Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

1 8Islam i n World Cult u r e stertwined with important political power plays. The most often discussed instanceof such entanglement is the m i h n a , p e rhaps the closest parallel to theChristian Inquisition that one can find in medieval Islam. The mihna began inthe early ninth century when the caliph reigning at Baghdad attempted to imposeone interpretation of Islamic theology—that of the rationalist schoolknown as the Mu’tazila—as the official doctrine of his Islamic empire. In attemptingto assert his authority to determine religious orthodoxy, he orderedthat scholars who opposed him be stripped of their positions as teachers orjudges, and he sometimes even had the recalcitrant imprisoned and tortured(Zaman 1997, 106–118). These policies were abandoned after about twodecades, and the appeal of Mu’tazilite rationalism among Muslims was drasticallydiminished. Subsequently, other schools of k a l a m arose, most of themplacing more reliance on revealed knowledge than on human reason in determiningIslamic religious doctrine. Nevertheless, in the centuries following them i h n a , kalam was rarely, if ever, the primary concern of most Muslim scholars,since for most of the medieval and early modern periods, theology was not asprominent in Islam as it was in Christianity.The relative importance of k a l a m to other areas of Muslim thought andpractice is evidenced in the work of many medieval Muslim theologians, suchas that of the fourteenth-century Central Asian scholar Sa’d al-Din al-Ta f t a z a n i ,who spoke of k a l a m as “beneficial for this world insofar as it regulates the life[of humans] by preserving justice and proper conduct, both of which are essentialfor the survival of the species in ways that do not result in corruption”(quoted in Knysh 1999, 146).Thus, like Judaism, Islam has generally tended to place greater emphasis onproper conduct regulated by religious law than on the abstract formulation oforthodox dogma as the central arena of religious and intellectual activity. Onlyin the twentieth century has Islamic theology once again come to the fore inpublic debates, both internally between different groups of Muslims and externallyin the form of apologetics explicitly or implicitly arguing against the foilof modern Western thought.Islamic LawAlongside Sufism, Islamic philosophy, and k a l a m , another sphere of Islamic religiousexpression that has been central to the historical traditions of Muslimlearning is law. Although the caliphates of the classical period claimed theirauthority to rule was based on succession from Muhammad, governance intheir territories tended to be a continuation of practices long established bythe absolutist empires of the pre-Islamic Middle East, especially Byzantiumand Sasanid Persia. Feeling that such absolutist models of monarchy were con-