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Newsletter for January 2019
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Shi'a-Phobia Exposed
by Dr. Robert D. Crane
The latest in the campaign to demonize Shi'a and especially the
Ithna'ashari or mainline Shi'a in Iran, Iraq, and Bahrain is the
effort by two scholars, Haider Hamoudi and Miqdad, to claim that
the Shi'a did not first develop, support, and use the human
rights embodied in the Islamic normative law known as the
maqasid al shari'ah,
which is the cutting edge of human rights in contemporary
Islamic jurisprudence.
These scholars claim that the Shi'a oppose the rational thought
of qiyas or decision by precedent for all the wrong reasons. The
Shi'a have always opposed qiyas only because it is unnecessary
in a jurisprudential system that relies on the maqasid or
universal principles of human responsibilities and human rights
as first developed implicitly by Imam Jafar based on the
practice of the Prophet Muhammad,
salla Allahu 'alayhi wa salam.
Imam Jafar was the first to develop a maqsudi framework for the
spiritual life based on levels descending from the general to
the specific, which can be applied directly to Islamic
jurisprudence, though to my knowledge no-one yet has studied
this correlation as the basis for the maqasid al shari'ah.
Admittedly, only recent scholarship has discovered that the
maqasid were first used explicitly by Shi'a scholars well before
any Sunni scholars did, and centuries before Al Ghazali
popularized this system of jurisprudence in the Sunni world.
Since the maqasid, particularly in the Sunni world, have been
moribund or dead for six hundred years until recently, only now
are scholars looking for the origin of the maqasid in early
texts. The maqasid have never been dead in the Shi'a world,
because
'adl
or justice is the second of the five requirements in the Shi'a
creed, right after
tawhid
and before even prophethood,
nubuwah.
The
marjaa'
or authoritative Shi'a jurisprudents, led by the ayatollahs, are
required to use
ijtihad
or intellectual effort and the maqasid to determine the will of
the Hidden Imam, because by definition a consensus by them on
the parameters of an issue is the Imam's will, and, once the
parameters are set beyond dispute,
ijtihad
is used to apply general principles to specific cases. I am not
a Shi'a, nor do I support the concept of the Imamate, but the
presentations that seem to reflect Shi'a-phobia sound like
reversing truth and falsehood, which is the special task of the
Dajjal, also known as the Anti-Christ.
It is interesting, though not remarkable, that anti-Shi'ism
sounds very sophisticated. It may be a perfect example of what
the head of the Hudson Institute warned me against when he said,
"The most dangerous people on earth are geniuses, because only a
genius can make irrationality sound reasonable". By definition,
the Dajjal is very smart, regardless of whether one considers
him to be a real person or merely a metaphor, and his genius
consists in reversing truth and falsehood, which is why a
scholar should be equally familiar with both truth and its
opposite.
The origin of normative law in Islamic thought, according to
Shaykh Taha Jabbir al Alwani’s early publication on the subject,
entitled Usul al Fiqh al Islami: Source Methodology in
Islamic Jurisprudence: Methodology for Research and Knowledge,
which was translated by Yusuf Talal DeLorenzo and Anas al-Shaikh-Ali
and published by the IIIT in 1991, can be traced back to the
practice of the Prophet Muhammad, salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa
salam. He used to gather his knowledgeable companions or
sahaba and put to them for judgment test cases, both actual
and hypothetical. When each gave his judgment, the Prophet would
comment, “I care less about what
you
have concluded than about how you reasoned to your conclusion.”
‘Ali ibn Abu Talib always traced his judgments back to basic
principles.
Although some early jurists, including Jafar al Sadiq (d. 148
A.H.) and Shafi’i (d. 240 A.H.), used rationally derived
principles to
explain
specific verses of the Qur’an, the first known volume dedicated
to the maqasid in which the term maqasid was used in the
title was written by Al-Tirmidhi al Hakim, who died in
296 A.H. (908 A.C.). This was a Sufi-oriented exploration of the
purposes behind specific rules of prayer. He also wrote the
first book on the symbolism of the hajj, which even today is
condemned by the literalists who insist that symbolism is
un-Islamic.
The first scholarly treatises on the maqasid as a means to
explain the purposes behind rulings in general, but still
without introducing any general theory for the purposes,
according to Jasser Auda on page 16 of his magnum opus, were
written by two men who both died a century later in the year 381
A.H. (991 A.C.). He writes, “The first known monograph dedicated
to maqasid was written by Ibn Babawayh al-Saduq al Qummi,
one of the main Shi’a jurists of the fourth Islamic century, who
wrote a book of 335 chapters on the subject entitled ‘Ilal al
Shara’i. … The earliest known theoretical classification of
purposes was introduced by Al-Amiri al Faylasuf, … but his
classification was based solely on the hudud.”
The earliest use of maqasid was limited to the use of reason in
contextualizing specific scriptural sources. Several centuries
were required for the development of the maqasid toward a higher
level of systems analysis of purpose designed to understand the
message of the entire Qur’an, the matn or content of the
ahadith, and the historical accounts in the Sunnah, as well as
to apply such insight to public policy.
Juwayni equated the maqasid with what was in the public
interest, al masalih al ammah, thereby emphasizing the
social aspect of Islamic law,
though not neglecting the purpose of Islamic jurisprudence in
guiding both individual and social awarness of the transcendent.
He was also one of the first to deduce maqasid directly from the
Qur’an rather than, as previously practiced, only from the
Islamic legal heritage embodied in the rulings of the various
madhdhahib or schools of law.
The elevation of the maqasid to the level of wisdom was
introduced by Shamsudddin ibn al-Qayyim (d. 748 A.H., 1347
A.C.), who was a student of Ahmad ibn Taymiyah (d. 728). Ibn
Qayyim wrote, “The Islamic law is all about wisdom and achieving
people’s welfare in this life and the afterlife. It is all about
justice, mercy, wisdom, and good. Thus any ruling that replaces
justice with injustice, mercy with its opposite, common good
with mischief, or wisdom with nonsense, is a ruling that does
not belong to the Islamic law.”
The peak development of the maqasid during the classical period
of Islamic thought was achieved by Imam Abu Ishaq al-Shatibi,
who died in Andalucia in 790 A.H., 1388 A.C., as the great
Islamic civilization of that era was crumbling from its own
internal corruption. He taught and demonstrated that the
inductive process of developing a multi-layered system of
purpose by the process of ‘ilm al yaqin from the first
two sources of truth and justice, namely, revelation (haqq al
yaqin) and study of the universal laws of the universe (‘ain
al yaqin), was just as certain or reliable (qat’iy)
as the first two of this triad.
We need not go into the levels of reliability from the
qat'iy
to the
dhany
on which Haider Hamoudi and Miqdaad focused their critique,
except to say that the Shi'a scholars were well aware of the
spectrum of distinctions.
Al Shatibi's
elevation of the maqasid as fundamentals of Islamic
jurisprudence and of all human thought was not widely accepted
until half a millennium later when Rashid Rida introduced
economic justice, political justice, and women’s rights as
independent maqasid, and the two Muhammad al Tahir ibn Ashur
(grandfather and grandson, who died in 1907 and 1973) introduced
political freedom and religious freedom as essential components
of truth and justice.
These were followed by Muhammad al Ghazali (died 1996 A.C.) who
emphasized equality and equity, especially by reducing the
wealth gap in and among nations and by pursuing broad-based
human development, and Yusuf al Qaradawi (born in 1926) who
included among the maqasid the search for a cooperative world
and peace. This maqasidi
or maqsudi
movement has culminated in the work of Shaykh Taha al Jabbir al
Alwani, who was born in 1935 and is writing separate books on
the three supreme maqasid or purposes of all existence, the
Oneness of God (tawhid), purification of the soul (tazkiyah),
and developing civilization on earth
(the
hadara
of ‘imran).
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