Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

DEFINING AND DEFENDING BELIEVERS t 203
divine message. That is clearly the function of the hadith, to gloss
and explain the revelation, and there is innovation enough visà-vis
the Quran’s pronouncements within the extraordinarily flexible
limits of the “custom of the Prophet.” Some of this had in the
end to be accepted as permissible innovation in grudging acknowledgment
of at least some evolutionary energy at work within the
community. At the other end of the belief spectrum, however,
stood ghuluw, “extremism,” a type of innovative practice or belief
that violated even the elastic limits of the lawyers’ patience. And
beyond that lay only total and irreconcilable unbelief, the damnable
kufr.
The question remained what to do about such aberrations. Excommunication
or banishment from the company of one of its
members is a corollary of the very notion of community. Members
may depart of their own volition, either by drifting off and away
by the kind of silent attrition that affects all communities or
through a formal renunciation, the act that is, in this religious context,
called apostasy and that often carried with it the most severe
penalties. Neither is the issue here, however; the present concern is
with those members of the faith community whom the rest judge
unfit or unworthy for continued association and so ban or excommunicate,
cutting them off from community membership and from
sharing in whatever considerable benefits may flow from that affiliation.
Though it was put into these precise words only by the
medieval Latin Church, the belief that “Outside the community
there is no salvation” was a long and profoundly held conviction
among Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. To thrust someone
outside the Church of the Saints, to declare that this believer or
this class of believers “has no share in the Afterlife” was to pronounce
a grim sentence indeed.
Sunnis and Shiites
Before adherence to the custom of the Prophet became a criterion
for orthodoxy, there was another, older idea to which many Muslims
could rally and which, by its choice of issue, effectively set