at one point she reportedly mouthed the word ‘help’, it was only after her assailant had run off that she screamed. Initially, at least, the bystanders took the woman to be engaged in voluntary sex. But one young bystander, Randy Kyles, took a second look and thought ‘Man, this is strange’. Something seemed not to be right, so he did not get on his train when it came in. (Others on the platform, by contrast, remarked that what was happening was weird, but nevertheless boarded the train.) When the victim ran up the steps screaming that she had been raped, Kyles chased after the rapist, eventually flagging down a police car and getting him arrested. Kyles later explained his action as follows: ‘I had to do something to help that woman. It just wasn’t right. It could have been my mother, my aunt, one of my mother’s friends.
It is clear from these accounts that neither paper considered a rape at a local station in Chicago to be newsworthy in itself. The focus of journalistic attention – and the anticipated focus of the reader’s interest – was the conduct of the bystanders. The account given in the Times, which went back to Detective Daisy Martin’s statements on the Friday, placed their behaviour in a most unflattering light: though they greatly outnumbered the lone rapist, they had simply stood by and let it happen. The implication was that their conduct was shameful, and the reader reacts with appropriate indignation. How differently we would have behaved had we been there! Or at least, we hope we would have. The account given in the Tribune, by contrast, suggests that at least some of the bystanders, and Kyles in particular, behaved commendably. They had two good excuses for not intervening during the rape itself – the physical layout of the station, and the appearance of consent created by the coerced smiles of the woman, even if these did not look quite right. Kyles himself behaved with energy and courage when the situation became clear. He felt that he had to do something to help the woman, just as we would have felt had we been there; and we hope that we would have acted as well as he did in the distinctly confusing circumstances of the case. Underlying these two accounts, and the remarks of Martin and Kyles, is a broad moral consensus. One cannot just stand by and watch someone rape a woman, even a complete stranger, in a public place. Either one must do something about it, or one must have good and specific reasons for not doing anything. In other words, it seems, we have a clear conception that we have some kind of duty not just to behave decently ourselves, but to prevent others from doing things to their fellow humans that are outrageously wrong. Yet in everyday life we lack a name for the duty, still less a general formulation of the situations to which it applies and the circumstances that dispense us from it. The value is there, but it is not one that our culture has developed and systematised. ‘It just wasn’t right’ is the bottom line in Kyles’s explanation of what he did; the ‘just’ signals that, had he been pressed to explain himself further, he would have had nothing to say. We either understand or we don’t. In fact, of course, we understand perfectly well, and some of us can on occasion wax quite eloquent on the subject; but our culture provides us with no ready-made articulation of our understanding. In Islamic culture, by contrast, such a duty has a name, and it has been analysed repeatedly by the religious scholars whose writings make up the bulk of the literature of Islam. The main purpose of this book is to make this body of thought available in English in a concise and readable form. We can come back to the intriguing contrast between the treatment of the duty in Islamic and Western cultures at the end of the book.2 Before we delve into the thinking of the Muslim scholars, there are some preliminary matters that need attention: the terminology used by the Muslim scholars in referring to the duty; the religious allegiances of these scholars; and the main types of work in which they set out their ideas. The following sections address these themes, and are in the nature of road-maps.
1 Terminology The phrase ‘commanding right and forbidding wrong’ has its source in Muslim scripture, that is to say in the Koran, which Islam considers to have been revealed by God to the Prophet Mu˛ammad (d. 632) through Gabriel. Thus in one verse, God is calling for unity among the believers, and addresses them thus: ‘Let there be one community (umma) of you, calling to good, and commanding right and forbidding wrong; those are the prosperers’ (Q3:104). In another verse He avers: ‘You were the best community (umma) ever brought forth to men, commanding right and forbidding wrong’ (Q3:110). And again: ‘And the believers, the men and the women, are friends one of the other; they command right, and forbid wrong’ (Q9:71) – a verse, incidentally, that is notable for its explicit mention of women in connection with the duty. As these examples show, the phrase is firmly rooted in the diction of the Koran. But what goes for the phrase may not be true of the conception. There is no certainty that the Koranic phrase originally meant what the later Muslim scholars took it to mean. The Koranic uses of the phrase are vague and general, and give no indication of the concrete character of the duty, if any. Indeed, there was a trend in early Koranic exegesis that saw the duty as simply a matter of affirming the basic message of Islam: ‘commanding right’ was enjoining belief in the unity of God and the veracity of the Prophet, and ‘forbidding wrong’ was forbidding polytheism and the denial of the Prophet.3 But whatever the Koranic phrase originally meant, the Muslim tradition overwhelmingly took it to refer to the duty we now understand by it. Muslim scholars normally follow Koranic usage in referring to ‘commanding right and forbidding wrong’ in tandem. Occasionally they make scholastic distinctions between commanding right and forbidding wrong, but these are niceties we can leave aside.4 For our purposes, they are two sides of the same coin, and in most contexts we can conveniently abbreviate the full phrase to ‘forbidding wrong’. Alongside the Koran, Islam possesses a second body of material at least some of which is accorded the status of revelation, namely tradition (˛adıth). In early times, individual traditions were orally transmitted, but within a few centuries they had been reduced to writing and embodied in voluminous collections. In the Sunnı case, what the Muslim scholars consider to be authentic traditions from the Prophet form a body of material with a status comparable to that of the Koran. There are numerous traditions that refer to forbidding wrong, often to encourage believers to perform the duty. However, the tradition that figures most prominently in the discussions of the later scholars, at least among the Sunnıs, is couched in different terms. Like many traditions in favour of forbidding wrong,5 it is identifiable from its transmitters as stemming from the city of Küfa in Iraq. According to this tradition, Marwn, the governor of Medina, was presiding over the ritual prayer on a feast-day some time in the 660s or 670s. In this connection he did two things that were considered irregular: he brought out the pulpit despite the fact that it was a feast-day, and he delivered the sermon before conducting the prayer. In the face of these ritual infractions, a man got up and said: ‘Marwn, you’ve gone against the normative practice (sunna)! You’ve brought out the pulpit on a feast-day, when it used not to be; and you’ve started with the sermon before the prayer!’ At this point, one of the Companions of the Prophet commented that the man had done his duty, and proceeded to quote something he had heard the Prophet say: ‘Whoever sees a wrong, and is able to put it right (an yughayyirahu) with his hand, let him do so; if he can’t, then with his tongue; if he can’t, then in his heart, and that is the bare minimum of faith.’6
This tradition, then, provides us with a clear example of a wrong that needs righting, and at the same time sets out a schema of modes in which a believer might respond to it; we will come back to these ‘three modes’ in a later chapter.7 Yet in the payload of the tradition, the Prophet speaks not of ‘forbidding’ wrong but of ‘righting’ it, using a verb (ghayyara) whose primary sense is ‘to change’.8 From this the scholars derive the phrase ‘righting wrong’ (taghyır al-munkar) – though because the phrase derives from a Sunnı tradition, it is less used by the Shıfiites.9 Despite the difference of language, the scholars take it for granted that ‘forbidding wrong’ and ‘righting wrong’ are the same thing, and we will follow them in this without further ado. Both these ways of referring to the duty go back to early Islamic times. There is a third that is of later origin, and mainly an invention of Ghazzlı.10 Following a precedent set by a somewhat earlier scholar, Mwardı (d. 1058), he adopted the word ˛isba as a general term for ‘forbidding wrong’. He then developed a terminology based on the root behind this word (˛-s-b). Thus the person who forbids wrong is ‘the one who performs ˛isba’ (al-mu˛tasib), the person who has committed the wrong is ‘the one to whom ˛isba is done’ (al-mu˛tasab fialayhi), and the wrong itself is ‘that with regard to which ˛isba is done’ (al-mu˛tasab fıhi). Because Ghazzlı was a very influential thinker, this terminology is frequently encountered in the works of later scholars.11 But despite its systematic character it led to a considerable amount of confusion. Long before the time of Ghazzlı, the word ˛isba had been applied to the office of a functionary I shall refer to as the censor (mu˛tasib); his job was to oversee the markets and morals of the city in which he was appointed. This too was a form of ‘commanding right’, but distinct from the duty of the individual Muslim that is our primary concern in this book.
2 Religious allegiances As world religions go, Islam is relatively unified. It has nevertheless been shaped by a variety of cleavages, some deeper than others, with the result that Muslims have been divided into a large number of more or less distinct groups. These groups are relevant to us to the extent that they have constituted intellectual communities within which doctrines of forbidding wrong have been transmitted and discussed. In practice, of course, we are unlikely to know much of the views of a group unless it has survived into the present and preserved a significant literary heritage; so we shall have little occasion to refer to the numerous groups that died out at one time or another in the course of Islamic history. By far the oldest and deepest cleavage is the sectarian division that separates Shıfiites, Khrijites and the Sunnı mainstream. The main ground on which these sectarian allegiances were defined was the religious politics of the seventh century, above all the question who was the legitimate ruler of the Muslim community after the death of the Prophet. Both Shıfiites and Khrijites were subject to further splits, generating numerous sects. On the Shıfiite side, two of these sects will play significant roles in this book: the Immıs, who today constitute the predominant Shıfiite group in Iran and elsewhere, and the Zaydıs, who survive only in northern Yemen. On the Khrijite side, only one sect survives today, namely the Ib∂ıs. Geographically speaking, the Ib∂ıs have long been confined to two widely separated regions: Arabia, where they make up the majority of the population of Oman, and North Africa, where they are found as minorities in Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. Each sect tended to have its own succession of imams, that is rulers whom it recognised as legitimate; those of the Immıs soon came to exercise no real political power, whereas those of the Zaydıs and Ib∂ıs did better. The various sects were likely to have distinct heritages of tradition (˛adıth), and this was particularly pronounced in the Immı case. They also tended to regard each other, with some qualification, as infidels; truth was a zero-sum game, and only one sect could possess it. In modern times the Zaydıs and Ib∂ıs have shown a strong tendency to move towards the Sunnı mainstream, but the Immıs remain clearly distinct from it. A later and less profound division separates the four surviving law-schools of Sunnı Islam: the ˘anafıs, Mlikıs, Shfifiites and ˘anbalites. These are rival schools of thought in the field of religious law (sharıfia), and originate in the heritages of founding figures of the eighth or ninth centuries: Abü ˘anıfa (d. 767f.),13 Mlik (d. 795), Shfifiı (d. 820) and Ibn ˘anbal (d. 855). The law-schools differ on numerous legal questions, but they have tended to see their differences as in some sense legitimate; thus scholars of rival law-schools have not been given to calling each other infidels, or not at least on the basis of their legal views alone. It gradually became the norm for any Sunnı Muslim to belong to one or other of the four schools; thus both Mwardı and Ghazzlı were Shfifiites. But many early Sunnı scholars, and a few later ones, lacked such allegiances. An example is Ibn ˘azm (d. 1064), a brilliant Spanish maverick.
The law-schools were important as intellectual – and also social – communities, and as such they will play a significant part in this book; but in modern times they have tended to become less salient. Outside the Sunnı fold, the various sectarian groups likewise had their law-schools; but there will be less reason to refer to them, since in the sectarian environment the law-school is often (though not invariably) coterminous with the sect. A third cleavage demarcates the various theological schools. The word ‘theological’ in this context is to be taken in a fairly broad sense, but it should be understood to exclude religious politics and law. The fundamental division here was between those who espoused the use of systematic reasoning in matters of theology and those who rejected it in favour of an exclusive reliance on Koran and tradition. By the ninth century the champions of systematic reasoning had split up into numerous schools, of which the only one that matters to us is the Mufitazilites. They did not survive as an independent movement, but their views and works were to an extent adopted and transmitted by members of some of the sects and lawschools described above. The major role in this was played by the Shıfiite sects. Thus the Immıs adopted many Mufitazilite views, though they did not preserve Mufitazilite works written by non-Immıs. The Zaydı reception of Mufitazilism went further, and included the preservation of a significant body of Mufitazilite writing by a Shfifiite Mufitazilite, fiAbd al-Jabbr ibn A˛mad al-Hamadhnı (d. 1025). On the Sunnı side, Mufitazilism survived longest among the ˘anafıs, but even they do not preserve a significant number of Mufitazilite works. In addition to Mufitazilism, two further theological schools of a somewhat later vintage will occasionally concern us. One was Ashfiarism, which became strongly associated with the Shfifiite and Mlikı law-schools; the other was Mturıdism, which came to prevail among the ˘anafıs. Ranged against these schools were the enemies of systematic reasoning, whom we can call the traditionalists. We encounter them in a variety of contexts, but their greatest bastion was undoubtedly the ˘anbalite law-school. In one way theological differences run deeper than legal differences: in theology, as in religious politics, truth tends to be seen as a zero-sum game, and those who find themselves in disagreement are prone to call each other infidels.
But in another way the divisions run less deep: theological differences did not provide the basis for the formation of lasting social communities, but rather, as we have seen, rode piggyback on sectarian and legal groupings. A fourth form of division, of great importance historically, is that between the numerous ∑üfı brotherhoods that have come into existence over the centuries. But these brotherhoods will play very little part in this book. Some aspects of the heritage of ∑üfı thought will occasionally concern us, as will the tensions between ∑üfism and its enemies.
3 Sources Islamic religious literature is vast and ramified, and references to forbidding wrong crop up in sources of very varied types and provenances. But the more sustained discussions of the duty tend to cluster in a limited number of genres. As we have already seen, there is relevant material in both Koran and tradition. Scholastic cultures tend to invest heavily in commentary on their authoritative texts, and the Muslim scholars are no exception. Since the Koran is the most authoritative Muslim text, it is not surprising that it has been the subject of more commentaries than any other; these range in date from the eighth century to the present. What such commentaries have to say about the relevant verses thus provides us with a rich vein of material. There are likewise commentaries on the major collections of traditions, of which the most important from our point of view is that of Muslim (d. 875); but in general the commentaries on tradition have less to offer us than those on the Koran. The most obvious type of source to go to for systematic and detailed accounts of the duties of Muslims is the vast legal literature of Islam. The study of law was the central activity of Muslim scholarship, and any topic that had a recognised place in the law-book was thus assured of continuing literary attention down the centuries, and wherever there were scholars to attend to it. The Sunnı law-schools, however, did not cover forbidding wrong in their law-books, with the result that their legal literature has only occasional and incidental remarks to offer on the subject. Fortunately the sectarian scholars – the Immıs, the Zaydıs, and the Ib∂ıs (at least in the east) – did not follow the Sunnı lead, and their law-books regularly included discussions of forbidding wrong. In the case of the Immıs the amount of material this yields is particularly large. In part this reflects the historical success of the Immıs over the centuries – they became far more numerous than the Zaydıs or Ib∂ıs, and thus supported many more scholars. But it is also a testimony to the impetus given by the Islamic revolution in Iran to the publication of Immı manuscripts; secularists would have left most of them to gather dust. Another kind of work that may include a treatment of forbidding wrong is the theological handbook. This is particularly so with the Mufitazilites and their heirs, the Zaydıs and Immıs. The Mufitazilites, indeed, initiated by far the strongest tradition of systematic analysis of the duty to be found in Islam. By contrast, the Ashfiarites possessed no such tradition, although they sometimes provided accounts of the duty in their treatises on theology. So too did the ˘anbalites, to the extent that these traditionalists belatedly adopted the genre. The Mturıdites had no problem with the genre, but it was not their practice to include discussion of forbidding wrong in it. Theological treatments of forbidding wrong tend to abstraction; more concrete and colourful material can sometimes be found in collections of responsa (fatws). In such texts a scholar is responding to specific questions usually put to him by laymen, and these questions may include accounts of the actual circumstances that raised the issues. There is a rich collection of responsa of Ibn ˘anbal on forbidding wrong that reflects the conditions in which ˘anbalites lived in ninth-century Baghdad; Iran in the late twentieth century is represented in some responsa of Khumaynı (d. 1989). From time to time scholars have devoted monographs to forbidding wrong. For example, there is a massive compilation on the subject by Zayn al-Dın al-∑li˛ı (d. 1452), a Damascene ˘anbalite who was also a ∑üfı – indeed at one point he makes a specifically ∑üfı contribution to the armoury of techniques for forbidding wrong. But ∑li˛ı’s work, in line with others of this genre, tends to be more interesting for the materials he transcribes from earlier sources than for any ideas of his own. In recent times monographic treatments of forbidding wrong have become significantly more common, among both Sunnıs and Immıs. Modern works of this kind are often of interest for the ways in which their authors seek to relate the heritage of forbidding wrong to modern conditions.
If there is one account of forbidding wrong that stands out from the rest, it is Ghazzlı’s. This account forms part of a lengthy anatomy of piety to which he gave the famous – if not entirely modest – title The revival of the religious sciences (I˛y√ fiulüm al-dın).14 In this work he devotes far more space to forbidding wrong than most earlier writers on the duty. But it is also the quality of his analysis that sets it apart. His account is a fine example of his talent for effective organisation – a talent explicitly recognised and appreciated by posterity.15 It is also innovative, insightful, and rich in detail. Small wonder that the work in general, and its treatment of forbidding wrong in particular, achieved a wide currency in the Islamic world. A striking testimony to this was the appearance of reworkings of the Revival designed to render it compatible with milieux distinct from that of Ghazzlı himself. Such recensions were produced among the Mlikıs, ˘anbalites, ˘anafıs, Ib∂ıs, Zaydıs and Immıs; even the Monophysite Christians of Syria had their version.16 At the same time numerous writers on forbidding wrong mined Ghazzlı’s account of the duty.17 The result of all this was to spread his ideas about forbidding wrong far and wide. Yet for one reason or another, certain features of his account tended to meet with resistance on the part of those who customised or borrowed from it;18 monitoring their reactions can shed an interesting light on their attitudes to sensitive questions. All these sources document the doctrines of forbidding wrong that were prevalent among the Muslim scholars. But it is only incidentally and unevenly that they reveal anything about the practice of the duty in real life – though responsa obviously have considerably more to tell us here than handbooks of theology.
In addition to the kinds of source described above, however, we can have recourse to the large body of historical and biographical literature that the scholars have left behind them. The disadvantage of such anecdotal material is that it is scattered here and there in a random fashion. The advantage is that the works in which we find it do not have formal doctrinal agendas – which is not, of course, to say that they are innocent of doctrinal concerns and influences. Such material may not be the ideal source for reconstructing the practice of the duty, but it is the best we can hope to find for pre-modern times. We are now ready to start looking at the doctrines of forbidding wrong put forward by the Muslim scholars.
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