Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

176 t CHAPTER SEVEN
(Luke 22:38). Those two swords represented the temporal power
of the emperor, (which was neither entirely secular, since from
Constantine’s day he was understood to rule over some sort of
idealized Christian commonwealth, nor entirely spiritual, since
both the emperor’s feet were firmly planted in the Roman imperial
tradition) and that of the head(s) of the Church, in the East the
patriarch of Constantinople and in West the pope in Rome. At its
highest level that duality often appears like hand-to-hand combat
between powerful individuals, but in the ranks below, the elite of
prestige and power in Christendom was unmistakably its clerics,
who controlled its sacramental system and, through their possession
of the magisterium or teaching authority, shaped the behavior
and beliefs of all Christians.
The ministry of the principal sacraments and the magisterium
were both spiritual powers possessed by the Christian clergy not
by training, habit, or experience but through the conferred gift of
the Holy Spirit. Neither Judaism nor Sunni Islam had a clergy in
anything like the same sense, and in both those cultures lawyers
were and remain the leaders of the religious community. Rabbis
were the uncontested elite of Jews living in both Christian and
Muslim societies, where they had no genuine secular competition
and very few religious rivals—the holy man (tzaddik) was one,
and the later “pietist” movements (Hasidism) also challenged mere
legal learning. The rabbi’s prestige arose from his mastery of the
law, which could be certified by the masters or school (yeshiva) he
had attended or simply by the community’s recognition.
Jewish Rabbis and Islamic Ulama:
A Comparison with a Difference
It is tempting, then, to see in the Muslim ulama the rabbis of Islam.
In a sense the comparison is just. Both groups constituted a relatively
well defined class that enjoyed the power and prestige of a
religious elite by reason of their mastery of religious law, and both
received a standardized education in jurisprudence in an institutionalized
setting. Neither were legislators in the strict sense, but