Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

184 t CHAPTER SEVEN
tions of sound or healthy hadith. Muslim scholars then had in
hand a “closed” body of and authoritative data from which to
fashion a workable code of Muslim behavior.
Quran-based reasoning on moral matters has always been selective
in the sense that all the verses of the Revelation, like its counterpart
in Judaism and Christianity, are of equal truth, and so citation
of any one of them is in theory definitive. The fastidiously
trained jurist might recognize the contradictions between one
quranic verse and another and seek to justify them by applying the
principle of abrogation (see chapter 5), but for most the quranic
Ipse dixit was enough, and the same attitude seems to have prevailed
in the matter of the hadith. Such an attitude, that “all’s fair
in Quran and hadith,” leads to moral probabilism—namely, that a
defensible position is a permissible one, and however attractive a
notion that might be to radical or amateur moralists, it never was
such to Muslim jurists. How, then, in the absence of a determining
moral authority, was the Muslim to decide among the varying
probable positions founded on Quran or hadith or, more disconcertingly,
on the opinions of jurists who attempted to work out
solutions to moral questions on the basis of their own personal
effort? The answer turned out to lie in consensus, the agreement of
the community of Muslims.
The agreement of the community of Muslims had its own seeds
of anxiety, in the suggestion, for example, that moral truth was
what most Muslims thought it was rather than what God said it
was. A solution was quickly forthcoming. The authority of consensus
rested with God, as explained in the Prophetic saying that
inevitably appeared in all discussions of the subject: “My community
will never agree in error.” Another aspect of the problem was
addressed in a second hadith: “You are better judges than I in
temporal matters,” the Prophet is reported to have said of himself,
in addressing future generations, “and I am a better judge than you
in what concerns your religion.” In matters of faith, then, the
Quran and the hadith rule alone; in matters of morality, community
consensus may also provide a reliable guide.
The operation of consensus is apparent in the matter of circumcision.
The pre-Islamic Arab practice of circumcision had no war-