Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

GOD’ S WAY t 169
Islamic Justice: The Qadi
The Quran was sent down to restore justice to the world: to induce
humans to recognize the “claims of God,” as the jurists called
them, as Creator and Lord, and, in consequence of that, to restore
justice to human dealings with one another. The society to which
this message was brought was not without its own version of justice.
Mecca was in the process of urbanization, but, as already
noted, the prevailing mode of justice there was still largely based
on the Bedouin notion of a customary tribal law (sunna) administered,
where necessary—the tribes frequently took justice into
their own hands—by an arbitrator (hakam) chosen for his sagacity
or, on occasion, his charismatic qualities.
The substitution of quranic norms of justice for Bedouin ones
was neither a short nor an easy process. The tribal arbitrator, for
example, continued to function side by side with fully developed
Muslim institutions of justice for many centuries, though there
were restrictions on the cases that could be submitted to such arbitration.
The effort was made, somewhat haltingly at first, but
eventually with great success, to convert Arab custom into Muslim
law. The first sign of the intent to do so was perhaps a significant
change in nomenclature. Judges appointed under Islamic authority
were not called hakams or arbitrators, but qadis, decision-makers,
a deliberate echo of qada, the verb used in the Quran to describe
God’s own divine power.
The Muslim tradition, which, like its monotheistic counterparts,
attempts to legitimate its institutions by tracing them back to the
origins of the community, credits the earliest caliphs—the Quran
knows of no such official, or of any other, for that matter—with
the appointment of the first qadis. Such may not be the case, but
the practice of these early Islamic judges was of a very mixed quality:
quranic injunction, local custom, their pre-Islamic predecessors’
methods and norms, and their own discretionary powers
all played a part in the judgments rendered by the Umayyad qadis.
Though there was as yet no fully formed body of Islamic law at
that point, the sharia was in the process of elaboration in various