Sunni Islam is undergoing a gigantic tug-of-war – a power struggle – in which competing versions of the religion are facing off against one another. The struggle, with consequences that manifest themselves in terms of dead bodies and violent accusations of heresy, is at its heart, an aesthetic one: how does one arrange the sources of Islam? This article is an effort to catalogue that discussion. It might seem pithy and even irrelevant at time, but the fundamental questions about Islam today – the place of women, the place of minorities, the rights of non-combatants, the limits placed upon the various nation-states, the death penalty of apostasy and blasphemy, censorship, the organization of parliamentary (or one party) systems, Muslim democracy, Muslim republicanism, Islamism, Israel, oil and so on – all hinge on a) whose narrative about how Islam’s sources are arranged emerges victorious, and b) which narrative does the economically and militarily powerful West decide to empower.

The general trend among academics in the West is to list four or five presumably “standard” sources of Islam and then say “well, here are the ones the Salafis do not accept and add, here the ones the Wahhabis do not accept and add” and so on. I suppose academics do this because they see the world in terms of what is normative (within the academy) and not what is normative in terms of power. This is a flawed approach because it presumptively favors one particular brand of orthodox Sunni Muslims – the classic orthodox – which has been getting quite a proverbial beat down at the hand of the Salafis and Wahhabis for over a century. The only reason one would treat them as normative is if one a) truly believes they ought represent normative Islam (I do not), and b) truly believes that their position can address the various questions about Islam today (again, I do not). On the other hand, I am not comfortable with treating Wahhabis and Salafis as normative either – though they would just love that – because a) they do not actually have a unified method, and b) their service to a particular political ideological agenda means that we should be careful from treating them as normative. As such, I will treat only the Quran – which is to Islam what Christ is to Christianity – as normative, and explain the fascinating, contradictory and multifarious ways in which Muslims relate to it, and the massive systems they have created emanating from it. All of this becomes relevant because the fate of a billion people, and all those who are touched by them, depends on it. Pay attention.

The Quran, in verse, is 114 chapters of spiritual exhortations (in the thousands), historical tales (in the hundreds), and legal rules (in the few hundreds). Further, it contains handful of everything under the sun: biology, chemistry, discussions about salinity, the miracles of God, war strategy, commentary on ongoing events in Muhammad’s life including solutions, gender justice, economic matters, and a whole lot of Moses. The question that Muslims are faced with is how do you take such a book and create a livable, and consistent, system of life? Do you hand the book to each individual Muslim and let him run with it? Given the fact that it was part of the Arab and Persian traditions to collapse religion and state together, the Quran also ends up having to double as a political text. On top of that, you had to deal with the fact that the first hundred years of Islam were spent in territorial expansion – the book to read is The End of the Jihad State – such that what approach Muslims should apply to the Quran once the Prophet had passed, the question became even more difficult to answer.

The initial answers were interesting. A collection of philosophers and scholars in Iraq (mostly Persian converts or descended of converts), led by Abu Hanifa, went for an Aristotelian solution. They proposed that all that was necessary to address a particular problem faced by a Muslim was to consult the text of the Quran, and if the Quran needed to be supplement, one’s intellect, ‘aql. These people were later on perjoratively called the ahl al ra’y, the people of opinion (astute readers should already be able to pick up what happened with them). This approach had two major detractors. The first were the Shi’a who felt that the only ones that had the authority to supplement the Quran should be the blood-descendents of the Prophet (but the Shi’a vested those individuals with almost unlimited power). The second were the followers of Imam Malik of Medina. Malik insisted that the Quran could only be supplemented by the “Medinan Way” – the actual living practice and methods of people from Muhammad’s hometown. His reasoning was that those who continued to live in Medina were the ones who had been closest to Muhammad , and therefore, were the ones who should be called upon when the Quran needed to get supplemented. Muhammad Iqbal, whom I referred to in the earlier post, approvingly called Malik’s movement a “Semitic restraint” against the Aryan tendency to dabble in the idealistic. Any way, these two approaches reigned supreme for some time until a man named Imam Shafi’i from Cairo showed up. He proposed a new system of supplementing the Quran, which was a mix between Abu Hanifa and Malik’s method. He called this the usul ul fiqh, the roots of jurisprudence. His system immediately caught fire. Under it, the Quran was one of the four primary sources of Islam. The other three were the sunnah (a shout out to Malik’s Medinan Way), ‘ijma (consensus of jurists), and qiyas (syllogistic reasoning, shout out to Abu Hanifa).

Thus, within three hundreds of Muhammad’s death, the Quran was no longer the sole source of extracting Islam.

There was another massive issue. Shafi’i did not conceptualize the Medinan Way in the manner that Malik did, and thus the definition of the word sunnah became immediately at issue. For Malik, the Medinan Way really meant Medinan and had a geographic limitation. The only thing that counted as part of the way were things that people from Medina did, and things that they said the Prophet did. Shafi’i had other ideas. To him the sunnah was every narration that was ascribed to the Prophet from anywhere in the world which could be verified as authentic. We know these narrations as hadith, and the job to authenticate the hadith narrations fell upon the hadith scholars (a new discipline altogether). Please note the distinction: Malik’s version of sunnah was a list of “lived practices” with a geographic limitation; Shafi’i’s version of sunnah had a greater range and came to us via the hadith-narrations, which had become big business by this time – by the time the hadith narrations were authenticated in various books, there were somewhere close to 10 million hadith floating around, though only a few thousand of them made them into the two official books called Sahih Muslim and Sahih Bukhari.

In other words, not only was the Quran no longer the sole source of extracting Islam, but ‘aql reasoning was demoted, and on top of that this new corpus – called the hadith – had come in and expanded the definition of what counted as sunnah tremendously. Forget just picking up the Quran and figuring out your Islam. Now you needed approximately twenty three years of certification. Naturally, the scholars divided the world into ‘amma (the common) and khassa (the special).

Shortly following Shafi’i, another scholar – named Ibn Hanbal – entered the discussion. He advocated throwing out the consensus of the jurists and analogical reasoning altogether and just relying on the hadith (except he added three more books to the compendium).

At this point there was a minor backlash and many scholars decided that they had done enough tinkering with the sources. Later writers would call this moment the “Closing of the Gates of Ijtihad.” The closing is really just a fanciful myth because people had been tinkering with the sources before that moment, and continued long after. In fact, in the three hundreds years during which the aforementioned events took place, anywhere from 70 to 900 different schools of law came forward, and many continued to be proposed even after the closing. As time passed, though, the sources did become static: Shafi’i’s approach became normative. The other schools – belonging to followers of Hanbal, Abu Hanifa and Malik – all bought into the method of usul ul fiqh, though with only minor variations. There were a few scholars who lambasted strict adherence to the Shafi’i method, one of whom was Ibn Taymiya, considered the grandfather of Wahhabism.

Even though the locus of Islam shifted from the Arab world to Turkey and India, scholars in those places mostly adhered to the usul ul fiqh, and by this time Muslim themselves had become deferential towards it, even beginning to venerate it as divinely ordained.

Four hundred years later there was blowback. A man named Abdul Wahhab, in Arabia, decided that the scholars had become corrupt and decadent and permissive, and instead of consulting the usul ul fiqh, questions about Muslim behavior needed to be answered by trying to figure out what Muhammad, his Compansions and to some extent, the generation following them, would have done. (Note the shift away from method to hypothetical). It would not be wrong to call this approach Originalism. As Wahhab was an ally of Ibn Saud, a militant rebel against the Ottoman Empire, Wahhab’s approach to Islam was built around undermining the power of the Ottoman legal system. Though Wahhab and Saud were crushed, Wahhabism emerged in the 19th century – besides Shi’ism – as the major counterforce to the classic orthodox who believed in the four school theory of usul ul fiqh.

In the Wahhabi approach, the Quran was supplemented by the actions of the original generation of Muslims. In order to get there, Wahhabis threw out most of usul ul fiqh. They decided to go beyond all the evolution in the law that the usulis had done, and accessing the hadith-narrations themselves, started to piece together a new narrative about Islam.

However, a defining moment came in the early 20th century, when Wahhabis, making originalist arguments, suddenly started to lead Muslim liberation movements, as well as the movement to bring Islam into the modern age. These modernists were called Salafis – the reformers. The pre-eminent Salafi of the 20th century would be someone like Muhammad Iqbal. On one hand he admired Abdul Wahhab for freeing Muslims from the strictures of classic usul ul fiqh (which he blamed for the Muslim world’s stagnation), but on the other hand, he was a mystic (which were reviled by Wahhab), a liberal (which were reviled by Wahhabis). Salafis were unlike Wahhabis in that they, using the same free-for-all method of hadith-usage the Wahhabis preferred, reached modernist rather than regressive conclusions. These Salafis reached their height when the took over the two biggest Muslim universities in the world – Al-Azhar in Cairo and Aligarh in India.

So, with the Salafis there is a new way of deriving Islam. There is the Quran, of course, but it is supplemented by those hadith that refer to the actions of the first two generations of Muslims, and there is…ideology, which means that those hadith, and the Quran, are constrained by an external, subjective referrant. Salafis were shameless in stating that Islam needed to serve particular ends – becoming reconciled with modernity, especially technology – and this was why they needed to infuse Islam with ideology. In one sense that was great. In another, horrible because dark ideologies entered the picture as well. This include the fascism of Mawdudi, the strange Leninist-Anarchism of Qutb, and the oddly progressive but equally anti-western hodge-podge of Qardawi. All of these are Salafis, but they were anything but liberal. If I recall correctly, Bin Laden considers himself a Salafi as well.

The reason that people say that Islam is at a cross-roads is because this thousand year arc that I have just so brazenly and rapidly (and probably somewhat inartfully) described, has created the conditions for Islam to be defined by almost any arrangement that one wishes to promote. There are, for example, Quran only people (the Quranists). There are Quran and ideology only people (Hizb ut Tahrir). There are the Salafis (Muslim Brotherhood). There are the Wahhabis (Saudi Arabia). There are the messianic cultists (Bin Laden). There is also an interesting revival of the 21st century version of the classic orthodox usulis. In addition, there are a whole hodgepodge of total originalists, partial-usulis, liberal literalists. There are those that do not include the hadith in the sunnah. There are those that want to expand the consensus of the jurists to mean the consensus of people i.e. parliament. It goes on and on, kind of like this post.

Anyway, my purpose was simply to demonstrate the immensely different ways in which the Quran – and Islam – have been changed and affected and defined. My other purpose was to do a sort of mini-preparation for a series on Islamic Reform that I have been commissioned to write at The Guardian over the next few weeks. That series will focus on Abdul Wahhab to today, and will contain references, links, and interesting case studies. I am looking at what I have written so far for it and I find it fascinating; its almost like a smarter person wrote it. I recommend bookmarking this page, or just checking back at my website next week for the schedule.