Madhab

24 Pages 5943 Words

definitive community of revelation in Islam. The reason is simple and
unarguable: God has given us this religion as His last word, and it must
therefore endure, with its essentials of tawhid, worship and ethics
intact, until the Last Days.


Such an explanation has obvious merit. But we will still need to explain
some painful exceptions to the rule in the earliest phase of our
history. The Prophet himself (pbuh) had told his Companions, in a hadith
narrated by Imam Tirmidhi, that "Whoever among you outlives me shall see
a vast dispute". The initial schisms: the disastrous revolt against
Uthman (r.a.), the clash between Ali (r.a.) and Muawiyah, the bloody
scissions of the Kharijites - all these drove knives of discord into the
Muslim body politic almost from the outset. Only the inherent sanity and
love of unity among scholars of the ummah assisted, no doubt, by
Providence overcame the early spasms of factionalism, and created a
strong and harmonious Sunnism which has, at least on the purely
religious plane, united ninety percent of the ummah for ninety percent
of its history.


It will help us greatly to understand our modern, increasingly divided
situation if we look closely at those forces which divided us in the
distant past. There were many of these, some of them very eccentric; but
only two took the form of mass popular movements, driven by religious
ideology, and in active rebellion against majoritarian faith and
scholarship. For good reasons, these two acquired the names of Kharijism
and Shi'ism. Unlike Sunnism, both were highly productive of splinter
groups and sub-movements; but they nonetheless remained as recognisable
traditions of dissidence because of their ability to express the two
great divergences from mainstream opinion on the key question of the
source of religious authority in Islam.


Confronted with what they saw as moral slippage among early caliphs,
posthumous partisan...