Finite Texts, Infinite Events: A Review of Transformations of Tradition
Sarah Bellal
“This book reflects, in a broad way, a question we’re all living and dealing with…that Muslims live in a world not of their own making.”[1]
In embarking upon a close reading of Junaid Quadri’s acclaimed work, Transformations of Tradition: Islamic Law in Colonial Modernity, I could not have anticipated the gravity of the questions contained therein. Above, Omar Anchassi aptly describes the setting in which the book’s main character undertakes his intellectual journey. Muftī Bakhīt al-Muṭīʿī was born in Egypt in 1854 CE, in an interim period of Ottoman rule preceded by French and followed by British colonial occupation. A prominent Ḥanafī jurist, he graduated from Al-Azhar in 1875 and served in various teaching and judicial positions, eventually rising to become the Mufti of Egypt in 1914.[2]
Quadri studies al-Muṭīʿī as a reformist hiding in plain sight. Al-Muṭīʿī is remembered as a staunch traditionalist – committed to the Sunni tradition of adhering to one of the four madhhabs and articulating theology through Ashʿarī-Māturīdī kalam – and an open opponent of those clearly identified as modernist-reformists, Muḥammad ʿAbduh and Rashīd Riḍā in particular. Despite his traditionalist pedigree, al-Muṭīʿī departed from the protocols of the Ḥanafī madhhab in significant ways. These departures are undergirded by markedly modern conceptions of history and science, which Quadri studies primarily through al-Muṭīʿī’s book on moon-sighting, Irshād ahl al-millah ilā ithbāt al-ahillah. Al-Muṭīʿī maintains his Ḥanafī identification by referring to authorities within the madhhab, albeit by citing and reworking their anomalous positions. In so doing, he arguably expands the outermost circle of the madhhab by re-engineering those opinions that lie on its fringes.
What Makes a Tradition
This book is only one in a broader genre that draws on the works of Charles Taylor, Alasdair Macintyre, and Talal Asad, among other authors – all exploring the meaning of “tradition”. These works attempt to answer questions such as: What is Islam? Who and what constitutes the Islamic tradition? How much change can a tradition undergo before it becomes unrecognizable?
Asad’s conceptualization of Islam as a discursive tradition – “a tradition of Muslim discourse that addresses itself to conceptions of the Islamic past and future, with reference to a particular Islamic practice in the present” – became so influential because it accounted for the diversity of opinions among Muslim authorities, who nonetheless draw largely from the same epistemological sources and recognize each other as interlocutors within a common discourse.[3] Quadri appreciates Asad’s concept of a discursive tradition, but finds more utility in limiting its analytical scope by focusing on individual madhhabs – rather than Islam as a whole – as distinct traditions that “have put forward key defining standards that differentiated them from their counterparts.”[4]
It is these standards that answer the question, “Who is a Ḥanafī?”, but only if we are able to identify said standards and how much they can be manipulated by insiders before they become outsiders. A very conservative answer is articulated by Sāʾid Bakdāsh, who defines the Ḥanafī madhhab per se as the transmitted opinions of Imām Abū Ḥanīfa – may Allah have mercy on him – alone.[5] As Bakdāsh himself demonstrates, scholars writing across the classical and postclassical periods also cite Qāḍī Abū Yusūf and Imām Muḥammad al-Shaybānī – among other scholars – in their expositions on the madhhab, expanding its pool of sources.
An exploration of how loyal al-Muṭīʿī was to the Ḥanafī tradition will follow below, but Quadri shows in the first chapters of the book that al-Muṭīʿī certainly saw the tradition as a key source of legitimacy when writing on science and technology.
Islam and/in Science
Modern Europe’s view of science as diametrically opposed to tradition has been used to denigrate Muslim scholars as relics of a bygone era, but this very accusation has spurred Muslims to defend the tradition by locating science in the history of Islam. The question arises of whether they end up molding Islam to fit Western narratives of the transcendence of science.
Tafsīr ʿilmī, or scientific exegesis of the Quran, has become a paradigmatic example of Muslim attempts to defend Islam’s relevance in modernity. Some works in this genre go so far as to argue “that scripture ought to be construed such that it accord[s] with modern science.”[6] Contributions to tafsīr ʿilmī expectedly come from writers like Muḥammad ʿAbduh, but al-Muṭīʿī writes his own contributions wherein he offers “examples of verses that he took to elucidate scientific facts, thereby aligning his work with the tafsīr ʿilmī genre that scholarship has primarily identified with modernist figures.”[7]
During al-Muṭīʿī’s lifetime, the common narrative of the development of modern science was articulated in Cornelius Van Dyck’s Uṣūl ʿilm al-hayʾah (The Principles of Astronomy), a textbook written in the 1870s for Arab school curricula by an American missionary.[8] Van Dyck locates key junctures in the history of astronomy in Pythagoras, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo, with a “two-millenium dormancy” between Ptolemy and Copernicus.[9] In one of his books on tafsīr ʿilmī, al-Muṭīʿī rewrites this history – copying large portions from Van Dyck – with a few alterations. The main addition he makes is that, between Ptolemy and Copernicus, Muslim astronomers like al-Farābī and Ibn Sīnā translated and built upon the works of Pythagoras.[10]
On one hand, al-Muṭīʿī’s account “legitimat[es] the ‘new science’ by finding precedents for it in Islamic writings”, apparently championing the Islamic tradition as epistemologically authoritative. On the other, it reads as an attempt to legitimize Islam by locating it within a barely altered Western account of the history of astronomy, and ultimately cements the prestige of modern science by “grounding it within authoritative Islamic texts.”[11]
Ijtihād and Reform
“It is known to everyone that the rank of ijtihād has come to an end ages ago, and that there is no one in these times that has attained the rank of ijtihād. Whoever imagines otherwise, his soul laughs at him, and Satan mocks him.”[12]
This quote that Quadri cites from al-Būlāqī reflects a popular sentiment among traditionalists of the postclassical era, though it was by no means agreed upon. The common Ḥanbalī position is that no era can be entirely void of a mujtahid,[13] based on the hadith of the Prophet ﷺ: “There will never cease to be a group from my ummah fighting for the truth, victorious, until the Day of Judgment.”[14]
Interestingly, even scholars like Ibn ʿĀbidīn (d. 1252 AH/1836 CE) – one of the most cited postclassical Ḥanafī legal authorities – did not consider themselves to be engaging in ijtihād; he places himself in the lowest level of Ibn Kamāl Pāshā’s hierarchy of Ḥanafī jurists (discussed below).[15] Similarly, Mawlānā Ashraf ʿAlī al-Thānwī (d. 1362 AH/1943 CE) did not consider himself or any of his contemporaries to be mujtahids.[16] Ibn ʿĀbidīn’s and Thānwī’s self-perception is notable because it’s not that Ḥanafīs ever stopped engaging in ijtihād; however, jurists prior to the 20th century seem less keen to label what they were doing as ijtihād. By al-Muṭīʿī’s time, the work of qiyās and tafrīʿ had continued uninterrupted, but a newfound impetus to refer to juristic activity as “ijtihād” appears. Just as the pressures of modernity pushed al-Muṭīʿī and others to prove Islam’s scientific credentials, it arguably also pushed them to highlight the dynamism of the sharīʿah and its ability to adapt to a rapidly changing world through the mechanism of ijtihād.
Hanafi Discourse on Ijtihād
Discourse on the scope of juristic activity within the Ḥanafī madhhab has taken place in light of the hierarchy of Ḥanafī jurists (ṭabaqāt al-fuqahāʾ). Though adherents of the madhhab have always agreed that the eponym and his ṣāḥibān sit at the top of the hierarchy, as the madhhab developed, later generations of Ḥanafīs were also organized into levels of authority. In the postclassical period, this typology was most famously delineated by Ibn Kamāl Pāshā (d. 940 AH/1533 CE), then the Ottoman Shaykh al-Islām. Ibn Kamāl organized Ḥanafī jurists into seven levels, with those possessing the greatest capability for independent reasoning at the top, and those who mainly parse and relate transmitted opinions in the lower tiers.
Ibn Kamāl’s typology is significant for multiple reasons: it makes claims about the types of juristic activity that different scholars are entitled to; it establishes which authors and texts are most authoritative, and thus crucial to reference in order to engage in intra-madhhab discourse; and it
is structured as a narrative of historical decline in juristic authority. It is a history in which the summit of intellectual acuity, hermeneutic competency, and juristic potency resides at the origin, with the passing of generations representing a graded diminishment of those qualities.[17]
Al-Muṭīʿī makes a significant departure from this particular Ḥanafī convention. He was not the first to disagree with Ibn Kamāl’s typology; indeed, his critique of Ibn Kamāl “was almost entirely a verbatim replication of excerpts from al-Marjānī’s Nāẓūrat al-Ḥaqq and draws key insights from ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Laknawī.[18] However, unlike that of his predecessors, al-Muṭīʿī’s critique more clearly reflects a modernist conception of time and legal authority. Al-Muṭīʿī adopts al-Marjānī’s three-tier typology – the first being mujtahid muṭlaq, the second mujtahid fī al-madhhab, and the third non-mujtahids – collapsing and redefining Ibn Kamāl’s seven tiers. Though al-Muṭīʿī doesn’t state where he sees himself in this hierarchy, by collapsing it he is at least claiming greater proximity to rank of mujtahid than Ibn Kamāl’s system would have afforded him and all other fuqahāʾ of his era.[19] Additionally, al-Muṭīʿī’s “insistence that ijtihād remains a viable possibility at this late stage of the madhhab’s history” reflects a hum rijāl wa naḥnu rijāl approach to source texts: rather than viewing earlier jurists as more capable of accessing the core sources (Quran, Sunnah, ijmāʿ, and qiyās) and thus necessary mediators of later jurists’ access, al-Muṭīʿī – and his Reformist contemporaries – contend that they, too, can play this role.[20] The difference between al-Muṭīʿī and the Reformists is that he did not discard the institution of the madhhab altogether, and indeed still identified with it.
Ibn Kamāl’s typology also reflects a typically madhhabist conception of time. The earliest Ḥanafīs are known for having engaged extensively in tafrīʿ – deriving subsequent rulings from previous fatwās – and addressing hypothetical scenarios that had not yet occurred. This reflects their understanding of the madhhab as applicable in and capable of addressing the future. Classical Ḥanafīs arguably tried to account for changing circumstances by establishing principles around istiḥsān, ʿurf, and ḍarūrah/ḥājah, and their successors continued to address new issues using the uṣūl and furūʿ they inherited. However, al-Muṭīʿī saw the mature, postclassical madhhab as not having sufficiently accounted for modernity:
Adopting a posture that recalls his contemporary opponent Riḍā rather than his Ḥanafī forebears, al-Muṭīʿī clearly sees himself as inhabiting a world characterized not by past prefigurements, but constant change and unprecedented novelty demanding perpetual engagement. [..] It is precisely the context of explosive technological advancement in which he is living, and the acceleration in life it represented, that motivated al-Muṭīʿī’s adoption of the reformulated juristic typology and his insistence on the ongoing necessity of ijtihād.[21]
That al-Muṭīʿī levied such a critique whilst continuing to be recognized as a traditionalist speaks to how intellectuals are often remembered not for who they were, but who they (presumably) were not: al-Muṭīʿī’s antagonism towards and disassociation from the Reformists of his time protected his own affiliation with tradition.
Inter-Madhhab Comparison
Initially whilst reflecting on the above point, I thought that Ibn Kamāl’s typology aligned with a distinctly Ḥanafī conception of time. However, I realized that even though the early mujtahids of the other madhhabs did not engage as much with hypotheticals, their corpus of legal conclusions was nonetheless taken by later adherents of the madhhab to be a mediator and interpreter of their own engagement with the sources of fiqh – hence the reference to this conception of time as “madhhabist”, rather than only Ḥanafī.
A question remained: Is the Ḥanafī madhhab especially resistant to transformations because it is rooted in a highly hierarchized community of interpretation?
This question was inspired by my reading of Ahmed El Shamsy’s ineludible book, The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History, as well as my studies at the Seminary. El Shamsy argues that al-Shāfiʿī enacted a radical break away from fiqh as a ‘community of tradition’ and initiated a ‘community of interpretation’. Whereas the centrality of ʿamal ahl al-madīnah in the fiqh of Mālik and the transmitted furūʿ of Abū Ḥanīfa’s chain of teachers anchored these two schools in “communities of tradition”, al-Shāfiʿī proposed principles for interpreting revelation that could theoretically be employed by anyone (who had a sufficient grasp of the tools of ijtihād), thus giving primary authority to hermeneutic principles over the transmitted practice of fiqh by specific people.[22]
Much can be said of whether popular characterizations of the madhhabs as textual or tradition-based, among other simplified descriptions, are accurate. However, if we were to proceed from the premises that El Shamsy posits, this would support the conclusion that the Ḥanafī madhhab is more resistant to transformations relative to the Shāfiʿī madhhab – at least at first glance. Conversely, one could argue that the designation of specific scholars and books as emblematically Ḥanafī means that, as long as scholars engage these key sources in conversation, they can sit at the table of intra-madhhab discourse even if they come to divergent conclusions.
Representationalist Ijtihād
What is striking about al-Muṭīʿī is that he is not just a renegade at the Ḥanafī table. His anomalous positions that Quadri highlights are not only un-Ḥanafī, but are actually modernist and thus unfamiliar to all of his traditionalist Sunni contemporaries. Quadri shows through al-Muṭīʿī’s writings on moon-sighting that he engages traditional sources, but with a modernist attitude towards technology and science.
This attitude is dubbed “representationalism”, which includes components of “technological optimism” and “scientific realism” in the case of al-Muṭīʿī.[23] Charles Taylor uses representationalism to refer to “the notion that ‘knowledge is to be seen as correct [inner] representation of an independent [external] reality.’”[24] As relates to the present discussion, a representationalist view considers technology capable of revealing facts about the external world which are reliable enough to employ in fiqh.
In Irshād ahl al-millah ilā ithbāt al-ahillah, al-Muṭīʿī argues for the permissibility of determining the start of Ramadan using the report of a single person transmitted through the telegraph, as well as using astronomical calculations. This contrasts with the dominant Ḥanafī stance that the start of Ramadan must be established through shahādah: the in-person testimony of witnesses who meet certain criteria of reliability. The dominant madhhab also holds that it is possible for a shahādah in one locale to make fasting binding in other places (a position known as “global moon sighting”), as long as the shahādah reaches those places through another person’s shahādah or through the shahādah of a qadi’s declaration. Shahādah – unlike riwāyah, which is simply a report and has a lower threshold for acceptability – is either accepted or rejected by a qadi based on the criteria for an upright witness, and therefore falls under the purview of the state.
Al-Muṭīʿī departs from the requirement of shahādah and argues for the validity of transmitting moon-sighting reports through the telegraph, as Quadri explains:
On Bakhit’s understanding, reports of fasting do not depend on a judge at all, and they are to be evaluated for their “correctness.” This represents another striking turn away from the long-dominant tradition of Hanafi proceduralism toward epistemological criteria.[25]
‘Proceduralism’ here refers to reliance on an established procedure, i.e. sighting the moon with the naked eye and conveying its sighting via shahādah, as opposed to relying on epistemological criteria, i.e. any tool that can tell us whether the moon is actually there. This epistemological approach to moon-sighting lends to al-Muṭīʿī’s view that astronomical calculations are also a valid way of detecting the start of Ramadan. Al-Muṭīʿī writes regarding ayah 189 of Sūrah al-Baqarah:
[The verse’s] meaning— and God knows best—is that the crescents and other similar signs are the times (mawaqīt) for ḥajj and similar rituals. . . . But nothing is negated through the signs’ absence, for they are merely informing signs.[26]
This is the crux of the debate: are we commanded to sight the moon and then begin fasting, or to determine whether the astronomical phenomenon of the new crescent has physically occurred? The majority of classical and postclassical jurists across the four madhāhib held the former, because they considered the moon-sighting as not just an informing sign of an independent reality, but as the effective cause for the start of the month. As a parallel: if a tree falls and no one hears it, and a squadron was given orders to move at the sound of the fall, they cannot move even if someone detected the tremor using a seismograph.
This reliance on procedure is also apparent in the issue of establishing paternity (nasab). This issue revolves around the hadith “al-walad lil-firāsh” – literally, “a child belongs to the bed”, meaning that a child is ascribed to the husband or mawlá of the mother who bears it. The standard Ḥanafī position is that if a woman gives birth, the child will automatically be ascribed to the man she was married to during her pregnancy, even if the man had not seen his wife for the past year, as Abū Ḥanīfah did not consider feasibility (imkān) a condition for attributing the child to the husband. The only way for the husband to deny the child and prevent its attribution to him is to undergo the process of liʿān in court.[27]
This may be confusing, especially if we consider paternity to be a purely physical reality. Shaykh Mūsā Shāhīn Lāshīn explains: “An adulterer is not entitled to claim lineage (nasab); he is only worthy of failure and loss, both in this world and the afterlife.”[28] Nasab is considered a privilege, not just a biological fact, as it entitles a person to material benefits such as inheritance, as well as the honor of growing one’s family. As Anchassi states, “Legal paternity is different from biological paternity…the sharʿī beginning of Ramadan is different from the astronomical sighting of the moon.”[29]
The comparison between procedural and epistemological approaches parallels what Aron Zysow terms ‘formalist’ and ‘materialist’ systems of uṣūl al-fiqh: whereas formalists are concerned with ensuring that the process of ijtihād is established with certainty, materialists are more concerned with ensuring that the outcomes of ijtihād – i.e. individual aḥkām – are accurate to the point of certainty. Zysow describes Ḥanafism as “an unusually consistent formalist system”, reflecting the concern for internal consistency of the law in Ḥanafī uṣūl.[30]
Thus, al-Muṭīʿī’s confidence in technology as an epistemological tool – a discoverer of actionable truth, as it were – is a departure from traditional Ḥanafī reliance on procedure. As with the history of astronomy, al-Muṭīʿī’s reference to classical Islamic sources makes his discussions on the telegraph and astronomical calculations worthy of a seat at the traditionalist table, at least at face value. Further scrutiny reveals a representationalist attitude, which expands the scope for technology to overtake inherited procedures in fiqh.
To return to the point that al-Muṭīʿī is not just being un-Ḥanafī, but also modernist – this is where Quadri’s decision to view the Ḥanafī madhhab as its own discursive tradition perhaps limits his analysis. This is not a failure of the book, since a book can only cover so much. However, it would be interesting to explore the following questions in light of the entire Sunni discursive tradition:
Do the other three madhhabs produce more or fewer “Bakhīts” in modernity?
Do the other madhhabs have more or less tolerance for mavericks? In other words, when a scholar departs from another madhhab as dramatically as al-Muṭīʿī did from Ḥanafism, is that scholar still able to maintain his or her affiliation to the madhhab?
Do regional distinctions play a role in scholars’ propensity to expand the outermost circle of the tradition?
Conclusion
Above, I’ve attempted to summarize some of Quadri’s key insights and add a few reflections of my own. The entire book is very much worth reading; I also benefited from reading ʿAllāmah al-Muṭīʿī’s work directly to see the tone and language he uses to argue for the continuation of ijtihād. In so doing, I read in him a strong desire for the success and renewal of the ummah, as well as the confidence of a scholar who saw himself as a contributor to the tradition and not a mere observer.
When analyzing the work of scholars past, it is important to remember that they were working with the means available to respond to the challenges of their time, sometimes without precedent to rely on. It is easy to look back, with the hindsight of a century’s worth of historical developments and academic production, and harshly judge the way they addressed these challenges. However, it is more judicious and gracious to recognize the beauty of human striving – with all of its flaws – and that we, too, will one day be subject to the scrutiny of people with the benefit of hindsight.
This piece opened with a quote that contextualizes not only al-Muṭīʿī’s departures from tradition, but also his debates with his interlocutors, which often became heated. This was to be expected in an era when Muslims were on the brink of both freedom and slavery: eager to wield the tools of modernity for good, but plunged into the crucible of political turmoil. Facing such high stakes, many a soldier will raise his cry above the armies’ clamor, hoping to guide his people and attain victory.
As Quadri writes,
Ijtihād must remain a viable possibility because, as the heresiologist Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Shahrastānī remarked, “texts are finite, but events are infinite.”[31]
Notes
[1] Omar Anchassi & Usaama al-Azami, “Islamicate Book Reviews 13: 'Transformations of Tradition' by Junaid Quadri,” YouTube, March 4, 2021, video, https://www.youtube.com/live/bt4BgaUiajQ?si=Xr0fLSvhQUGwmvY-.
[2] Junaid Quadri, Transformations of Tradition: Islamic Law in Colonial Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press 2012), 24-25.
[3] Talal Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam.” Qui Parle 17, no. 2 (2009): 20. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20685738.
[4] Quadri, Transformations of Tradition, 14.
[5] Sāʾid Bakdāsh, Takwīn al-madhhab al-ḥanafī (Beirut: Dār al-Bashāʾir, 2015), 91.
[6] Quadri, Transformations of Tradition, 116.
[7] Quadri, 119.
[8] Quadri, 121-122.
[9] Quadri, 122-125.
[10] Quadri, 126.
[11] Quadri, 128.
[12] Quadri, 72.
[13] Nūr al-Dīn Al-Samhūdī, Al-ʿaqd al-farīd (Dār al-Minhāj), 75. This reference was found through Shaykh Ismail Ibrahim’s course on Legacy Institute titled “Advanced Usul Study: Ijtihād and Taqlīd”.
[14] Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, Kitāb al-imārah, Bāb qawlihī ﷺ lā tazāl ṭāʾifah min ummatī ẓāhirīn ʿalā al-ḥaqq.
[15] Quadri, Transformations of Tradition, 81.
[16] Brannon Ingram, Revival from Below (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018) 112.
[17] Quadri, Transformations of Tradition, 81.
[18] Quadri, 85-86.
[19] Quadri, 90.
[20] Quadri, 91.
[21] Quadri, 96.
[22] Ahmed El Shamsy, The Canonization of Islam Law: A Social and Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 69-87.
[23] Quadri, 138.
[24] Quadri, 140.
[25] Quadri, 201.
[26] Quadri, 157.
[27] Mūsā Shāhīn Lāshīn, Fatḥ al-munʿim: sharḥ ṣaḥīḥ Muslim (Dār al-Shurūq, 2006), 6:11.
[28] Lāshīn, Fatḥ al-munʿim, 6:8.
[29] Anchassi, “Islamicate Book Reviews 13: 'Transformations of Tradition' by Junaid Quadri,”, video.
[30] Aron Zysow, The Economy of Certainty: An Introduction to the Typology of Islamic Legal Theory (Atlanta: Lockwood Press 2013), 2-3.
[31] Quadri, Transformations of Tradition, 96.
About the Author: Sarah Bellal is a graduate of the Qalam Seminary ʿĀlimiyyah program and a current student in the Takhaṣṣuṣ in Fiqh and Iftāʾ program.
