Studia Islamica 108 (2013) 82-107 brill.com/si

Legal Knowledge by Application: as Islamic Legal Hermeneutics in the 10th/12th Centuries

Abdessamad Belhaj1 Pázmány Péter Catholic

Introduction

Many scholars assumed that Sufism and Islamic are two inherently opposing modes of thought. However, a number of Islamicists have recently rejected such a common idea. In this regard, some researchers pointed out the conciliatory positions of traditionally anti-Sufi milieus. This is the case of the studies exploring how Sufism infiltrated Ḥanbalīsm, often said to be radically anti-Sufi.2 Others highlighted the interest of Sufi masters in contributing to fiqh either as jurists by profession or as jurists by interest.3 Consequently, what many historians of Islamic knowledge took for granted, namely that there is an irreconcilable conflict between Sufism and Islamic law, suffered a serious backlash. J. van Ess went so far as to

1 I am most thankful to Christopher Melchert for his comments on this paper. 2 See: Makdisi, George, Ibn Taymiyya. A Sufi of the Qādirīya Order, in: American Journal of Studies 1 (1973), pp. 118-129. Michel, T., “Ibn Taymiyya’s Sharḥ on the Futūḥ al-Ghayb of ʿAbd al-Qādir Al-Jīlānī ”, Hamdard Islamicus, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1981, pp. 3-12. Of course, these research results do not exclude Ibn Taymiyya’s harsh criticism of Sufi excessive practices and pantheistic beliefs. In this regard, see: Meyzer, Fritz, “The Cleanest about Predestination: A Bit of Ibn Taymiyya”, in: Essays on Islamic Piety and Mysticism, Ed. Meier, Fritz, Trans. O’Kane, John, Leiden, Brill, 1999, pp. 315-320. 3 Eric Winkel investigated this aspect in: Winkel, Eric, and the Living Law: the Ibn al-Arabi approach, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997; Winkel, Eric, “Shari’a, fiqh and Spirituality”, Islamic Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 1, 1994, pp. 23-33; Winkel, Eric, “Ibn ʿArabī’s Fiqh: Three Cases from the Futūḥāt”, Journal of the Muhy- iddin Ibn ʿArabi Society, Vol. 13, 1993, pp. 54-74. See also: Scattolin, G., “Sufism and Law in Islam: a text of Ibn ʿArabi (560/1165-638/1240) on ‘Protected People’ (Ahl al- dhimma)”, Islamochristiana / Dirasāt Islāmiyya Masīḥiyya, Vol. 24, 1998, pp. 37-55.

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/19585705-12341276 A. Belhaj / Studia Islamica 108 (2013) 82-107 83 assert that “there has never been any clear and uniform pattern of enmity between the jurists and the mystics”.4 His statement should be understood as a rejection of systematic opposition between Sufism and . One has to acknowledge that some highly critical moments of enmity existed indeed between pantheist Sufism and the jurists. At any rate, the controversies between jurists and Sufis over Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240) dem- onstrate the disagreement between the two antagonists. What jurists reject in Ibn ʿArabī’s school is not Sufism per se. Instead, they criticized Sufi prac- tices and beliefs, seeing them as innovations. Even though, discrepancy was soon to be curtailed in favour of Sunni unity. That being the case, an inquiry into several synthetic sufi/sharʿī ways of living or that of interpreting legal texts shows the extremely multi- dimensional nature of religiosity in Islam. Sufism is an open, fuzzy, and fragmented field of knowledge/practice that has infinite multitude of webs in connection with almost all aspects of human life. Therefore, it is expected that variety and complexity would infiltrate its sphere.5 To be concrete, my scope of investigation is limited to Sunni Sufism which made tremendous efforts to be accepted as an inner dimension of sharīʿa. Through a care- ful constructed legitimacy and an attempt at approaching law from inside, Sunni Sufis elaborated a Sufism that seeks, first and foremost, authority from within sunnism.6 The focal point of the available literature on the links between taṣawwuf and fiqh appears to be the common normative content between law and Sufism. In this paper, my point is to show that Sufism is not simply an ­ethics

4 Van Ess, Josef, “Sufism and its Opponents: Reflections on Topoi, Tribula- tions, and Transformations”, in: Islamic Mysticism Contested: Thirteen Centuries of Controversies and Polemics, Eds. Frederick De Jong, Bernd Radtke, Leiden, Brill, 1999, p. 34. 5 For the same reason, I do not share the claim of R. Slotten that “Sufism repre- sents the spirit of iconoclasm and anarchism in Islam and was directed against the stultifying of the aspects of the sharīʾah”. Having said that, it might be the case that Sufism, in some of its practices and ideas, allows iconoclasm as has been remarked accurately by Christopher Melchert. See: Slotten, Ralph, “Exoteric and Esoteric Modes of Apprehension”, Sociological Analysis, Vol. 38, No. 3, 1977, p. 192. See also: Heck, Paul L., “Mysticism as Morality: the Case of Sufism”, Journal of Religious Ethics, Vol. 34, No. 2, 2006, p. 256. 6 Mojaddedi, Jawid A., “Legitimizing Sufism in al-Qushayrī’s ‘Risāla’ ”, Studia Islamica, No. 90, pp. 37-50.