Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

GOD’ S WAY t 177
both rabbis and ulama were at the same time the conservative
guardians and the cautiously innovative exegetes of a long and
complex legal tradition.
But there were important differences. Jews were granted a degree
of community autonomy, first in the Roman and Sasanian
Empires and then in the dhimmi and later the millet systems under
which they lived for long centuries in the Abode of Islam (see chapter
8). That freedom was a concession dictated from above, and
within it the rabbis served, by delegation and with the acceptance
of their coreligionists, as the administrators of that restricted
autonomy. They not only maintained a legal tradition; they also
administered it, as judges and surrogates of a higher judicial authority,
that of the patriarchs who ruled the Jews of the Roman
Empire, the exilarchs who governed the Babylonian communities,
and the geonim, or heads of the great yeshivas.
The Muslim ulama, in contrast, at least the Sunni variety, were
only one element among the classes and elites contesting for power
in the Abode of Islam. Before Ottoman times they neither possessed
nor delegated any political authority, and they eschewed the
administration of the sharia, a task that fell to the governmentappointed
and supported qadi. Their power lay elsewhere, in the
prestige they enjoyed as the custodians of the obviously Islamic
component in what was professedly an Islamic society; in their
independence of the state, which they could castigate or applaud
as circumstances dictated; and in the network of marriages by
which they could forge ties with other powerful classes like the
large landowners and the wholesale merchants. Unlike their episcopal
counterparts, the ulama did not hold the keys of the kingdom
in their hands; they could neither bind nor loose nor force a
caliph to his knees or out of the Church. But power they possessed,
a genuine political power. Like their Jesuit contemporaries in Europe,
they educated an Islamic intelligentsia in their school system.
After the eleventh century higher education across the face of Islam
was uniquely ulama-inspired and directed in madrasas, where
Islamic consciences and indeed Islam itself were shaped through
the instrument of the sharia.
Until relatively recent times, the law school or yeshiva was the