上一章

注：原文翻譯問題見動(dòng)態(tài)

MUSLIM SOCIETY

The ambiguities of reconciling secular and religious values described in the previous section would also play themselves out in the emerging societies that came to make up the Islamic world. The institutionalization of Islamic law (the sharia), learning, and ritual affected every aspect of individual and social life, defining the contours of proper conduct for ruler, subject, and slave; men and women; and Muslims and non-Muslims living under Islamic rule from the Maghrib in the far west to large parts of eastern Asia. This remarkable social revolution consciously modeled itself upon the primitive social community that the prophet Muhammad formed at Medina.

By the close of the first century after Muhammad’s death in 632 C.E. the Islamic empire extended from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Basin. Although the ninth and 10th centuries witnessed the fracturing of the political unity of this empire into various caliphates, among them the Abbasids in Baghdad, the Umayyads in Spain, and the Fatimids in Egypt and parts of North Africa, the foundations and contours of a unified Islamic society and culture were firmly consolidated. The world was by this time divided into the “abode of Islam” (dar al-Islam) and an “abode of otherness” (dar al-harb, lit. “the abode of conflict”), the former having its unique characteristic laws, institutions, and customs that structured the lives of the peoples, Muslim and non-Muslim, who lived within its territories. According to this medieval worldview, in Islamic society, as in those of Christianity and Judaism, religion was conceived of as far more than a system of belief and worship; it was equally an ethical system that was meant to penetrate and govern every aspect of life. For a Muslim there were no secular aspects of life distinct from the religious. Secular authorities did not control secular laws since in theory neither existed. Therefore, there could be no conflict, no cooperation, no separation, and no association between the church and the state because the governing institutions of Islam combined both functions. As a result, classical Islamic history had no clashes between religious life and secular life, between the pope and the emperor. The caliph combined in himself both political authority and religious authority and was the titular head of the Islamic state and community. Whenever conflicts emerged, from the initial disagreement over the succession of the Prophet, which resulted in the emergence of the Shiite sect of Islam, to the coexistence in the 10th and 11th centuries of rival caliphates, these conflicts were invariably articulated and legitimated through competing claims of religious and political authority.

Islamic Law (Sharia)

As is the case with the divine laws revealed in the Judeo-Christian Bible, the laws revealed in the Quran do not constitute a complete legal system, much less something comparable to what modern Americans would call constitutional law and administrative law. Yet Quranic verses do articulate God’s will in the form of commands and ethical principles that govern humanity’s relation to God and guide human social relations. The Quran’s legal commands and principles cover matters relating to marriage and divorce, inheritance and the division of booty, creeds and acts of worship, charity and concepts of justice, and certain crimes and punishments. But these scriptural dictates alone were insufficient to guide and respond to all the needs and circumstances of a vast empire composed of distinct communities and creeds. The systematization of Islamic law, the sharia (path), took several centuries to complete and reflects not only different schools of legal interpretation but also the necessity of incorporating the local customs (urf) of the territories incorporated into dar al-Islam. Nevertheless, it did not take long to articulate the basic obligations of being a Muslim, known as the Five Pillars of Islam.

THE FIVE PILLARS OF ISLAM AND JIHAD

1. The profession of faith, the shahada. This is an oral testimony of the words la ila illa Allah, Muhammad rasul Allah, meaning, “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.” These words constitute the fundamental creed of Islam, based upon the radical oneness of God (having no partners or sons) and the indispensable belief that Muhammad is his final prophet and messenger. Converts to Islam must pronounce these words publicly as part of their formal initiation into the Islamic community

2. The ritual prayer, called salat. The Quran established that Muslims pray five times a day a ritual prayer that consists of specific prostrations and other bodily gestures accompanied by the utterance of liturgical formulas, usually scriptural verses. These prayers, always to be preceded by a ritual washing (wudhu), must be performed at designated times of the day. This formality distinguishes the salat from voluntary supplications, known as dua

3. The obligatory alms tax, called zakat, is a form of charitable giving that is considered an act of worship. The zakat is incumbent upon all free adult Muslim men and women whose personal income exceeds a certain amount and is used for specific purposes, such as debt relief and the liberation of slaves and for certain categories of people, such as the indigent, orphans, and widows. The nature and value of the amount to be paid, as well as the classes of recipients, are fixed by Islamic law. This Islamic legal obligation must be contrasted with other forms of voluntary charity, called sadaqa or khayr, which are encouraged as pious acts worthy of divine recompense and recommended as penitential expiation of sin.

4. Fasting during the month of Ramadan, called sawm, is a solemn act of repentance that all physically and mentally sound Muslims over the age of 10 are obliged to undertake. The fast commemorates the month in which the Quran was first revealed and is thus the occasion for the Muslim to draw nearer to God through acts of self-denial that include abstaining from food, drink, smoking, and sexual intercourse from dawn to dusk. Even more important is the interior, spiritual fast in the form of a statement of true intention to repent; abstention from sinful or negative thoughts, words, and deeds; and participation in pious activities, such as quranic recitation and study. The end of Ramadan is marked by the Feast of Breaking the Fast (Id al-Fitr), one of the two major Islamic festivals.

5. The pilgrimage to Mecca, called the hajj, is an obligation to be performed once in a lifetime, financial and social circumstances permitting. (The poor, slaves, unescorted women, and the mentally unsound are among those exempt from the obligation.) The hajj takes place during the month of Dhul-Hijja and consists of a series of rites to be performed over several days at sites associated with Islamic sacred history. Before entering the city of Mecca, pilgrims purify themselves by ablutions, don a seamless white garment (a reminder of death and the final judgment), and pronounce a liturgical formula of consecration to God. Once in the holy city obligatory visits include the Kaba, the black rectangular building around which Muslims circumambulate seven times, followed by the sevenfold ritual of running between the hills of al-Safa and al-Marwa. The pilgrimage climaxes with the communal standing at the foot of Mount Arafa, stoning a pillar that represents the devil, and the sacrifice of an animal, the latter being the Feast of Sacrifice (Id al-Adha), the second major festival of Islam.

These five pillars established the fundamental norms of belonging to an Islamic society. A further obligation, jihad (striving), became regarded in some respects as a sixth pillar of Islam, insofar as its spiritual meaning of striving signified the struggle entailed in perfectly fulfilling all five Islamic obligations. The religious-military enterprise of holy war is a collective obligation (fard kifaya) of leaders to provide a sufficient number of soldiers and supplies to protect and defend the Islamic community from its enemies, Muslim or non-Muslim.

COMMANDING RIGHT AND FORBIDDING WRONG

In Matthew 22:35–40 Jesus espouses the greatest commandments, to “l(fā)ove thy God with all thy heart” and “to love thy neighbor as thyself,” saying that on these two principles “hang all the laws and the prophets.” In a similar way the Quranic moral command of commanding right and forbidding wrong encompasses the five pillars of Islam, as well as jihad, and all the precepts of Islamic law. In one crucial quranic verse God addresses the Muslim community saying, “Let there be one community of you calling to good, and commanding right and forbidding wrong; those are the prosperers” (Q 3:104), an idea that is constantly repeated throughout the sacred scripture. The commandment presupposes the concern to fulfill God’s laws of righteous conduct in this world as a prelude to “prosperity,” a quranic euphemism for salvation in the hereafter. As such, Muslim commanding right and forbidding wrong stands midway between the otherworldly emphasis of Christian actions and the this-worldly Jewish desire to manifest God’s intentions on Earth.

Throughout the ages Muslim exegetes have interpreted this moral command in different ways. Some insisted that it was a collective duty imposed by God equally upon all members of the community. The majority opinion held that a designated group or authoritative body trained in matters of law and ethics should carry it out on behalf of the entire community, but that individuals also had the obligation to admonish one another to do right and forbid wrong. As far as the scope of the command is concerned, again there were dissenting opinions. Some commentators interpreted the verse in the narrow sense of enjoining belief in God and forbidding polytheism through jihad. Most believed the scope to include all the matters of faith and worship and religious and social obligations that God and the prophet Muhammad have prescribed and forbidden. This, at any rate, was the way preachers delivered their sermons on the topic, which began with lengthy and meticulous excursus on all the actions entailed in enjoining the good and all the deeds proscribed by the command to forbid wrongdoing.

THE ULEMA AND THE SCHOOLS OF LAW (MADHHABS): SHAFIIS, MALIKIS, HANAFIS, AND HANBALIS

Islamic law, or sharia, which began to be applied systematically in the Abbasid period, is the product of several sources: the Quran; the words and practices of the prophet Muhammad (the Sunna), recorded in collections called Hadith; the consensus (ijma) of the earliest Islamic community and the first four caliphs; and the analogical reasoning (qiyas) of trained legal scholars, called ulema (alim). Different interpretations of the Quran and Hadith and discrepancies over the relations among all the different legal sources led to the emergence of four major schools of law, madhhabs, in the Sunni tradition, each named after its reputed founder. Abu Hanifa (d. 767), founder of the Hanafi school, attached importance to opinions derived from individual reasoning (ray). Malik ibn Anas (d. 795), founder of the Maliki school, gave priority to the Sunna of the community that Muhammad established in Medina and exercised his own legal opinion. Al-Shafii (d. 820), the founder of the Shafii madhhab, gave equal weight to the Quran, as the literal word of God, and the prophet Muhammad’s Sunna as the faithful expression of God’s will. Beyond these sources the learned scholar (alim) could resort to other methods of exercising independent judgment (ijtihad) based upon the legitimate sources of law or upon his own personal judgment (ray) in order to adjudicate in novel situations. Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 855), founder of the Hanbali madhhab, likewise believed that the Quran and the Sunna of the Prophet alone were sufficient bases of the sharia but also admitted the consensus, or ijma, of the Prophet’s companions.

The Shiites formed their schools of law, too. While the Ibadis and the Zaydis followed closely the principles of legal thought of the major Sunni schools, the Twelver and the Ismaiili Shiites believed that the sole infallible authority to interpret the Quran and the life of Muhammad was the imam, a descendant of the Prophet’s nephew, Ali ibn Abi Talib, whom they considered the only legitimate caliph. The Sunnis, however, rejected the idea of an infallible imam and believed that God’s will was revealed fully and completely in the Quran and in the Sunna of the Prophet and that the ulema alone had the capacity to interpret it. The Sunni ulema, perhaps in response to the Shiite concept of the infallible imam, began to regard themselves as the “heirs of the prophets” (waritha al-anbiya) and in their capacity as judges and interpreters of the law, religious teachers, preachers, and guardians of religious shrines, functioned as the keepers of the moral conscience of the community.

By the 11th century various schools of legal interpretation had consolidated their zones of influence. The Malikis predominated in the Maghrib; the Shafiis prevailed in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and the Hijaz; the Hanafis were significant in Iraq, Syria, Iran, Central Asia, and India; and the Hanbalis were important in Baghdad and Syria. When rival madhhabs occupied the same cities, however, open fighting could break out in the struggle to influence the decisions of rulers, local governors, and judges (qadis). Such was the case in Baghdad during the Abbasid era, when Shafii and Hanafi urban factions fought one another in the streets, and in 10th-century Qayrawan, when rival Maliki ulema exhorted mass uprisings against the ruling Idrisid Shiites and their imams. In the same century stiff opposition from the Malikis forced the Fatimid Shiites, to relocate from the Maghrib to Egypt. Shiite madhhabs flourished in Fatimid Egypt between the mid-10th and 12th centuries, when Sunni Ayyubids followed by the Mamluk rulers would give precedence to the Sunni madhhabs.

SHARIA IN PRACTICE

The science of regulating all aspects of public and private life according to the principles of Islamic law is called fiqh (jurisprudence). Scholars of the Sunni and Shiite madhhabs created codes of conduct for their followers in the attempt to prescribe in detail the way of life, the sharia, that Muslims must follow to obey God’s will. In these legal codebooks all human actions were classified according to five basic norms: (1) Actions could be obligatory for the whole community (fard kifaya) or a single member (fard ayn). (2) Actions could be recommended. (3) Actions could be morally neutral. (4) Other human actions were reprehensible. (5) Certain actions were absolutely forbidden.

Examples of such books of fiqh include the al-Muwatta (Introduction), reputedly the first of its kind, which was compiled by the founder of the Maliki school, Malik ibn Anas; and alRisala (The compendium) of another Maliki jurist, Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani (d. 996), which opened with a profession of faith offering his readers “those essential truths ‘which the tongue should express and the heart believe.’” Islamic books of law such as the alMuwatta and the al-Risala resemble Jewish legal codes in their general organization. They divide all human activities into two broad categories: first, the Ibadat, or acts of worship, meaning those acts immediately directed toward God, and second, the Muamalat (social intercourse), meaning those acts involving human interaction and social relations. The acts of worship include norms regarding ritual prayer and purification, fasting, almsgiving, the annual pilgrimage, the celebration of the canonical feasts, and the laws and legalities of waging jihad. The Muamalat treats matters of family law, inheritance and bequests, property law and business contracts, and the establishment of charitable endowments (waqfs) and specifies particular crimes, such as murder, theft, adultery, and wine drinking and their due punishment. Following this, Islamic codebooks usually explain the procedures that judges (qadis) must follow in adjudicating on forbidden and criminal activities and might end with a general moral exhortation.

Fiqh is distinguished from ilm, and the practitioners of each have distinct names, faqih and alim, respectively. Ilm is a repository of knowledge of legal matters expressly contained in the Quran and the Hadith traditions. The faqih possesses this knowledge but is also equipped to apply ijtihad (“exertion”); that is, he exercises his own independent judgment in the absence of a traditional ruling in order to formulate a legal opinion (ray). Each of the Sunni schools of law accepted, rejected, or at the very least broadened or restricted the scope of interpretation through which scholars and judges could exercise their independent judgment in ruling on individual cases.

Although it is often repeated that from the 10th century onward “the door of ijtihad was closed,” no evidence exists that this “maxim” was ever stated, much less put into action. To the contrary, within each school of law judges continued to make decisions in response to new circumstances, and in this regard the juridical consultations of muftis were especially important. A mufti was a private scholar whose personal reputation for religious learning and legal knowledge (ilm), integrity, and justice (adala) accorded him the authority to rule on disputed questions by means of ijtihad or personal opinion (ray). The opinions, called fatwas, of important muftis were assembled into compendia of responsa that, as did fiqh manuals, served as important tools in applying the sharia. The 15th-century Maghribi mufti Ahmad al-Wansharishi’s compendium of fatwas preserves the juridical responsa of numerous famous judges and muftis that bear witness to the difficult and unprecedented legal ramifications facing the Mudejars (Muslims living under Christian rule) in Spain.

Fiqh developed somewhat later in Shiite circles and reflects key theological difference separating Shiite and Sunni Islam. Shiites believe in an unbroken chain of authority that passed from the prophet Muhammad to Ali ibn Abi Talib to his successors, the imams. In the 10th and especially the 11th century Shiite ulema began to assemble their own corpuses of hadith and their own compendia of the sources of religion (usul al-din) and the sources of jurisprudence (usul al-fiqh). The principles of Shiite jurisprudence were first established by two jurisprudents of Buyid Iran, the eminent legal scholars al-Murtada (d. 1044) and Abu Jafar alTusi (d. 1067), who rejected the use of analogical reasoning (qiyas) and the exercise of one’s personal judgment (ijtihad al-aql) to formulate an individual opinion (ray). Shiite rejection of these legal methods was inspired by polemics against their Sunni rivals, who accepted the application of ijtihad. Political setbacks that the Buyids suffered upon the ascendancy of the Sunni Seljuks in the 12th century, as well as upheavals stemming from the 13th-century Mongol invasions of Iran and Iraq, caused the Shiite legal establishment to revive its now stagnant legal system. It was now asserted that legal decisions should be arrived at by using ijtihad al-sharia based on the revelations of the Quran, the Hadith, and authoritative men (rijal) such as al-Tusi.

However, even in circumstances in which the law seemed settled, local custom and local leadership could intensify or mitigate the severity of punishment for crimes. Local community custom, known as urf, was used to interpret and judge people’s actions. Elders of the village or tribe customarily judged the perpetrators. Urf and sharia were not necessarily in conflict. Whatever in urf was not opposed to sharia was accepted as permissible. In the Maghrib, for instance, the sharia often was interpreted in the light of custom. In 15th-century Morocco some qadis displayed a preference for the opinions of jurists that conformed to local customs and interests, a practice known as amal. Marriage, for instance, was solemnized in accordance with Islamic terminology. But marriage rights, duties, divorce, and inheritance associated with marriage were decided by custom. For example, in certain locales inheritance of land by daughters was contrary to custom, although it was legal according to the sharia. Disputes about property or partnership might be taken to a qadi in the nearest town for decision or conciliation. Contracts or agreements to which parties wished to give formality and permanence also were taken to the qadis to be expressed in the language of the sharia, but the document itself would be interpreted by local custom. While one must be careful not to generalize, in cases such as these local custom provided mostly the substance of the law, while the sharia provided mostly the form.

The Muhtasib（mutasib）

An important Islamic social institution that emerged in the early Abbasid period was the office of the muhtasib, a market inspector and censor of public morality. The ideal muhtasib was a man of scrupulous moral integrity and probity, a faqih by training, since he was expected to have a perfect command of all details of Islamic law and be intimately familiar with the activities of the merchant class. The duties of the muhtasib included ensuring the integrity of all products manufactured and sold in the marketplace and the accuracy of weights and measures. He supervised the performance of all the religious obligations and festivities and the proper use and maintenance of the mosque and other religious buildings. He kept a careful watch over all activities in the streets, schools, public baths, cemeteries, shops, and markets to guarantee the prescribed separation between the sexes and to certify that the laws and restrictions governing dhimmis were duly respected. The muhtasib was empowered to intervene on his own accord to expose and censure wrongdoing, even if it meant challenging a qadi or other member of the ulema who had failed to carry out his duty.

Many muhtasibs wrote manuals of their activities, called hisba. In the prologue of his 12th-century hisba manual Muhammad ibn Abd Allah ibn Abdun reflected upon the duties of his office, which included the following:

to fortify the state of the Muslims, improve their condition and behavior . . . , incite them to do good and ensure that they know justice and righteousness and maintain themselves within them. The repression of injustice and tyranny . . . participates in the fight against evil and against open rebellion against the religious law. (Ibn Abdun 35)

Among the reprehensible goings-on in the cemeteries, Ibn Abdun denounced the vendors who installed themselves there among the tombs to “contemplate the uncovered faces of mourning women.” He also ordered that the windows of buildings overlooking the cemetery be permanently closed so that men would not be tempted to spy upon the women. For the same reason he prescribed that the funeral reader of the Quran should not be a young good-looking man “even if he were blind because many bad things might arise from this” (Ibn Abdun 96, 97). Out of the same concern for sexual decorum Ibn Abdun urged judges always to give precedence to women litigants so that they would not have to sit about for a long time exposing themselves to the gaze of strange men. He also ordered the collector of fees of the public baths not to sit in the vestibule when the baths were open to the women in the afternoons, “since this is an excuse for licentiousness and fornication” (Ibn Abdun 151). Under no circumstances whatsoever should Muslim women enter into the “abominable churches because the priests are perverts, fornicators and sodomites” (Ibn Abdun 130).

The muhtasib of Seville expressed concern that officials not abuse their power. Regarding the collectors of rents and taxes, he demanded that they only collect what was owed and that they use a well-balanced scale to determine the exact amount of payments in kind. Collectors must be prohibited from manifesting hostility and brutality toward the people or in any way humiliating them. He was particularly suspicious of magistrates (sahib al-medina) and their unscrupulous activities and insisted that “no attention be paid to any accusation that they might present [against a person] if it is not accompanied by an eye-witness testimony written by neighbors of the accused because those [magistrates] prefer evil to good” (Ibn Abdun 70). Nor was any love lost on lawyers, for Ibn Abdun wished that they could be suppressed altogether “since their activity is the motive for people to waste their money in vain.” They do nothing but pronounce “slick and oily speeches before the judges, disguising the truth” (Ibn Abdun 61).

That Ibn Abdun felt obliged to urge the enforcement of the discriminatory laws distinguishing dhimmis from Muslims indicates that such laws were normally not followed. He forbade Muslim masseuses to massage Jews or Christians in the public baths and to throw away their garbage or clean their latrines “because the Jew and the Christian are better suited to these tasks” (Ibn Abdun 149). Jewish and Christian tax collectors and police officers should not be allowed to wear the same attire as Muslim jurists or “other respectable persons” and must wear a distinguishing sign on their clothing. Nor must they greet Muslims with the traditional Islamic greeting “Peace be upon you” (Ibn Abdun 157).

《Handbook To Life in The Medieval World》（2008）

By Madeleine Pelner Cosman and Linda Gale Jones??