Abdal Hakim Murad - The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology

The social construction of orthodoxy 107
practice of authoring and teaching basic credos for memorisation. They
argued that such texts served to implant the correct tenets of belief in
the mind of the believer who would come to understand them more
fully through reason at later stages in his intellectual development.
By the end of the tenth century, the broad outlines of the developed
Sunnı orthodoxy had taken shape. This orthodoxy was structured
around several established schools of law, which defined right action,
and the three main ‘‘schools’’ of theology (Ash‘arıs, Maturıdıs and
traditionists) that defined right belief. Over the next few centuries, the
‘ulama’ worked out a system of mutual tolerance that was based on
universal agreement regarding the sacred sources, a pragmatic acceptance
of and respect for differences of opinion, and an ideal of intellectual
humility that was expressed by al-Ghazalı as follows:
I advise you, my brother, to have a good opinion of all people,
especially the scholars. And it is part of having a good opinion of
someone to look for the most positive possible interpretation of his
words, and if you cannot find [one], then blame your own inability to
find it [rather than him]. 8
The scholarly culture of Twelver Shı‘ites developed roughly a century
later. The primary reason for this lay in the role played by the infallible
Imams as supreme guides for the community until 940: inthepresence
of a living, unerring religious authority, the cultivation of religious
scholarship was not perceived as a pressing need. Only after the withdrawal
into occultation of the twelfth and final Imam and the consequent
disappearance of the Shı‘ı community’s focal point did Twelver
scholars set out to formulate the basis and content of Shı‘ı orthodoxy.
The development of Twelver scholarship was facilitated by a unique
source of funding: the khums, a fifth of all profits from trade, agriculture
and crafts, which lay Twelvers had traditionally given to the Imam and
which in the Imam’s absence was argued to be due to his representatives,
the ‘ulama’. By deriving their primary means of support directly
from the population, Twelver scholars were able to retain a higher
degree of independence than their Sunnı colleagues, who were often
dependent on waqf funding, direct patronage or appointments in the
state-controlled judicial system.
Like early Sunnism, which was characterised by a tension between
the discourses of the traditionists and the theologians, Shı‘ism was also
divided between two conflicting understandings of the nature of religious
knowledge. The Akhbarıs held that the basis of religious life – the
traditions of the Prophet and the twelve Imams – could be accessed and
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