Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah and Shaykh Hamza Yusuf on the Islamic Tradition

by Zakariya Wright for Islamamerica.org

 In the influential essay, "In the Spirit of Tradition" (published on Islamamerica.org), Nazim Baksh offered several insights useful in getting a grip on the idea of an "Islamic tradition." An emerging generation of Muslim intellectuals in the West, able to demonstrate "traditional" scholarly understandings of the Islamic sciences, has pushed the idea of "Traditional Islam" to the forefront of discourses on Islam in the West. The word "tradition" has been thus rescued from its normative association with "backwards" that, according to Baksh and many others, was a legacy of the colonial encounter and the attempt to justify the subjugation of non-Western (thus non-modern and uncivilized) societies.

 Tradition is better described, as Baksh reports from Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, as a "plumb-line," or core understanding of the Islamic message. This knowledge and practice has been passed down from teacher to student in an unbroken chain of transmission (isnad or silsilah) since the time of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. For Hamza Yusuf, tradition thus becomes largely synonymous with Sunnah, or the way the Qur'anic revelation was put into practice by the Prophet and his companions.

 But the idea of "the Islamic tradition" has a much wider currency than Baksh's essay might suggest. Many European converts to Islam have been influenced by the writings of the French thinker René Guenon, who conceived of tradition as a revelatory, "perennial" truth, speaking to the essential relationship between God and man attested to in all religious traditions. Muslim reformers variously associated with the Muslim Brothers or the Salafiyya movement continue to speak of tradition more negatively as taqlid, or blind adherence to inherited practices which cloud the original purity of Islam. In other words, exactly what is the Islamic tradition continues to be a source of dispute. Moreover, several important questions remained unanswered, such as accounting for historical change within a continuously transmitted tradition, or the profound adaptive capabilities of "traditional" Islamic scholars.  

 To provoke further discussion on the topic "What is the Islamic Tradition?" the Chicago-based Nawawi Foundation convened a conference in Des Plaines, Illinois on March 17, 2007. The event hosted Shaykh Hamza Yusuf of the Zaytuna Institute (based in Hayward, California) and Nawawi's own Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah. As might be expected, both eminent scholars spoke poignantly on the nature of traditional Islam. This essay will mostly concentrate on the perspective of Dr. Umar (a brief biography of this scholar is available at www.nawawi.org). A profoundly articulate voice in the American Muslim community since his return from the Middle East in 1999, Dr. Umar offered some fresh insights on the discourse concerning the Islamic tradition.

 Dr. Umar's primary contribution to the debate was an explication of a maxim concerning the function of the scholar in relation to his predecessors: Qif haythu waqafu thumma siru, "Arrive to the point they got to, then proceed." In other words, according to Dr. Umar, "Tradition is not a tradition if it doesn't bring you to the present." Since Islam is religion of many traditions -- thus making it difficult to speak of more than elements of an Islamic tradition similar to elements of a particular culture -- the word "tradition" itself does not comprehend the notion of multiple and varying elements of continuity unfolding into the present. In the place of "tradition", Dr. Umar offers another word: "legacy."

 In this regard, Dr. Umar proffers another bit of advice from one of his teachers: "Don't forget about the madhhab al-hadith." By this, we are to understand that there are many aspects of Prophetic model which, while recognized by past scholars, were unable to be actualized until contemporary circumstances brought their full significance into greater clarity.

 The notion of a rich legacy continuously explicated into the present, according to Dr. Umar, undermines two forms of arrogance to which many Muslims have fallen victim in the "modern" age. The first is "doctrinairism", or the exclusive adherence to one school of thought to the denigration of other scholarly perspectives. Outside of the essential elements of consensus within Islam (such as the five ritual prayers), "Islam is a religion of dissent", observes Dr. Umar. The scholars of the past largely accepted divergent opinions. For example, Imam Malik (one of Islam's most eminent jurists) accepted the validity of marriages performed in ways at odds with his own interpretation of the marriage contract. In terms of methodology, doctrinairism results from confusing the fundamental revealed law of God (Shari'a) with the interpretations of scholars (fiqh). Doctrinaires cannot accept divergent opinions among scholars (ikhtilaf) because they have elevated the opinions of particular scholars to the status of revelation, even if they claim to be following the Qur'an and Hadith exclusively.

 To counter the divisive tendencies of doctrinairism, or what Hamza Yusuf calls "naql-heads" (those who cannot see beyond the particular transmission, naql, that has come to them), Dr. Umar spoke of a historic conference convened in Lester, England, in 1999. Prominent Western Muslim scholars of diverse backgrounds and persuasions came to together to agree on a "non-aggression pact." The idea was to revive the tradition of tolerance for diversity that has been a strength of the Islamic legacy. Scholars agreed to refrain from attacking, slandering or backbiting fellow Muslims even if their opinions differed.

 The second, more pernicious form of arrogance to be offset by an emphasis on the Islamic legacy is the "psychology of rupture." An unprecedented result of the experience of colonialism and modernity has been the idea that, in order to regain the former glory of Islam, Muslims must throw out the intervening 1400 years of scholarship between themselves and the Prophet. The implication is that only the Muslims of the present can succeed where fourteen centuries of pious ancestors have failed. In the end, such "reformists" become impoverished by cutting themselves off their past. Faith, says Dr. Umar, requires both community and continuity with the past: "the essence of Islam" is that it "relates us to the beginning of the cosmos" through a tangible chain of transmission. The rupture-reformists deny Muslims the ability to remain practically rooted in the past, thus denying them a fundamental need of human identity and subjecting them to psychological crisis.

 The Prophetic narration, "Difference of opinion (ikhtilaf) in my community is a mercy (rahmah)," is not to deny the importance of scholarly authority, affirm Dr. Umar and Shaykh Hamza. To elaborate on the notion of authority in addition to the scripture, Hamza Yusuf referred to the verse of the Qur'an: "Thus We have sent you a messenger from among you, who will recite to you Our signs and purify you, who will teach you the scripture (kitab) and wisdom (hikmah), and teach you that of which you have no knowledge" (2:151). There are two sources of knowledge God mentions here: the scripture and wisdom. "Wisdom" is nothing other, according to Hamza Yusuf, than the behavioral ideal (sunnah) of the Prophet and his companions, which is continuously explained and transmitted by the scholars. Hamza Yusuf, as previously mentioned, believes the best translation of "tradition" is simply the Sunnah.

 An interesting point of discussion, proposed by Dr. Umar, was the idea of multiple traditions with varying levels of authority. Shaykh Hamza suggested that there is a danger in picking and choosing between elements of tradition: the Islamic tradition is like a flower, and if one picks off petals one by one, sooner or later you will have destroyed the flower. As transmitted Sunnah, according to Shaykh Hamza, all aspects of the tradition as it has been received are of Divine inspiration, an aspect of God's promise to "preserve" His revelation. Thus scholars who have elaborated on the grammar and recitation of the Qur'an, among other sciences, have been Divinely inspired. The Islamic sciences are unique, in comparison with other religions, in their preservation of revelation. No other language besides Arabic, for example, retains the ability to replicate the same pronunciation over 1400 years; a quality sadly lacking, observes Shaykh Hamza, with Greek. In fact, according to Dr. Umar, when Jewish scholars in Islamic Spain for the first time undertook to codify the rules of Hebrew grammar and pronunciation, they had no other recourse than to fall back on Arabic as a fellow Semitic language.

 But Dr. 'nuanced argument for multiple categories of tradition, with different levels of authority, is nonetheless useful in conceptualizing the breadth and dynamism of the Islamic legacy. The Islamic sciences, according to Dr. Umar, can be classified by their content in one of four ways: (1) "transmission-based" (Qur'an memorization and recitation and Prophetic narrations for example); (2) "derived" (based on ijtihad or scholarly reasoning, such as the schools of jurisprudence and theology or Qur'an and hadith interpretation); (3) "subsidiary" (largely language-based, such as grammar, morphology or lexicology); and (4) Sufism. The inclusion of Sufism, the value of which was attested to by Shaykh Hamza as well, deserves further explanation; but the point here is that the Islamic legacy contains within itself a dynamic exchange between fixed, agreed-upon elements and those in a constant process of elaboration.

 The open endorsement of Sufism by such respectable scholars as Dr. Umar and Shaykh Hamza seems part of a recent trend to speak more directly to what has for years been referred to in "mainstream" American Muslim circles, Dr. Umar admitted, only as the "tradition of Junayd" or the "science of Ihsan." Tasawwuf or Sufism, Dr. Umar said, is essential for the believer to succeed in faith's required emotional disposition towards love. As the saying goes, "A person who has no love for God is not worth anything." True love for God, and thus the true akhlaq Muhammadiyya (Muhammadan characteristics), can only be achieved through the "path of self-transcendence": Sufism. Sufism in particular bears much of the responsibility for keeping the Islamic legacy up-to-date. The self-transcended Sufi is "the son of his time", and can appear to "have an answer for everything, even post-modern relativity." But both Dr. Umar and Shaykh Hamza shied away from saying joining a particular Sufi order (tariqa) was obligatory: it was only required that the ordinary Muslim should be aware of the principals of tasawwuf, or the science of the soul's purification.

 Significantly, Dr. Umar's own shaykh in the science of Sufism was a certain Shaykh Muhammad Abu Bakr, whom Dr. Umar describes as Ashari in theology, Maliki in jurisprudence and Ahmadi-Idrisi in Sufism. He thus demonstrates his connection to the renowned Moroccan Shaykh Ahmad Ibn Idris (d. 1837 in Yemen), a key figure in the little-studied but nonetheless extremely influential revival of Sufism in the eighteenth-century Islamic world. Several prominent scholars -- among them Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi (d. 1731) and Mustafa al-Bakri (d. 1749) in Syria, Abd al-Aziz al-Dabbagh (d. 1719) and Ahmad al-Tijani (d. 1815) in Morocco, Muhammad al-Samman (d. 1775) in Medina, Mahmud al-Kurdi (1780) in Egypt, Mir Dard (d. 1785) in India, and Ahmad Ibn Idris in Mecca and Yemen -- began expressing their reformist orientation and Sufi affiliation as the Tariqa Muhammadiyya, or "Muhammadan way."

 While certainly not a new idea, these scholarly Sufi revivalists shared an increased emphasis on the Prophet Muhammad as the ultimate Shaykh of both Sufism and jurisprudence. Practically speaking, this largely meant honoring the rich Islamic legacy through an emphasis on contact with the enduring spirituality of the Prophet, and a de-emphasis of the scholar's rigid affiliation to a particular school of jurisprudence. Significantly, this loosely articulated doctrine did not seek to sweep away centuries of scholarly activity, but rather sought to draw on the breadth of the Islamic legacy with newfound authority and insight, through a heightened awareness of the guidance embodied in the Prophet Muhammad, to meet changing circumstances.

 This background to the insights of Dr. Umar Faruq is not meant to circumscribe or delimit his opinions in any way, but only to reference a dynamic process of continuing revival and elaboration of the Islamic legacy at the dawn of the "modern" era. Even in the midst of the political, social, economic and cultural rupture of modernity, there are historically other authoritative interpretations, aside from the "psychology of rupture," which have never ceased using the Islamic legacy to adapt to changing circumstances. It is perhaps no accident that the prescription to avoid the arrogance of both doctrinairism and rupture emerges from the Tariqa Muhammadiyya's emphasis on the enduring presence of the Prophetic ideal. The advice of Dr. Umar's teacher -- "arrive to where they got to, then proceed" -- encapsulates the idea of an Islamic legacy or Prophetic tradition continuously elaborated in the present by competent scholars.