Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland
Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland
Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland
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202 t CHAPTER EIGHT<br />
support up until shortly be<strong>for</strong>e his death <strong>and</strong> then broke with him,<br />
had greatly emphasized the latter: whoever did not act like a Muslim<br />
was in fact not a Muslim, <strong>and</strong> should be treated accordingly.<br />
“Accordingly” in this context meant as an apostate, the penalty<br />
<strong>for</strong> which was “termination with extreme prejudice.” In the few<br />
places where Kharijites actually gained political control of the<br />
community, they were, as one might suspect, exceedingly circumspect<br />
about killing off all the other Muslims who did not share<br />
their view of <strong>Islam</strong>.<br />
Innovation <strong>and</strong> Heresy<br />
In a society that possessed no institution or office capable of defining<br />
“orthodoxy” in the familiar Christian sense, one norm against<br />
which a Muslim’s actions or, somewhat less certainly, his opinions<br />
could be judged as to rectitude was the custom of the Prophet. The<br />
notion that the sunna might serve as an <strong>Islam</strong>ic yardstick gained<br />
widespread currency in legal circles only in the early ninth century,<br />
but neither it, nor deviations from it—bida, “innovation”—serve<br />
as a very useful guide <strong>for</strong> underst<strong>and</strong>ing what was actually happening<br />
within the <strong>Islam</strong>ic community in the first century <strong>and</strong> a half<br />
of its existence, nor even, perhaps, thereafter.<br />
On a closer inspection of the notion of bida, with its attractive<br />
heuristic possibilities as an <strong>Islam</strong>ic equivalent of “heresy,” it soon<br />
emerges that the term covers both more <strong>and</strong> less than is historically<br />
useful. The Quran presents itself as both a permanent <strong>and</strong> a closed<br />
revelation, <strong>and</strong> the Muslim believer, no less than his Jewish <strong>and</strong><br />
Christian counterpart, is invited to accept the notion that God had<br />
here laid out, definitively, immutably, <strong>and</strong> exhaustively, his will <strong>for</strong><br />
humankind. To add, subtract, or otherwise change God’s Word<br />
was, there<strong>for</strong>e, an “innovation,” whose Arabic expression st<strong>and</strong>s<br />
suggestively close to the etymon <strong>for</strong> “creation,” a power reserved<br />
exclusively to God.<br />
God, as it turned out, had not said his Last Word, even in the<br />
believers’ eyes, <strong>and</strong> what followed in <strong>Islam</strong> was an attempt to interpret,<br />
to flesh out, <strong>and</strong>, somewhat less ingenuously, to modify the