The Amman Message in light of Imam al-Ghazali’s Clear Criterion

By all accounts, the Jordan Initiative was a remarkable achievement- a shining moment in this otherwise troubled age. In 2005, King Abdullah, the latest monarch of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, invited leaders of all Muslim communities to Amman and placed before them a short document. By the end of that conference, those leaders had put their names to a declaration that was ominously titled True Islam and its Role in Modern Society. For the first time, certainly in the modern era, the lines of true belief were carved out in the sand.

While I had argued in an earlier article that the declaration’s main goal was to short-circuit the silly habit of extremists to denounce all those who disagree with their peculiar ideology- including Muslims- as apostates, I felt that both my post and the declaration itself had not gone far enough to explain its true import. Since 2005, the Jordan Initiative has come under a lot of fire, due largely to a valid misunderstanding of what the document really means and how its points are to be implemented. Take for example, the declaration’s apparent tolerance for differing and often contentious schools of thought. To many people, it was simply unreal, typical of any official announcement coming from a Middle Eastern collaboration. Worse, some might have shrugged it off because they found it reactive, if not downright hypocritical.

But the Jordan Initiative is significant, if only because it exists. What it lacks is a systematic way forward. Let’s examine the main points of the declaration.

The Jordan Initiative’s primary concern is to define orthodoxy. It makes clear that at the top of this food-chain rests the overwhelming bulk of Muslims who adhere to the canonical schools of both Sunni and Shia Islam. It says,

Whosoever is an adherent of one of the four Sunni Schools of Jurisprudence (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i and Hanbali), the Ja’fari (Shi’i) School of Jurisprudence, the Zaydi School of Jurisprudence, the Ibadi School of Jurisprudence, or the Thahiri School of Jurisprudence is a Muslim.

Founded in the early centuries of Islam, these schools of jurisprudence, or Madhhabs, were the sterling result of brilliant minds working to develop a moral way of life by drawing from the Quran and the Prophetic Sunna. They are canonical because it is accepted that those who adhere to the rulings and culture of the Madhhabs are, by default, on the path of the Quran and the Sunna. It is here that the Jordan Initiative first bares its fangs, by challenging a pet opinion held by most extremists. What this opinion consists of is the belief that the culture of unqualified adherence to a single Madhhab is as wrong as it is sinful. Sunni traditionalism labels such ‘follower-ship’ taqlid, and the person who adopts taqlid with respect to a single, chosen Madhhab is called a muqallid. Needless to say, those who oppose muqallids make up only a noisy and increasingly sidelined minority. One of the most striking features of this faction is the way they adopt a defensive and reactive method of (re-)interpreting sacred texts. Take the instance where the Prophet Muhammad had famously said,

"My Ummah shall not agree upon error. [1]"

While overwhelming scholarship regard the hadith as a Prophetic promise that "correct" belief will always reside with the majority, the vocal minority advances another meaning; that even in the face of an overwhelming majority of misguided believers, a small regiment of Muslims will always stand up for the truth. Given their marginal status in the umma, the reason for this kind of interpretation is an obvious one.

The Jordan Initiative’s next line asserts that:

…it is not possible to declare whosoever subscribes to the Ash’ari creed or whoever practices true Sufism an apostate.

Once again, this is a direct challenge to extremists who hurl suspicion at Muslims based on their adherence to either Imam al-Ashari’s theological creed or Sufism, or as is commonly the case, both. This stance is especially bizarre since Imam al-Ashari’s creed had not only dominated Islamic intelligentsia in the past, but continues to do so. In all fairness, the Asharite method is not the only one in the Islamic fold. Three are accepted as canonical in the present day: the creed of Imam al-Ashari, the creed of Imam al-Maturidi and lastly, the Athari. But this is where the declaration falls short. More than anything else in the Islamic world, reconciling the differences of competing theologies is a tricky bit of business.

The only good theologian is a dead one
Imam al-Ghazali argues that the problem between theological schools lies not with their respective methods but more on a phenomenon called the rhetoric of transcendence. In other words, it involves a theologian clothing his theological framework with an aura of absolute orthodoxy, so that he has little choice but to declare other frameworks as heretical. Commenting on Imam al-Ghazali’s thought [2], Sherman Jackson goes on to clarify that just because theology can never be transcendent does not mean it can never be right or that it can never apprehend the truth.

I must first qualify what I mean by theologians. Ignaz Goldziher once ruminated that the only people free from theology are Prophets [3]. Theology is widely understood to mean "the study of God." In the Islamic sense, theology is known as kalam, and its practitioners are mutakallimun. The mutakallimun frequently use rational analysis and argument to understand, explain, test, critique, defend or promote a variety of religious topics. Although theology might be used to help the theologian understand more truly his or her own religious tradition, Imam al-Ghazali strenuously warned that it should only be used for defending the faith from heresy, or for clearing personal doubts, and rarely for anything else.

If we agree with Imam al-Ghazali’s contention that the real problem lies with the rhetoric of transcendence, then the next step would be to attempt an understanding of how theology develops. Put simply, kalam cannot be torn from the context of human history. Because kalam in its early days came to be completely associated with excessive use of rationality, it earned sharp criticism from traditionalists who drew their knowledge from transmitted sources instead. It is thus not inconceivable that arch-traditionalists like the esteemed Imam Ahmad Hanbal had opposed kalam only because of how the early Mutazilites had exploited it and then forced it down the throats of the scholars. In many cases, this was accomplished by physical torture, and Imam Ahmad Hanbal himself had been one of the Mutazilite’s most tenacious victims. The Mutazilite episode serves as a potent reminder to what can happen when particular fields of knowledge are taken to the extreme. Excessive legalism in Islam’s early years, for example, had triggered a populist shift toward Islam’s spiritual aspect, thus fueling the eventual maturing of the science of Tasawwuf, or Sufism. It was therefore inevitable that Mutazlism’s excesses would usher in a more balanced approach toward the science of kalam. It arrived in the form of Imam al-Ashari (see my brief biography of the distinguished individual here).

It is incorrect to allege that only devotees of rationalism- such as the Asharites- engage in figurative interpretation and traditionalists do not. In the field of jurisprudence (fiqh), Shaykh Muhammad Abu Zuhra mentioned that the difference in the use of ‘analogical deduction’ between the four jurists- with Imam Abu Hanifa making the most use of it and Imam Ahmad Hanbal the least- amounted to one of degree [4], not of absence. In the field of exegesis (tafsir), Imam al-Ghazali points out that not even a scrupulous traditionalist like Imam Ahmad Hanbal had totally rejected figurative interpretation (tawil) of certain Quranic verses and hadith. He cites the example of the black stone of the Kaba being the right hand of God, or the idea that a believer’s heart rests between God’s two fingers.

All said, the line between theology and tradition is a dim one. The notion that a Muslim derives his creed from an exclusively ‘traditional’ source is as much a synthetic and interpretative venture as the path taken by theological reasoning. After all, the past does not pass unprocessed and un-mediated into the present. To be more precise, the age which some modern Muslims like to overstate as a time of unprecedented political, spiritual and ideological correctness because of the presence of the Pious Predecessors (salaf-al-salih) has come down to us through a process of,

…evaluation, amplification, suppression, refinement and assessing the polarity between would-be tradition and/or non-indigenous ideas…[5]

In other words, individuals who make a big fuss about rejecting theology are themselves theologians advocating a different "study of God". That is why it is reckless for factions who reject kalam to profess a kind of condescending resignation over the supremacy of Imam al-Ashari’s thought in the Muslim world. Disingenuously, they claim to possess the pure, untainted creed of the Pious Predecessors and then go on to suggest that Imam al-Ashari’s kalam could only have become as popular as it is now because of political circumstances.

Love thy neighbor
It should be clear by now that contrary to popular belief, the schools of jurisprudence are not the real barriers to unity in the Muslim world. I disagree with the view that Madhhabs are sects. Again, I would point out that such a stand is only a marginal one that serves nobody else’s interest but a narrow ideology. The latter hinges on the hackneyed myth that since Madhhabs are sects, they should be excised from Muslim consciousness. Madhhabs do not create schisms, theological schools do, and this for a simple reason. Theological wrangles are often more profound and far-reaching.

Given that kalam is a source of dispute, how does the Jordan Initiative even begin to broker harmony between Sunni, Shia and more importantly, the Salafi sect, which is mentioned in the last part of the declaration? As it states,

…it is not possible to declare whosoever subscribes to true Salafi thought an apostate.

Presumably, kalam is an indispensable part of both Sunni and Shia sciences, even though the former mainly subscribes to Imam al-Ashari’s creed and the latter subscribes to a Mutazilite one. The Salafi sect, on the other hand, adopts an unquestioning devotion to Imam Ahmad Hanbal’s opposition to the kalam of his times by extending it to all forms of rational thought, including the dominant Asharite creed. As demonstrated above, however, nobody- including those who claim to reject rationalism for rationalism’s sake- is entirely free from the proverbial claws of theology.

Sewing up old wounds
The spirit of the Jordan Initiative is hardly a novel one. Long before it, an eminent scholar of Islam had already produced a document that clearly and concisely refuted the modern Muslim preoccupation with splitting the umma (Muslim community) into neat little US and THEM packages. That man has been famously called Hujjat al-Islam, or Proof of Islam by many, but for the layman bereft of history, we shall simply call him Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali. The classical document I am referring to is Faysal al-Tafriqa Bayna al-Islam wa al-Zandaqa, which loosely translates into The Clear Criterion for Distinguishing Islam from Godlessness. Al-Ghazali’s treatise not only demonstrates that it is possible for different theological schools, hence sects, to co-exist, but that it is vital that they do so.

Since all theological frameworks must base themselves on two primary sources- the Quran and the Sunna, Imam al-Ghazali proposed a principle for assessing the truth of a particular statement. Central to his method is the understanding that theologians from diverse schools approach the sources in different ways. Depending on the methodology involved, a verse from the Quran- the one describing God mounting His Throne, for example- might either be interpreted literally or figuratively, or somewhere in between.

Al-Ghazali therefore asserted that to consider a statement as true is merely to acknowledge the existence of its referent. Such existence can be perceived across five levels:

1. Ontological (dhati)
2. Sensory (hissi)
3. Conceptual (khayali)
4. Noetic (‘aqli), and
5. Analogous (shabahi)

These levels are useful in evaluating how a particular Quranic verse or hadith is to be interpreted, with ontological being literal in the strictest sense, and sensory representing the first level of figurative interpretation. Thus, when interpreting a Prophetic statement, one must begin with the ontological level. Only if a statement cannot be sustained as true on that level can the interpreter descend to the next level, in this case, into the realm of the figurative.

Imam al-Ghazali asserts that as long as a theological framework meets his Qanun al-Tawil, or Rule of Figurative Interpretation, it should not be cast out of the Islamic fold. Of course, this summary is merely a tiny part of Imam al-Ghazali’s treatise. I cannot do justice to the elegance of Imam al-Ghazali’s thought in this regard and I would highly recommend any earnest student to obtain Dr Sherman Jackson’s translation and excellent commentary on Faysal al-Tafriqa.

In a very concrete way, Imam al-Ghazali’s treatise perfectly complements the Jordan Initiative by furnishing it with an objective method of discernment. The Qanun also has an added advantage of preventing Muslims from falling into the trap of equating unity with uniformity. In an earlier article, I explained,

No other organized religion has managed to accomplish what the early scholars of Islam did for their religion; that is, create a framework of unity amidst diversity. So resilient has this idea been that for more than a thousand years of Islamic history, there has been no significant sectarian split outside the Sunni-Shia schism. Compare this with the Christian condition, in which three major schisms use three different versions of the Bible. This was because the Fathers of Catholicism, representing the first orthodoxy in Christianity, were more intent on imposing the impossible ideal of uniformity rather than unity. You don’t have to venture too far afield to find examples of such regimes in the Islamic world. The short-lived Taliban in Afghanistan precisely mirrors early Catholicism’s rabid fear of diversity. A culture of uniformity that is taken to its logical conclusion ensures a totalitarian regime with an arm dedicated solely to theological inquisition.

Uniformity can only come at the expense of unity, so do yourself a favor, endorse the Amman Message now.

---

Notes:
[1] Imam Hakim related a Sahih Hadith from the Prophet in the following words: "My Ummah shall not agree upon error."
[2] Sherman Jackson, Translation of Faysal al-Tafriqa.
[3] Ignaz Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, Princeton University Press, 1981
[4] Muhammad Abu Zahra, The Four Imams – Their Lives, Work & Schools of Thought, 2004
[5] Sherman Jackson, Translation of Faysal al-Tafriqa.

You should check out these posts:

• The Unquenchable Thirst for Knowledge- Imam Al-Ashari Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Ismail al-Ashari was born in the...
• The Prophet’s family makes a stand Daniel Pipes once posted a series of questions on his...
• Detox the orthodox Men have always differed and because religion through the vehicle...
• Islam, Fundamentalism, and the Betrayal of Tradition (Joseph E Lumbard) Hailed by Hamzah Yusuf (Zaytuna Institute) as an important...
• Mu’tazilla is not Godzilla There is no doubt that the Islamic concept of God...
• Urban myths that bear repeating Urban myths are folklore that are thought to be true...
• The Officially Sanctioned Dictionary I have always admired how most Salafists seem to talk...
• Get thee behind me, Madhhab! There is no current of thought more tragic than the...
• Three flavors of Salafism Neo-Salafism has no coherent fiqh of its own- it...
• Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab In researching this short biography, I was astonished at the...