Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

GOD’ S WAY t 179
tect the law and taqqanot, or rulings, to advance the common
good has no parallel among the Sunni ulama.
The Schools
The early evolution of Islamic law took place in widely scattered
centers across the Abode of Islam, and not even Shafii’s attempts at
imposing a kind of order on its development eradicated or even
inhibited the continued growth of different schools of legal interpretation,
each of them recognized as orthodox and legitimate by
the others. Thus the Shafiite, Malikite, Hanafite, and Hanbalite
“schools,” which were founded by and named after early masters
of Islamic jurisprudence, flourished, and continued to flourish,
among Muslims. They differ on specific points of theory and practice,
but their differences are not very substantial, nor do their
practices much differ from the positive precepts of Shiite law, although
this latter has a considerably divergent view of what lawyers
call the roots of jurisprudence. The four major Sunni schools
recognized, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, the Quran, the
sunna of the Prophet (as expressed in the hadith), the consensus of
the community, and a measure of personal interpretation (ijtihad)
as the basis of Islamic law; whereas the Shiites relied heavily on the
infallible teachings of the Imams and rejected out of hand community
consensus which had in fact betrayed them and, in their view,
ignored both God’s will and Muhammad’s explicit intentions.
Shiite law is based on a foundation quite different from that of
the Sunnis. Shiites too extended the law beyond the givens of the
Quran—not on the authority of the traditions reported from
Muhammad’s Companions, who had deprived Ali of his lawful
claim to leadership of the umma, but on those from the divinely
appointed and infallibly guided Imams. The latter passed down
traditions regarding the Prophet, it is true, but they could also pronounce
on their own authority, something denied to later generations
in Sunni Islam. Thus the Imams, down to their Great Concealment
among the Twelver Shia in 941, represented the same
kind of ongoing revelation on matters of faith and morals as