Theologie und Gesellschaft im 2. und 3. Jahrhundert Hidschra: Eine Geschichte des religiosen Denkens im fruhen Islam, 2 vols.

Frank, Richard M.

Here at length we have the first parts of the Sheikh Yusuf's long awaited magnum opus. Its preparation has extended over many years during which the data concerning several of the major elements were gathered, sifted, and examined in a series of more detailed studies. What we are offered here is a synthesis of considerable proportions and, viewed as a whole, of almost bewildering detail. The work, whose completion may be expected shortly, is to be distributed over six volumes, the first four containing the historical study and the last two translated texts together with commentary. The former are organized into four principal sections, the first pair of which are contained in the two present volumes. They are [sub-sections]A, "The Basic Features of Islamic Religiosity in the First Century A.H."; B, "The Islamic Provinces in the 2nd Century"; C, "Unification of Islamic Thought and the Flowering of Theology"; and D, "Summary of the Historical Problems." [sections]A is quite short, consisting of only 56 pages; [sections]B, extending over 1142 pages, is divided into five major subsections, the relative length of which offers a rough measure of the importance of the several provinces and their cities during the period as considered within the scope and focus of the book. They are Syria (vol. 1, pp. 65-147); Iraq, subdivided into Kufa [vol. 1, pp. 149-456] Basra [vol. 2, pp. 1-429]; and Wasit [pp. 403-39]; Iran (pp. 489-638); the Arabian Peninsula (pp. 639-712); and Egypt (pp. 713-42). The scheme for the entire historical study is laid out at the beginning (vol. 1, pp. xiii-xxviii) and the numbers of the various sections and subsections given (some with seven decimals!) so that forward references to the later volumes can be made already from the outset.(1) Though broadly understood as a general kind of religious discourse (religios bestimmtes Reden; vol. 1, p. vii), theology is here nevertheless distinguished from other specific forms of religious thought and activity, and accordingly the jurists, ascetics, and traditionists are discussed as such only as in one way or another they play a role in and interact with (or react to) the theological teachings of particular individuals and groups.

With respect to the ordering and presentation of the data, the primary focus of the work is "prosopographical" (vol. 1, pp. ix and 59), as, within each of the general, provincial sections, a host of individuals is sorted, distributed, and ordered under various topical headings and their lives, activities, and teachings set forth, singly and in their various interrelationships, in chronological order. The more general headings and their sequencing within the principal, geographical sections of the work do not follow a rigid and consistent scheme, but are identified, ordered, and subdivided according to the relative prominence and influence of particular trends, movements, schools, and individuals within the several provinces. Ever clear and meticulous, the extent and character of the analysis in each subsection is governed by the importance of the particular individual to the primary topic and in proportion to the quantity and the character of the historical data. Where difficulties, ambivalences and conflicts in the primary data have not been dealt with adequately in the secondary literature, their presentation and analysis are relatively more detailed. The treatment of a few major figures is quite extensive, e.g., for Abu Hanifa and his followers (vol. 1 pp. 184-212), Hisam ibn al-Hakam (vol. 1, pp. 349-82), al-Hasan al-Basri and his followers (vol. 1, pp. 41-121), Wasil ibn Ata, (vol. 2, pp. 234-80) and Amr ibn Ubayd (vol. 2, pp. 280-310), while for a large number of minor figures information presented in the available sources is exiguous and their formal treatment accordingly limited to a few lines.

In view of the wide dispersion of the most important and influential religious doctrines and ideological movements and the geographical mobility of many of their leading exponents and adherents, this ordering of things by province and city might seem at first to represent a turning away from a central focus on the dynamics of the organic formation and growth of theologically or ideologically nucleated movements in favor of the formal convenience of tabulating an immense quantity of data, but the reasons prove to be sound, as the results are both impressive and rewarding. The number of individuals, groups, views, and events presented and examined is immense and their diversity too great to allow any reasonably balanced discussion of particulars in our present context.

The origin and development of "schools" or "sects" whose identity was based on some relatively comprehensive set of theological teachings (i.e., not merely on one or two narrowly focused points of doctrine or on essentially political ideals and aspirations which, though within the historical context experienced and expressed in religious terms, remained primarily social or political) took place in stages, however, and from region to region and group to group somewhat unevenly in the course of the second century of the hijra. Groups that identified themselves (or that may have been identified by others and/or by later heresiographers) on the basis of a given doctrine or ideology often overlap in other matters or intersect with different, more or less unrelated groups, while the meaning or significance of one or another major doctrine may undergo a complete metamorphosis, on the part of those who lay claim to it, with the changing of the historical context from one generation to another. And so too, the descriptive significance of an expression employed to designate a group or a school, whether by its adherents or its opponents or by both, may change altogether in a generation. Cohesive and coherent schools or well-defined trends begin to coalesce and move toward some initial degree of maturity only from the middle of the century. Earlier one finds more local or regional groups (some, though, with extensive contacts abroad, in a few cases through the activities or merchant-missionaries) the focus of whose thought is rather narrowly circumscribed in its preoccupation with one or another particular issue. (The heated debates over who is a Believer are, for example, most often limited initially to determining who is a member of the particular group - one of "us" as distinguished from "those other people:" - and only later come to be conceived formally within the extended horizon of the entire Muslim community.) In some cases, teachings which had their origin simply as unelaborated elements or principles of a particular form of piety rather than as thematically formalized dogmatic theses entered, as characteristically representative of divergent attitudes, into controversies between groups or parties and thus subsequently became the focus of reflective attention. More systematic, speculative theology began to take clear shape as, within given groups, the major issues came to be somewhat disentangled from the web of social and political issues and aspirations and as, concomitantly, they were more precisely conceptualized and thought out within a broader theological context by specialists. None of the major doctrinal theses which dominate the classical Mu tazilite theology, for instance, are to be found with either Wasil ibn Ata, or Amr ibn Ubayd (who were, moreover, very different individuals with very different political as well as theological views). Likewise, the allegiances and aspirations of the diverse Shi ite parties and sects shift from generation to generation and their several doctrinal commitments undergo various mutations.

The importance of social and political ties and divisions, affinities, and tensions is conspicuous at all levels within this period. For Arabs the role of social relationships, class, and status and the nature and level of kinship or affiliation seem often to orient, if not in some way to determine, the religious attitudes, commitments and activities of many individuals and groups throughout the period and to be significantly correlated to those of most, while, on the other side, the preconquest and subsequent class and status, occupation, or profession and the proximity or remoteness of the relations of individuals to local governing authorities or to various members of the Arab rulers and elites plays an analogous part among the mawali.

The multiplicity and diversity of data assembled in laying out the panorama presented in these two volumes is almost overwhelming, as the reader is borne along a steady, albeit shifting, course of names, relationships, and events with their various degrees, levels, and modes of interconnectedness. Intricate as it is, however, the work reads quite smoothly, and a careful series of cross references allows the reader to keep track of recurrent and related matters and elements, aspects of which appear in more than one place.

Primary sources and the secondary literature, cited with remarkable comprehensiveness, are presented, analyzed, and evaluated cautiously and judiciously throughout. Given the number and diversity of personages and groups, doctrines and views, events and movements discussed, it is inevitable that subsequent, more narrowly focused studies of particular problems and relationships will raise questions and offer corrections or refinements regarding various of the assertions or proposals that are put forward here, but these will in no way detract from the importance of the work or diminish its value, as they shall have to be, if properly done, in one way or another indebted to it.

Daniel Gimaret, in a paper presented to the inaugural meeting of the Societe Internationale d'Histoire des Sciences et de la Philosophie Arabes et Islamiques in 1989 (since published under the title "Pour un reequilibre des etudes de la theologie musulmane," Arabica 38 [1991]: 11-18), voiced a serious and well-founded complaint regarding the disproportionate number of studies dedicated to the earliest period of kalam and the conspicuous neglect of the great theologians of Islam's maturity, on the part of European scholars.(2) The present work is not, however, to be viewed as one more study on the beginnings of Muslim theology, for the origins and evolution of the various major and minor trends of religious thought in Islam during the second century A.H. are here presented together and displayed in their integral relationship to the various aspects of the broader historical matrix in which they arose and either underwent metamorphosis and developed or withered away, in a process out of which a number of distinctly Muslim genera of systematic theology were ultimately to take shape and mature. These two volumes are hardly to be classed as light reading; they offer no tidy, linear account of the early emergence of Muslim theology. They do, however, succeed in opening to the reader who has the patience to work his way through them a view of the multifaceted religious history - or, better perhaps, of the turmoil and confusion of a multitude of religious histories and subhistories - of the second century A.H. in their irreducible complexity and so of a very important part of the historical past as plausibly it actually was.

(1) So too the basic order and organization of the texts to be presented in volumes V and VI is presented in vol. I, pp. xviii-xxx; references to these texts are given according to their numbering rather than to the sources themselves. This causes some inconvenience in the absence of the two final volumes, as one is unable to consult the individual texts so referred to unless he knows already where to find them. (2) One must keep in mind, however, that the authors of the best of these studies were trained for the most part in philology and history, not in philosophy and theology as such, wherefore they are not likely to be fascinated by the subtlety and elegance which Abu Hasim, Abd al-Gabbar, al-Guwayni, or Fahruddin al-Razi and the like may bring to the analysis of the major issues of theology.