Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

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