SCHOLARS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND SUFIS 105
philosopher Abu Bakr al-Razi blatantly asserted that the miracles ascribed
to prophets of the past were legends and that heaven and hell were mental
categories, not physical realities.
You can see how beliefs such as these would put the philosophers and
the ulama at odds. For one thing, the precepts of the philosophers implic-
itly rendered the ulama irrelevant. If any intelligent person could weigh in
on whether a law was right or wrong, based on whether it made rational
sense, why would anyone need to consult scholars who had memorized
every quotation ever ascribed to Prophet Mohammed?
The ulama were in a good position to fight off such challenges. They
controlled the laws, education of the young, social institutions such as
marriage, and so on. Most importantly, they had the fealty of the masses.
But the Mu'tazilites had advantages too--or rather, they had one advan-
tage: the favor of the court, the imperial family, the aristocrats, and the top
officials of the government. In fact, the seventh Abbasid khalifa made
Mu'tazilite theology the official doctrine of the land. Judges had to pass
philosophy tests and would-be administrators had to swear allegiance to
reason, in order to qualify for office.
Then the Mu'tazilites and their supporters went further: they began using
the power of government to persecute people who disagreed with them.
Which brings me back to Ahmed Ibn Hanbal, founder of the Han bali
school of law, the last of the orthodox schools to develop, and the most
rigidly conservative of them all. Ibn Hanbal was born in Baghdad in 164
AH, just thirty-six years after the Abbasid dynasty began. He came of age
amid the disillusionment that must have permeated certain strata of soci-
ety when people realized that Abbasids were going to be just as worldly as
the Umayyads. He captured the imagination of the crowds by preaching
that Islam had gone wrong and that the world was headed to hell unless
the community corrected its course. The only hope of salvation, he said,
lay in scraping away all innovations and going back to the ways of the first
community, the Medina of Prophet Mohammed's time. Above all, he de-
clared uncompromisingly that no one could know what was right or
wrong on their own. They could guarantee their soul's safety only by fol-
lowing in the footsteps of Mohammed and trusting strictly to revelation.
The other schools of Islamic law gave analogical reasoning (qiyas) a high
place as a way to discover how the shari' a applied to new situations, but