Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

204 t CHAPTER EIGHT
political limits against “sectaries.” This was the principle of a
united community, jamaa, and it survived in the common centrist
conjunction of “people of custom and the united community” (ahl
al-sunna wa al-jamaa), briefly characterized as “Sunni.” The connection
between the two notions of custom and community may
go back to the days of Ali (r. 656–661), when that caliph refused
to accept the extension of the sunna concept, the notion of normative
behavior, beyond the Prophet to his immediate successors. The
partisans of jamaa, in contrast, regarded the community and its
sunna as a continuous process and so were willing to accept the
sunna of the first three caliphs as authoritative and normative as
that of the Prophet himself.
What was important in the Sunni view was, then, staying close
to “catholic” Islam as defined by consensus, first in a political
sense by following the Commander of the Faithful or leader of the
community: praying with him, paying the alms-tithe into his
hands, following him into holy war if he so decrees, abiding by his
application of the punishments prescribed by the Quran. “Whoever
secedes from the Imam of the Muslims,” said Ahmad ibn
Hanbal (d. 855) in his Creed, “when the people have agreed upon
him and acknowledged his caliphate . .., that rebel has broken the
unity of the Muslims and opposed the tradition coming from God’s
Messenger.” But there is an even more profound sense in which
consensus defines the community. The Prophet is reported to have
blessed Muslims who “kept close to the community,” a phrase that
for Shafii, Islam’s most influential jurist, meant deviation “from
what the community of Muslims maintains. ... Error arises in
separation. In the community there can be no total error concerning
the meaning of the Book, of the Prophetic tradition,” and,
taking a large step outside the cover of revelation, he adds, “or of
analogical reasoning, please God.”
If the Kharijites were thereby willing to exclude the grave sinner
as well as the unbeliever (kafir) from their midst, there were others
such as the early jurist Abu Hanifa (d. 767) who regarded faith
(iman) as something separate from the moral activity of the individual
Muslim. Neither view entirely prevailed in the end. The definition
of faith as “confessing with the tongue, believing with the