Sonderdrucke aus der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg ULRICH HAARMANN Islamic duties in history Originalbeitrag erschienen in: The Muslim world 68 (1978), S. 1 - 24 ISLAMIC DUTIES IN HISTORY Both the Islamic umma and the individual Muslim are governed by the divine law as revealed in the Qur'an.' Natural and positive law, religion of the individual and political legislation of the community of believers, merge indissolubly in the sharic a, the religious law of Islam. The sharra affords the positive answer to the believer who searches for righteous conduct before God and before fellow man. This dualism is reflected in the doctrine of the religious duties (farei' id, tibeidät) of Islam. The commandments of the ritual prayer, of alms-giving, of fasting in the sacred month of Ramadan, of the pilgrimage to Mecca, and, to a limited degree, also of the jihcid against the unbelievers—all of them are personal and communal actions alike. Together with the creed (shaheida), the all-encompassing religious principle, the former four became known as "pillars of the religion," arkein al-din. It is incumbent upon each Muslim to fulfill them; they are the epitome of the revealed law. There has never been any dissension in Islam about the absolute liability of the believer to fulfill the religious duties, although the Qur'an does not cite them explicitly as the 'pillars of the faith.' The Holy Book, however, gives in the so-called 'legal verses' (al-eiyeit al-sharliyya) clear injunctions regarding the individual obligations, sometimes in a summary statement (as in the case of the pilgrimage), sometimes with relatively detailed ordinances (as in the case of the alms-tax). The sunna, the legal precedent of the prophet MOammad and second material source of Islamic law, supplements and in some instances supplants the pertinent Qur'anic statutes. One important example for the abrogation of a Qur'anic direction by the sunna 1 Some of the arguments of this article appeared originally in : "Die Pflichten des Muslims—Dogma und geschichtliche Wirklichkeit," Saeculum, XXVI (1975), 95-110. Ignaz Goldziher, in his article, "Muhammedanisches Recht in Theorie und Wirklichkeit," Zeit8chrift film vergleichende Recht8wi88enschaft, VIII (1889), 406 - 23, gives an outline of the growing tension between the law "that the pious jurists taught and developed on the basis of the sunna of the prophet" (ibid., 409) and actual practice; he pays no specific attention to the ritual duties as the supreme norms of Muslim religious law. 1 2 THE MUSLIM WORLD of the prophet is the increase of the number of the daily saldt from three to five. In the ritual obligations God approaches his servants directly, demanding obedience. In the Qur'an, his supreme manifestation, God informs man in detail about these duties and enhances them through clarity (baydn). This high status places the duties beyond discussion. He who denies the legal obligations commits apostasy and renders himself an unbeliever, subject to all the legal corollaries in this and in the other world. Kufr is crystallized not only in the rejection of God's word as revealed in the Qur'an, but also in the ignorance of the pillars of Islam.2 The scholar who takes it upon himself to give a rational justification to the ritual duties and to their individual regulations—as he does with the other revealed prescriptions—associates them with the highest ethical values : so the salat, the ritual prayer, epitomizes man's surrender to God, i.e., Islam as such. It serves to glorify God's majesty and lends man a means to express his gratitude for the gift of life. 3 The integration of the duties on this supreme level is mirrored in the tendency, in 4actith, to. portray one duty through another. Fasting is described as the zakdt of the body ; 4 he who engages in jihad is like him who fasts.5 The legists who framed the structure of the sharra between the rise of the `Abbasids in the eighth century and the completion of Hanbali legal thought in the eleventh century, corroborated and anchored the dogma of the unchangeable ritual in obligations demanding unconditional fulfillment. Not in the least was it their intention to set bounds to the worldly ruler, the caliph, by freezing the canon of absolute religious laws, in this way underscoring their own responsibility for the welfare (maslaha) of God's community. All through Muslim history, in all madhdhib, by Sunnites and Shrites 2 Cf., e.g., al-Shirbini's seventeenth-century diatribe against the Egyptian rural dervishes "who do not observe fasting nor prayer and neglect the pilgrimage and the zakeit." See Gabriel Baer, "Fellah and Townsman in Ottoman Egypt," Asian and African Studies, VIII (1972), 243. 3 See Erwin Grid, "Vom Geiste islamischen Rechts," Festschrift für Ernst Kling- mfiller, ed. Fritz Hauss and Reimer Schmidt (Karlsruhe : Verlag Versicherungswirtschaft, 1974), p. 127 (quoting al-Fanäri), and idem., "Recht und Sprache im Islam," Zeitschrift ‚Ur vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft, LXXIV (1974), 70. .4 According to Ibn Maja "there is zakät applicable to everything, and the zakät of the body is fasting" ; cf. Mishkat al-Masabih, English translation with explanatory notes by James Robson, 3rd edition (Lahore : Muhammad Ashraf, 1972), II (parts 6-10), 438. 6 Ibid., 806. ISLAMIC DUTIES IN HISTORY 3 alike, from al-Ghazz5,11 to Ibn Taymiyya, it was unanimously held that duties are constant and do not allow for varying interpretations depending on spatial and temporal circumstances. Duties are the timeless buttresses of God's final message to mankind. This quality separates them clearly from the general ethical norms (akhleig) and the conventions of human relations (muceimaleit) about which the Qur'an also speaks. It should be added that the supreme and supra- natural status of the ritual duties in Islamic dogma is particularly clear and elaborate in Muslim legal theory, the will alliqh. In the context of this article it may suffice to mention al-Shalici, the first ustri, who qualified the ritual duties as the first and foremost category of bayan,6 "clear indication," denoting the distinctive excellence of the Qur'an both in a linguistic and a material sense. Until now we have only spoken of the theory of the ritual duties, yet not of historical reality. Is it possible to discern, in opposition to the dogma of absolute unchangeability, modifications and develop- ments during the fourteen centuries of Islamic history even in this particularly sacred field of religious life ? Let us note how other ordinances that rank high in the sharra and which were regulated in minute detail were during the course of time neglected and even trespassed and superseded, e.g., the lei/add-penalties such as mutilation or stoning for severe offences. When the Ottoman sultans decided to abrogate these penalties in their Vinfin -nämes and substitute for them the ta`zir, fines, and flogging, they certainly had no intention. to undermine the sharra, but intended to supplement it in a reli- giously neutral way in order to meet the demands of the time. As far as the ritual duties are concerned, we are still far from able to give an exhaustive assessment of their separate developments in historical practice. With the exception of several studies on the jihad, there is hardly any Muslim or Western research available which deals with historical facts, and not only with legal and normative data which tell us little about their application (or rather : non-application) through the course of time. Only a few scattered observations on the historical development—that is, on the actual practice of the five duties over the centuries—can be indicated in the following pages. On this narrow base I shall then venture to formulate a few general conclusions. 6 Al-Shäfil, Al-Risilla ff ufel al-figh, ed. A. M. Shäkir (Cairo : Mt4tafä al-Bäbi al-Halabi, 1358/1940), No. 56, p. 21; Nos. 73-83, pp. 26-28. English translation by Majid Khadduri, Islamic Jurisprudence, Shaft:Ts Ristila (Baltimore : The Johns Hopkins Press, 1961), pp. 68, 71-72. 4 THE MUSLIM WORLD Examples are chosen with the view to answering two questions. First : To what degree could legal norms be adapted to the con- siderable historical changes of the first two or three centuries of Islam ? Second: When and under what circumstances did the interests of governments collide with the prescriptions of the cibädät, and how were these conflicts solved ? We shall now briefly discuss the individual duties—ritual prayer, pilgrimage, fasting, alms-tax, and jihäd—in the given sequence. The first and foremost duty of the believer is the sakit, the ritual prayer. Its prominence among the five farald (the shahada not included) is manifoldly attested. 7 The said which is prescribed in detail in the sharra is an act of divine service. Each Muslim of age who is in command of his mental power must perform it five times a day in the state of ritual purity. As already mentioned, the Qur'an speaks of only three salat per day. According to a Itadith, the daily norm was later increased to five, possibly as a compromise with another tradition calling for forty daily prayers. The central liturgical elements (arkan) of the salät and the salient features of the bodily performance during prayer (prostration, genuflexions) are given in the Qur'an. The complex nature of the ritual, however, developed only later on the basis of the sunna of the prophet. The integrating power of the salat within the young Muslim community of Medina must have been enormous. The common prayer, led by the prophet and later by the caliphs, promoted and symbolized the exchange of the old loyalties based on kin and tribe for the new ties within the community of believers.