166 No god but God
largest and most diverse legal tradition with regard to breadth of
interpretation. And finally, the Hanbali School of Ahmad ibn Hanbal
(d. 855), the most traditionalist of the legal schools, can be found in
pockets throughout the Middle East, but tends to dominate ultracon-
servative countries like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. Added to this
group is the Shi‘ite school of law founded by Ja‘far as-Sadiq (d. 765),
which will be dealt with in the following chapter.
The Ulama associated with these four schools entrenched them-
selves as the sole authority of acceptable Islamic behavior and the sole
interpreters of acceptable Islamic beliefs. As these schools of thought
gradually transformed into legal institutions, the diversity of ideas and
freedom of opinion that characterized their early development gave
way to rigid formalism, strict adherence to precedent, and an almost
complete stultification of independent thought, so that even by the
twelfth century, Muslim thinkers like al-Ghazali (himself a Tradition-
alist) began decrying the Ulama’s assertion that “whoever does not
know scholastic theology in the form [the Ulama] recognize and
does not know the prescriptions of the Holy Law according to the
proofs which they have adduced is an unbeliever.” As we shall see,
al-Ghazali’s complaint against the Ulama is as applicable today as it
was nine hundred years ago.
In the modern era, as questions of individual religious obligation
have entered the political realm, the Ulama’s ability to define the pub-
lic discourse regarding correct behavior and belief has increased dra-
matically. They have even managed to broaden their audience by
playing a far more active role in the political developments of the
Middle East. In some Muslim countries, including Iran, Sudan, Saudi
Arabia, and Nigeria, the Ulama exert direct political and legal control
over the populations, while in most others, they indirectly influence
the social and political spheres of society through their religious
edicts, their legal rulings, and, most notably, their stewardship of
Islam’s religious schools, or madrassas, where generation after genera-
tion of young Muslims are indoctrinated in a revival of Traditionalist
orthodoxy, especially with regard to the static, literalist interpretation
of the Quran and the divine, infallible nature of the Shariah. As one
such teacher and scholar recently argued,