194 | CHAPTER 6
scholars’ understanding of law both as organizing the whole of one’s life,
even its most intimate aspects, and as a field in which many authorities might
have their say, no universal agreement being required on matters of detail,
provided their general orientation was toward affirming the Islamic identity
of their otherwise extremely disparate community, the umma.
The emergence of these four communities of interpretation was not with-
out animosity and strife, and there were originally over a dozen of them; but
the process of selection and consolidation was being completed in the later
tenth and into the eleventh century, they were becoming mass movements,
and different parts of the present- day Muslim world still acknowledge
them.^143 Each community espouses a mature and self- sufficient exegetical
system, appealing to the ultimate authority of God and his Prophet as evi-
denced in scripture and tradition (to the authenticity of which the works of
Bukhārī and Muslim provided indispensable guidance), but imparting to
that material the distinctive interpretative stamp of the school’s founder and
other authorities. Until this evolution is completed at the end of the First
Millennium, it is not possible to talk about Sunni Islam. Contemporary
Sunnism maintains a heterogeneity implicit in the diversity of tradition and
the divergence of the legal communities, but is at the same time kept under
control by the principle of the consensus (ijmā‘) of the Sunni community as
a whole, which is conservative because founded on tradition, but strong be-
cause it combines tradition with rational speculation. Christopher Melchert
situates this “semirationalism” historically in the following words:
The theolog y and law that al- Maʾmūn tried to establish evidently of-
fered too little to the common people of Baghdad and other cities, but
the pure traditionalism that Ahmad ibn Hanbal and others opposed to
it evidently offered too little to sophisticates at court. The jurispru-
dence taught by the classical schools of law did offer something to both
sides.^144
Apart from law, the other major area of Muslim thought dependent on
collecting and assessing hadīth was history,^145 which likewise developed rap-
idly from the eighth century. Even the earliest hadīth might contain narra-
lolog y and grammar,” in M. R. Niehoff (ed.), Homer and the Bible in the eyes of ancient interpreters (Leiden
2012) 72–74.
143 N. Hurvitz, “From scholarly circles to mass movements: The formation of legal communities in
Islamic societies,” American historical review 108 (2003) 985–1008. The maturation of the legal commu-
nities is variously dated: Bauer, Ambiguität [1:5] 21–22, 159–61, 205–6, has a formative period to 1000
and a classical period into the twelfth century; Brown, Canonization [3:18] 367–68, focuses on the elev-
enth century; Melchert, Sunni schools of law [6:135] 198, specifies “the beginning of the eleventh
c e n t u r y.”
144 Melchert, Sunni schools of law [6:135] 201.
145 Khalidi, Arabic historical thought [3:82] 17–82.