Introduction to this Publication

Muslims of Botswana, assalamu ‘alaykum.

It is with great pleasure that we present the transcripts of the talks of Hajj
Abdalhaqq Sayf al-’Ilm Bewley delivered at the Masjid an-Nur in Gabo-
rone West during the opening days of March 2009, and with gratitude to
the Botswana Muslim Association for facilitating this crucial presentation.

It will be remembered in these pages by those who attended the talks

and seen by those who will read his words for the first time how this
Muftih has made clear to us how dire are our present circumstances but
at the same time how easily we can do something about it.

This is a critical opportunity for us as a community to act in a way pleas-

ing to Allah, indeed in way loved by Allah , as He tells us on the tongue
of His Prophet, , that we do nothing He loves more than to follow what
He has commanded. He shows the means in all three talks by clarifying
the current position of the Madhhabs, the tyranny we suffer under the
present financial system and how we can implement Zakah today.

We hope that these talks will encourage you to join with us in implement-
ing the Fard of Zakah to the extent we are able according to the guide-
lines established in Madinah al-Munawwarah during the first three glori-
ous generations.

Amir Mohammed Imraan Chand

1


The Masjid an-Nur Talks
Gaborone
2nd, 3rd & 4th March 2009

Introduction to the speaker

Hajj Abdalhaqq Sayf al-’Ilm Bewley

Assalamu alaykum to everyone.

Amir Imraan Chand has asked me to introduce our guest to you the Mus-
lims of Botswana, which seems appropriate as we have known each other
for forty years. We were brought together by our connection to Shaykh
Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi in London and our commitment to spreading Islam
among the English and establishing the first community of indigenous
European and American Muslims. This was before the oil embargo of the
mid-seventies and it seems inconceivable now but in those days nobody
knew anything of Islam except maybe the crusades and even then only
among the educated. I suppose you could say that nothing has changed
because people still do not know what Islam is, but now it is because they
are misinformed.

Please allow me to give you a brief summary of what our guest has been

2
doing over these years so that you may understand that he is no mere
academic but a man of action and commitment to Allah’s deen.

Hajj Abdalhaqq Bewley became Muslim during a visit to Morocco in 1968

and spent the following three years studying there until he returned to
England where he met and married his wife, the world-famous translator
Aisha Abdarrahman.

After four years Hajj Abdalhaqq travelled extensively and indeed has con-
tinued to do so ever since. He has been instrumental in establishing and
teaching communities through Da’wa in the south-east of Nigeria, in
Spain where he helped establish the first community of Spanish Muslims
in Cordoba. This community later moved to Granada and eventually built
the now famous new mosque opposite the Alhambra in 2002. He spent
eighteen months between Bermuda and the USA assisting the Da’wa
work of Shaykh Abdalqadir. For most of the eighties he remained in Nor-
wich, England where he was Imam of the mosque there for some time
and ran a Muslim school. At the beginning of the nineties he went to Ger-
many for two years, during which time a sizeable community was built up
including Germans from both the West and the newly accessible East.

He then moved to Slough near London for two years where he worked
teaching young people from the Pakistani community and also a strong
group of West Indian Muslims from South London.

From London to he went to Prague in the Czech Republic where he spent

a year setting up an Islamic Centre and doing Da’wa. He returned to Nor-
wich in 1998 to establish a centre for teaching Islam to new Muslims. In
July 2000 he went to Granada to run a teaching programme for new Mus-
lims which continued for 2 years.

He returned to Norwich as the Imam, then went to Cape Town to teach

Islamic Studies at the newly opened Dallas College where he remained
for a period of 2 years, combining that with the duties of Imam al-Khatib
of the Jumu’a Mosque of Cape Town for the first year following its open-
ing in 2006.

While all this was going on he and his wife also managed to produce
more than one hundred translations of Islamic texts, both ancient and
3
modern, many of which have been published. Among them are The Noble
Qur'an printed in Dubai, The Muwatta of Imam Malik, The Shifa of Qadi
Iyad, the widely distributed Sirah entitled The Life of Muhammad, and
more modern texts such as The Four Imams of Muhammad Abu Zahra, as
well as several smaller books by the Egyptian Shaykh Shahrawi. They have
also written a dozen published titles of their own, as well as many papers,
talks and khutbahs, a number of which have been published in Muslim
magazines around the world. They have recently produced the first vol-
ume of the first English translation of the great tafsir of al-Qurtubi and
also the first English translation of the Tafsir al-Jalalayn.

It can truly be said of this man that since Allah brought him to Islam he
has worked tirelessly for this glorious Deen following the example of his
teacher Shaykh Abdalqadir and we thank him for coming here to help us
in clarifying our situation as Muslims today in these tumultuous times.

I would like to add a note on the talks that he will give over the next
three days. Tonight’s talk will give us some insight on the current financial
system and tomorrow he will address the critical matter of Zakah of
which many Muslims are ill-informed today and do not have the respect
due to a foundational pillar of our Deen.

On Wednesday the topic of the Madh-habs which will have to be split

over two sessions after Maghrib and ‘Isha’ and will need the concentra-
tion of those of you participating. Again, what you will hear in those talks
-which are more like a lecture than simple talks- will give you an insight
into why there are four, how they came about, why we accept them all,
how important they were and the nature of the extraordinary men they
originated from.

Hajj Issa Bryce

Vice Chairman
Botswana Translation Bureau of Islamic Literature

4
 Islam and the World Financial System

A few years ago when computer science was still in its infancy there was
a term which was used in the more sophisticated word processing pro-
grammes which pretended to show on the screen what would appear in
the final printout and that term was ‘WYSIWYG’ – “what you see is what
you get”. In many ways that is a term which is certainly applicable to Is-
lam. What you see is what you get. In Islam there is no hidden agenda;
there is no spookiness: no mysterious rites, no sacramental ceremonies,
no magical observances. Everything is straightforward, up front. What
you see is what you get. The form of the prayer in Islam, for example, is
entirely self explicit. You can see by looking at it exactly what is going on.
It is clearly and unambiguously an act of worship. What you see is what
you get. That does not indicate any lack of profundity; on the contrary, it
means that the actions of Islam gain their inner meaning and depth not
through external obfuscation but by means of true sincerity of intention
and inward awareness of the Divine Presence which lies behind, and gives
life to, all outward phenomena.

For this reason one of the most important human qualities, the need for
which is emphasised in many places in the Qur'an, is something known in
Arabic as sidq. Sidq is a comprehensive word which means sincerity, in-
tegrity, truthfulness, trueness; that something or someone is the same
inside and out; that there is consistency right the way through. As is the
case with all human virtues this quality of sidq was most perfectly exem-
plified by the Prophet Muhammad, . If he felt anger or pleasure, they
were clearly visible in his face. People knew exactly where they stood
with him. When he spoke to someone he would turn his whole body to-
wards them. His absolute sincerity was tangible. He was always true to
his word. And he hated the opposite qualities of deception and hypocrisy.

Once when he was walking through the market in Madinahh he passed a

grain merchant who was sitting beside a heap of grain which he was sell-
ing. The Prophet put his hand into it and felt some dampness with his
fingers. He asked the man about that and he replied, “The rain caught it,
Messenger of Allah.” The Prophet reprimanded the man saying, “Why did
you not put it on top of the heap so that the people could see it! Anyone
5
who cheats us is not one of us.” So he was in effect saying that cheating
and hypocrisy put a person outside the pale of Islam; that this quality of
sidq is an essential component of a Muslim man or woman. In fact it is
clear from the Qur'an and many other sayings of the Prophet that hypoc-
risy, which is to give the appearance of being something whereas in real-
ity being something quite different, is one of the worst characteristics
that it is possible to possess, worse even than outright unbelief. Hypo-
crites have their place in the very lowest level of Hellfire.

Now what has all of this got to do with the subject of this talk: Islam and
the world financial system. The answer is: a great deal. Because the fact is
that the Pulas in your pocket are very definitely not what they appear to
be. What they claim to be is a simple medium of exchange; you hand over
some Pulas and get a bag of rice in return. Their reality, however, is
something very different to this. What they really are is not so much a
medium of exchange as a means of control. In order to understand this it
is necessary to go back in history a bit and see how the pieces of paper
we now call money came into existence.

Originally, and almost universally, money took the form of gold and silver
coinage. However, people who had large quantities of gold and silver
used frequently to hand it over for safekeeping to gold and silversmiths
who, due to the nature of their trade in precious metals and bullion, usu-
ally had secure strong-rooms. In return the goldsmith would issue them
with a receipt for what they had deposited. The goldsmith would make a
charge for storage and for any services of this kind he performed. After a
time some people started to use these receipts instead of the gold itself,
transferring the receipt to someone else's name when paying a large
debt. In this way, privately-issued notes began to make their appearance
as a medium of exchange, but they were still exactly equivalent to the
gold in the goldsmith's possession and their total volume was very small
in comparison with the normal cash transactions in actual gold and silver
that generally took place.

After a while, however, the goldsmiths realised that the deposits they
held on behalf of other people tended to remain at a more or less con-
stant level and so they started to issue extra receipts for the value of
given amounts of gold, over and above those they had already given out,
which people could come and cash in with them if they wanted. These
6
they used both to pay for things for themselves and increasingly, as cir-
cumstances permitted, to make loans which people would repay in gold
coinage with interest, thus enabling the goldsmiths to increase their
stocks of gold without paying out anything at all. The people who took
the notes would also use them in place of the gold and silver they
claimed to represent. This, properly speaking, constituted the origin of
the paper notes that are today all the money we know. The important
thing to realise is that a considerable number of these notes issued by the
goldsmiths were in reality entirely fictitious; they were not backed-up by
any gold at all. Money had, in effect, been conjured out of thin air. This
transaction, which was then, and still is, quite frankly fraudulent, mirrors
exactly the way that the Pulas in your pocket come into existence.

It soon became obvious that this activity of literally creating money out of
nothing was an extremely profitable business and the goldsmiths in-
volved soon gave up their honourable craft of turning gold into objects of
beauty to devote themselves to it entirely. They added to the issuing of
paper money two other complementary transactions – the processing of
bills of exchange and the negotiation of loans – and invented the new and
enormously powerful business of banking. This process did not happen
overnight and evolved gradually between the mid 16th and mid 17th cen-
turies, when it suddenly emerged as the force to be reckoned with. In
England the Earl of Clarendon, a senior figure in the government of the
time, wrote in the 1660's: ‘Bankers were a tribe that had risen and grown
up in Cromwell's time and never even heard of before the late troubles,
(referring to the English Civil War) till when the whole trade of money
had passed through the hands of the scriveners (the people who wrote
contracts and negotiated loans); these bankers were for the most part
goldsmiths.’

There was, however, one recently introduced element on which the

whole edifice of banking was entirely dependent for its profitability. That
element was usury – known to us by the Arabic term Riba. This appeared
in its most prevalent form of charging interest on money loaned. Without
this, banking would not have been possible. Nowadays the interest rate
and its fluctuations and the open and hidden effects of that on us is so
much part of our lives that it is difficult to imagine the world without it.
We entirely forget that up until the 16th century the charging of interest
was totally forbidden, not only in Islam but also in Christian Europe, and
7
that this prohibition stemmed not only from categorical Divine ordi-
nances both in the Bible and the Qur'an but also from its universal con-
demnation and rejection by the whole Greco-Roman philosophical cor-
pus. On this matter religious and secular tradition spoke with one voice,
knowing the potentially catastrophic effect of usury once it is introduced
into human affairs.

However, putting themselves above this combined consensus of Divine

injunction and inherited human wisdom, some leaders of the Christian
Reformation, notable among them Calvin in Geneva – undoubtedly under
pressure from powerful contemporary business interests – decided that
they knew better and legitimised the charging of interest on loans. This
opened the floodgates to a torrent which within a very short time had
changed the whole political and economic landscape of Europe and which
has now engulfed the entire globe.

This is not the time to trace the development of all the changes which
took place but suffice it to say that the worst fears of our ancestors were
realised and power became rapidly concentrated into the hands of fewer
and fewer financiers who controlled political affairs from behind the
scenes, holding no social responsibility whatsoever for the millions of
human beings who in ever greater numbers fell under their control. One
of the great studies of this process was written by the English historian
R.H. Tawney. Its title is Religion and the Rise of Capitalism and it is indis-
pensable reading for anyone interested in this subject. He says in it,
speaking of the new financial power brokers who had no political loyal-
ties, and funded protestants and Catholics alike, frequently financing
both sides in a single armed conflict, that they:

…represented in the economic sphere the morality typified in

that of politics by Machiavelli's Prince. Compared with these fi-
nancial dynasties, the Habsburgs, Valois, and Tudors (in other
words the great ruling houses of Europe) were puppets dancing
on wires held by a money-power to which political struggles were
irrelevant except as an opportunity for gain.

And that was just the beginning of the story.

It is important at this point to remember that I have not gone off on some
8
kind of abstruse historical excursion. By referring to these things I am still
talking specifically about the money in your pocket: about what it repre-
sents and how it comes to be there. It was precisely their ability to con-
jure money out of nothing by issuing paper which was supposed to be
backed by gold but was in fact mostly backed by nothing at all – just like
your Pulas – that gave these people the power they held over others. One
of the early bankers, Mayer Rothschild, was brutally explicit about it say-
ing, “Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes the
laws.”

As long as there was at least a nominal connection with gold, the credit
bubbles created by the financiers and their phoney money were at least
tethered to the earth and when they eventually burst, leaving many thou-
sands impoverished at different times and in different places, and it be-
came clear that the paper was worth in reality no more than the ink it
was printed with, the situation was soon able to restore itself to a more
solid foundation. But when, in 1972, President Nixon severed the link
between the dollar and gold, a new situation came into existence. There
was now no restraint whatsoever on the creation of credit or "banker's
money". It was the financier's dream come true but has rapidly become a
nightmare scenario for all but a tiny percentage of the world's popula-
tion, even if very few people were really aware of it until recent events
made its frightening reality only too clear. Egged on by world-wide elec-
tronic communication and markets which have proliferated on an un-
precedented scale the credit bubble has now expanded to what can only
be described as insane dimensions.

The money which has now come into existence and which for the most
part only exists as electronic signals winging their way through cyber
space from one computer to another, can no longer even be counted. To
give you some idea of the crazy stage which things have now reached, it
has been calculated that the amount of money which changes hands daily
on just the international currency exchange market, which is merely one
among hundreds of other markets, is in the trillions of dollars and equiva-
lent to the total annual turnover of world trade in real goods. The total
value of the yearly sales of real goods everywhere in the world changes
hands on the money markets every single day. There would not be
enough paper to make so much money even if all the timber on the
planet was used to do it and if the notes to make such a sum were placed
9
one on top of the other the pile would reach beyond the moon! It would
seem like some kind of mad joke were the effects not so desperately seri-
ous for individual human beings and nations and indeed the planet as a
whole.

There is no person on the earth who does not now live and die in debt,
whether they know it or not, and an ever increasing number know it only
too well as their personal debts to banks and credit agencies mount and
mount, causing terrible anxiety and stress and not infrequently leading to
crime and sometimes suicide. The situation of national debt in nearly
every country in the world is notorious. Even the lands which are wealthi-
est in terms of natural resources are now hopelessly in debt to suprana-
tional financial institutions and the total national income of many poorer
countries does not even cover the interest payments on the money they
owe, much of which has been borrowed to finance vast megaprojects
whose incalculable environmental damage to the earth's increasingly
fragile ecostructure is becoming more and more evident day by day. And
this is just the tip of the iceberg of the detrimental effects of the world
financial system. And it is all so that an infinitesimal percentage of the
world's population, who are virtually unknown but who themselves know
how to manipulate the situation, can skim billions off the top of the
money mountain, and wield wealth and power to an extent never con-
ceived of before in the whole of human history.

Shaykh Abdalqadir As-Sufi graphically sums up the present situation in his

book, Technique of the Coup de Banque:

We are tyrannised, enslaved, and endebted to an entirely un-

elected elite whose names we do not even know. With hereditary
titles abolished and with hereditary wealth made impossible for
the masses through powerful taxation, the case of this elite re-
mains an anomaly. Their wealth and their lands spiral up into
almost incalculable statistics, beyond the dreams of Alexander.
They have no racial loyalty. They have no class loyalty. They
certainly have no national loyalty. Upholding humanism, it could
be said that they have no human loyalty. Insisting on their com-
passion they uphold the Rights of Man, sure in the certainty that
the upholding of that empty rhetoric will distract you from ever
attempting to refrain from their monetary system and live with-
10
 out banking …
All the crimes of all the criminals in the world added together
do not amount to the enormity of the crime that they daily com-
mit through their continued application of the usury system. The
pollution of the ocean is their achievement. The poisoning of the
earth is the result of their programmes. The toxic air of the
world's megacities is the direct result of their existence. The mil-
lions of dead caused by the sporadic uprising across the globe of
the poor driven from their land, who in abject misery turn on
their neighbours, the world's poor scavenging on rubbish tips are
to them an unfortunate side-effect of their monetary policies.

The present so-called credit crunch is the direct result of the untram-
meled greed of these criminal financiers and, because of the unprece-
dented freedom they have been given to conjure their billions out of
nothing, the collapse now faced by the world financial system is also
without any historical precedent and only very first phase of its terrible
effects have so far been felt. Of one thing we can be sure, however; the
financiers themselves are not going to be those who suffer. Their outra-
geous bonus culture has ensured that they have already siphoned off
their billions. They have bought their large properties and invested in
ways which will make sure they get through the coming bad times un-
scathed. No the sufferers will, as usual, be the poor of the world who will
lose their jobs and find their lives made more and more difficult, as reces-
sion turns to depression and increasing unemployment leads to hunger
and even destitution.

We cannot sit here and act as if this appalling situation has nothing to do
with us. The Pulas in our pockets are not the medium of exchange they
pretend to be; they are precisely the financial instrument which has en-
abled the present situation to come about and which allow it to continue
to proliferate and cause such havoc in the world. Our willing participation
in the process is what keeps it going. We are nothing but usury fodder,
actively conniving in our own financial problems and, indeed, in the very
destruction of the planet on which we live.

"But there's nothing we can do about it," I hear people say, "we have no
other alternative." That is no longer true. We do have a choice. There is
something that we can do but that something can only be found within
11
the parameters of a functioning Muslim community. Islam alone is now
able to uphold the authority of divinely revealed law and provide the
means for cutting through the magical deception of the usurer’s all-
enveloping web. The divinely revealed legal framework for a commercial
environment totally free of the machinations of the usurers is still entirely
in place and is just waiting to be re-implemented; but our chief weapon is
our money itself.

The gold dinar and the silver dirham of the Muslims, the money men-
tioned in the Qur’an and sanctioned by the use of the Messenger himself,
sallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallim, are exactly what they say they are: nothing
more nor less than 4.3 grammes of solid gold and 3 grammes of solid sil-
ver respectively; they truly are simply a legitimate, divinely sanctioned,
medium of exchange. This and this alone can restore balance and justice
to the day to day commercial transactions which are the life blood of any
normally functioning human society and which play such an important
and vital part in the life of every human being.

Many intelligent non-Muslims have become all too aware of the situation
and a few exceptionally clear-sighted ones have even hit on the solution.
For instance the French President Charles de Gaulle realised it all too
clearly shortly before his death and he tried to change the situation. He
put out a forthright statement on the subject saying:

The fact that many nations in principle accept dollars as being

the same as gold when making up any differences, which exist to
their credit in the balance of payments between themselves and
America, has meant that the Americans are able to incur debts
with foreign nations with complete impunity since such debts
can be paid, at least in part, with dollars, which they can them-
selves issue at will.
Given the consequences that could well arise from such a
state of affairs we think that a timely step to avoid them should
be taken before they do. We consider it necessary that interna-
tional exchanges should be established, as was the case before
the great disasters which have befallen the world, on an indis-
putable monetary basis that bears the mark of no one particular
country.
And what is that basis? The truth is that it is difficult to envis-
12
 age that there could be in reality any other criterion or standard
than gold itself.

And there have been a few others since who have unsuccessfully tried to
reintroduce gold into the international financial arena. But the plain truth
is that only we, the Muslims, are in a position to fill this vital role. We
have a Divine mandate to return to gold and silver coinage and indeed
must do it in order to properly uphold the third pillar of Islam, the pay-
ment of Zakah on monetary wealth, which all the traditional authorities
agree can only be correctly discharged using actual gold and silver. The
matter is clear and it is not difficult to achieve. It simply requires clear
understanding and firm resolve on the part of a body of Muslims to turn
it into a living reality. For instance, by taking this on the Muslims of
Southern Africa alone could truly change the world.

Just as the staff of Musa, , cut through the sophisticated sorcery of

the magicians of Pharaoh and showed it to be the baseless illusion it

really was, so the dinar of Muhammad, , will cut through the equally
magical deception of the usurer's monetary system and show it up for
what it really is: worthless scraps of paper and evanescent numbers in
cyberspace with no real value whatsoever. The gold dinar will put eco-
nomic power back into the hands of ordinary men and women where it
belongs. This is Islam in practice. This is Divine guidance in action. What
you see is what you get.

13
 Zakah

It is well known to all of us that the there are five absolutely indispensa-
ble elements which make up Islam, all of which are absolutely essential to
the practice of our deen. We find them clearly delineated in the authentic
hadith reported by 'Abdallah ibn 'Umar,  and his father, in which he
said: “I heard the Messenger of Allah, , say: ‘Islam is built on five: wit-
nessing that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messen-
ger of Allah, establishment of the prayer, payment of Zakah, Hajj of the
House, and the fast of Ramadan.’”

We know from this, and many other Qur’anic and Prophetic references,
that Zakah is an absolutely indispensable element of Islam as a whole.
Salah and Zakah are explicitly coupled together in the Qur’an at least
twenty-nine times and many more times in an implicit way. The phrase
“aqimu’s-Salah wa atu’z-Zakah” – “establish the Salah and pay the Za-
kah” – is a refrain which permeates Allah’s Book from beginning to end.
This has been taken by some significant mufassirun to be evidence of the
fact that Salah and Zakah are in effect interdependent. What they mean
by this is evidence, in a legal sense, that a person’s prayer is not accept-
able unless their Zakah has been properly discharged.

The first khalifah of the Muslims, Abu Bakr as-Siddiq, , confirmed this
interpretation by saying that he would fight anyone who made a distinc-
tion between Salah and Zakah and, indeed he carried out his threat, since
this was the basic cause of the Ridda Wars which took place during his
caliphate. Yet, despite this, there is no doubt that the great majority of
Muslims definitely consider Salah to be much more important than Za-
kah. There is no doubt that many of us fail to give Zakah the prime impor-
tance it is due as the third indispensable pillar of our deen.

Although is not our aim on this occasion to go into to the fiqh of Zakah in
a detailed way, it is nevertheless important to present a comprehensive
overview of the key elements involved. This will help us to begin to recog-
nise its main characteristics and see it clearly as the essential but ne-
glected act of ibadah it is, whose purpose is to serve as a social safety net

14
for the most needy people in every Muslim community.

Perhaps we should first of all briefly mention Zakat-al-Fitr, if only to make

it clear that this is not to be confused with the pillar of Zakah that we are
talking about here. Zakat-al-Fitr is a legal obligation connected to Sawm,
the pillar of fasting in Ramadan. Zakat-al-Fitr is binding on every Muslim
and has its own rules and conditions, which connect to the fiqh of fasting
and to the Eid. However, discharging the obligation of Zakat-al-Fitr at the
end of Ramadan, which every Muslim must do, has nothing whatsoever
to do with the pillar of Zakah which we are talking about here.

The payment of Zakah proper, the Zakah which is the third pillar of Islam,
becomes obligatory for every Muslim provided they fulfill certain condi-
tions. The first is Islam itself: Zakah is not paid by non-Muslims. Freedom
is another condition: Zakah is not paid by slaves. The third condition is
possession of the nisab. The nisab is the minimum amount of wealth on
which Zakah is due. If a Muslim has less than that no Zakah is owed. A
further condition is actual ownership. Zakah is only paid by Muslims on
property which actually belongs to them and moreover which is in their
possession at the time. Finally there is hawl: a general rule that Zakah is
only paid by Muslims on wealth which has been in their possession for a
year or more.

Zakah is also subject to certain other factors. As with all our acts of wor-
ship, and indeed all our actions in general, a vital element in the payment
of Zakah is the niyyah – the intention behind it – which must be made by
the person who pays it. They must specifically intend to be fulfilling their
obligation of paying Zakah to make it valid. The time of payment is an-
other important factor. In the same way that there is a specific time for
the prayer, the fast and the hajj, there is also a correct time for paying
Zakah.

Another factor which was always integral to the correct payment of Za-
kah is its proper collection. Traditionally Zakah has always been collected
by officially appointed collectors. The important point to grasp is that,
legally speaking, Zakah is not the act of individual voluntary Sadaqah it
has now universally become. Another vitally important aspect of Zakah
which has largely been abandoned is the matter of its correct distribu-
tion, which we will look at in more detail later. There is no doubt, how-
15
ever, that Zakah should basically be distributed locally since its primary
purpose is to look after the needs of poor Muslims in the area in which it
is paid. Only in the event of there being no eligible Muslims in the local
community should it be distributed further afield.

A final factor which it is vital to grasp, if the pillar of Zakah is to be re-

stored to its rightful place at the heart of Islam, is that only the correct
elements should be used to pay it. Zakah is only payable on three types of
wealth – livestock, agricultural produce and monetary wealth including
trade goods – and the precise means by which it may be paid, have been
clearly defined from the time of the Prophet, , onwards and have been
confirmed by every generation of ‘ulama since. They are: animals of a
precise type and age in the case of the Zakah on livestock; grain, fruit or
oil of a precise quantity and quality in the case of agricultural Zakah; and,
crucially, gold or silver of a precise weight in the case of the Zakah of
monetary wealth and trade goods.

The proof that it was the metal itself – actual gold and silver – rather than
any particular type of currency which was required in payment of Zakah
on monetary wealth, is shown by the fact that the amount owed is calcu-
lated by the precise weight of gold or silver needed to pay it; it was never
calculated in purely monetary terms. As we will see, despite the current
situation, whereby monetary wealth is now measured in terms of paper
and electronic currencies, this requirement to pay the Zakah of monetary
wealth and trade goods in actual gold or silver has not changed.

We have already mentioned the importance of the correct distribution of

Zakah and this has not been left to personal choice. The people who may
receive Zakah are clearly delineated in the Qur’an in ayah 60 of Surat at-
Tawba the meaning of which is as follows:

Sadaqah is for the poor,

the destitute,
reconciling people’s hearts,
freeing slaves,
those in debt,
spending in the way of Allah
and travellers.

16
 It is a legal obligation from Allah,
Allah is all-Knowing, All-Wise

The word sadaqah, as used in this ayah, has always been understood by
mufassirun and ‘ulama to refer specifically to Zakah. These categories of
Zakah recipients which are listed in this ayah have been defined by the
scholars of Islam throughout the centuries and are clearly explained in
the classical commentary which the Tafsir Jalalayn gives on this ayah. It
says:

The word, sadaqah, used here means Zakah so the meaning

of the ayah is: Zakah is for and must be distributed to: the
poor, – who are those who do not have enough to cover
their normal needs; the destitute – they are those without
anything at all; those who collect it – they are those who
collect the Zakah and distribute it, and the scribes who re-
cord it; reconciling people’s hearts – this entails, amongst
other things, the use of Zakah to encourage other people to
become Muslim; freeing slaves – this is by giving them what
they need to purchase their freedom; those in debt – that is
people who ask for help to pay debts, provided those debts
have not been incurred in disobedience to Allah; spending in
the Way of Allah – Zakah can be used for helping those who
do not have the means to undertake jihad; and travellers –
those who are prevented by lack of means from completing
their journey. It is a legal obligation from Allah. Allah is All
-knowing of His creation, All-Wise in what He does. It is not
permitted to give Zakah to people outside these categories
or to deny it to any of them if the need exists. So the ruler
should divide it among them but can give more to some
categories if necessary…”

It can be seen from this that the use of Zakah is very specific and that it
acts as a form of safety net for the most needy members of society in any
Muslim community. Zakah may not be used in any other way. For in-
stance, people often think that Zakah can be used, under the heading
“spending in the way of Allah”, for projects such as building or purchasing
a mosque or Islamic centre or school, when in fact, this is not a valid use
of Zakah.
17
We made it clear earlier that officially authorised collection of Zakah was
an integral factor in its correct implementation. This was the case from
the time of the Prophet, , onwards. He is commanded in the Qur'an, in
ayah 103 of Surat at-Tawbah to: "Take sadaqah from their wealth to pu-
rify and cleanse them." As in the previously quoted ayah about the recipi-
ents of Zakah, the word “sadaqah” in this context is universally accepted
as referring to Zakah. The important point to realise is the fact that this is
a command from Allah. The leader of the Muslims is ordered to take Za-
kah; it is not left to the choice of the individual donor. The Prophet, ,
confirmed this in his words of instruction to Mu’adh when sending him to
Yemen. He said to him: “Allah has made it obligatory for Zakah to be
taken from their property and given to their poor.” Again it is clear from
this that Zakah is to be taken by the Muslim authorities; its payment is
not to be left to the will of the individual concerned.

This obligation for the leader of the Muslims to actually take Zakah from
the Muslims is further vividly illustrated by the words and actions of the
first khalifah, Abu Bakr as-Siddiq, we referred to earlier. After affirming
the inseparable connection between Salah and Zakah, he declared, “If
they refuse me even a hobbling rope, which they used to pay to the Mes-
senger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, I will fight them
for it.” And, as we know, he went on to risk the very existence of the
fledgling Muslim community by carrying out his threat. This shows that
he considered the collection of Zakah to be an absolute duty of the politi-
cal leader of the Muslim community.

It is clear, therefore, that the collection and distribution of Zakah is an

integral function of Muslim governance and history shows that all the
schools of fiqh have upheld this organic connection between Zakah and
political authority. It was something which was taken for granted
throughout all the centuries of Muslim rule up until the present time.
Centrally appointed collection and distribution of Zakah is assumed in all
the traditional literature on the subject and is the clear position of the
four madhabs of Islam. They are all in agreement about the integral con-
nection of Zakah to Muslim governance. For instance, Imam as-Sarakhsi,
the famous Hanafi scholar, says in his book al-Mabsut: “Zakah is a right of
Allah and is to be collected and distributed by the leader of the Muslims or
his appointees. If anyone pays his Zakah to anyone else it does not re-

18
move from him the obligation of Zakah.” Imam Malik says in the Mu-
watta: “The distribution of Zakah is up to the individual judgment of the
man in charge... There is no fixed share for the collector of Zakah except
as the leader of the Muslims sees fit.” Imam ash-Shafi'i says in al-Umm
about the Qur'anic category, “those who collect it,” that they are those
appointed by the khalifah of the Muslims to collect and distribute Zakah.
And Imam Ahmad is quoted in the book Ash-sharih ar-rabbani li musnad
Ahmad as saying, “The khalifah alone has the authority and responsibility
to collect and distribute Zakah whether by himself or through those he
appoints and he has the authority and responsibility to fight those who
refuse to pay it.”

These are merely four representative examples from literally thousands

of other corroborating possibilities, so it is clear that right from the time
of its original prescription, the collection and distribution of Zakah was an
integral and inseparable function of Muslim governance. The fact that the
collection and distribution of Zakah is no longer in the hands of the politi-
cal leaders of the Muslim community, means in effect that the pillar of
Zakah can no longer be said to exist in the way it was prescribed by Allah
in His Book and subsequently implemented by His Messenger, . The
payment and distribution of Zakah by isolated individuals, which is what
Zakah has at best been reduced to at the present time, does not in fact
properly fulfill the legal obligation of Zakah, because, as we have seen,
the active involvement of established Muslim political leadership is es-
sential if it is to be implemented correctly. Lack of this organic connection
between Zakah and Muslim leadership necessarily means that the nature
of Zakah has been altered beyond any recognition from its original func-
tion and practice.

Plainly said: unless it is collected and distributed according to the Shari'ah

by a recognized Muslim political authority, it is, properly speaking, not
really Zakah. So a first priority for us, if we really desire to see the pillar of
Zakah restored to its pivotal place at the heart of Islam, must be to en-
sure politically effective Muslim leadership, at least at the local level of
every Muslim community. Without this it is impossible for the collection
and distribution of Zakah to be correctly implemented according to the
Shari'ah.

19
Another factor which has played a major role in undermining Zakah and
which has gone hand in hand with the loss of political authority we have
noted, has been the change in the nature of wealth and money over the
last two centuries or so. Until the end of the eighteenth century the chief
measures of wealth in human society were land, and the animals and
agricultural produce produced on it, and mercantile wealth, which was
exclusively measured in terms of gold and silver coinage. These natural
components of human prosperity are highlighted by Allah ta'ala in the
Qur'an in Sura Ali 'Imran when He mentions:
…heaped-up mounds of gold and silver, and horses
with markings, and livestock and fertile farmland. 3:14.
And, as we have seen, these are the very things on which Zakah, as a tax
on superfluous wealth, is levied: particular types of agricultural produce,
livestock, and monetary wealth, when any of these reaches the level of
the nisab, in other words a level which is over and above the legitimate
immediate needs of the individual concerned.

The problem is that the urban existence of the vast majority of Muslims
in the world today means that Zakah on livestock and agricultural pro-
duce has basically no relevance at all to their lives. It is also the case that
gold and silver have long ceased to be used as currency and this has
meant that Muslims no longer recognise the need to pay Zakah on their
monetary wealth and trade goods in these two metals, in spite of the fact
that, as we have seen, this is the way that the Shari'ah demands that it
should be paid.

The rise of the banking industry, which brought paper money into general
use and has made it, in most cases, the only legal medium of exchange,
has made it very difficult to measure, or even establish the monetary
wealth owned by a Muslim on which Zakah must be paid. What is at issue
here, where Zakah is concerned, is the relationship between gold and
silver – on which, and with which, Zakah must be paid – and the paper
money, and now increasingly the electronic currencies, which today make
up most people’s monetary wealth.

20
Although many Muslims are not aware of it, this whole matter has been
much discussed by the scholars of Islam. The use of paper money, which
we now take for granted and which is the only money we know, is in
many ways contrary to the Shari'ah and many ‘ulama fought a strong
rearguard action against its introduction into Muslim lands. One reason
for this was because of the difficulties it placed in the way of Zakah and
the consequent threat it posed to Islam as a whole. Although some mod-
ernist Muslims have tried to adapt and compromise the Shari’ah to make
it fit in with the present economic system, the truth is, as many ‘ulama
have made indisputably plain, that the deen cannot be fudged in this
way. The Shari’ah on this matter is clear: Zakah on monetary wealth and
trade goods may only be paid in actual gold or silver.
A number of fatwahs about this matter have been issued by Islamic schol-
ars, including the landmark fatwa of Shaykh ‘Illish, the great Shaykh of al-
Azhar of the late 19th century. A translation of the full text of this fatwa
can be found in the book Zakah – The Fallen Pillar of Islam. Paper money
had just been introduced for the first time as currency within the Otto-
man Empire and Shaykh ‘Illish was asked whether Zakah should be paid
on it or not. In summary his answer was that Zakah should not be paid on
it because, unlike gold and silver on which Zakah must be paid, the paper
which was acting as currency had no intrinsic value. Zakah would only be
owed on it if there was sufficient weight of it for its value as scrap paper
to reach the amount of the nisab on which Zakah would be payable on it
as merchandise.
This makes the principle involved extremely clear: Zakah can only be paid
using those means, which are clearly defined in the Book and Sunnah,
namely livestock, agricultural produce and actual gold and silver. Unlike
paper money, these are all things which have value in themselves as com-
modities. If you deface a gold coin it is still worth its weight in gold,
whereas if you deface a hundred Pula note it is worth virtually nothing at
all.
It might be said, going strictly by this understanding, that no Zakah is
owed on wealth held in bank accounts and other modern forms of saving
and investment because no actual gold or silver is involved. However,
going by the fact that the original intention of paper money was to repre-
sent particular amounts of gold and silver, it has been argued that, for
Zakah purposes, monetary wealth held in these forms should be valued in

21
terms of the amount of gold or silver that can be bought with it. If this
amount exceeds the nisab, Zakah is owed. Certainly, if Zakah is to be paid
at all in the present circumstances, and this is something which must be
done both to re-establish Allah’s deen in its entirety and to look after the
needs of millions of Muslims who are legally entitled to it, then this is the
position which needs to be adopted by Muslims everywhere. What must
be emphasised, however, is that this in no way removes the obligation for
Muslims to pay Zakah in the actual gold or silver categorically demanded
by the Shari'ah.

Since the Zakah on monetary wealth has to be paid in gold or silver, it is

essential to know exactly what amount of gold and silver constitutes the
nisab, the minimum amount on which Zakah is owed. The nisab in the
case of gold is 20 dinars by weight and in the case of silver it is 200 dir-
hams by weight, so we need to know the exact weight of both the dinar
and the dirham to find out whether or not we owe Zakah and if we do,
how much we have to pay.

Both dinars and dirhams are mentioned in the Qur’an and were in use
during the lifetime of the Prophet, . The exact weight and purity of
those coins were carefully recorded at the time and have been passed
down through the centuries. The dinar weighed 72 grains of pure gold
whose equivalent in modern terms is 4.25 grams. The modern equivalent
of the dirham is 3 grams of silver. On this basis, as far as Zakah is con-
cerned, the nisab for gold is 4.25 x 20 which works out at 85 grams, and
for silver 3 x 200 which comes to 600 grams. The exact value of these
amounts of gold and silver in whatever currency is in use in the place
where a person’s Zakah is being assessed, will, of course, depend on their
market value at the time and will need to be calculated at the time and
place that the Zakah is being assessed.

In the modern context gold dinars and silver dirhams, conforming exactly
to the traditional dimensions, were minted in 1992 by Muslim communi-
ties in both Britain and Spain and since then have also been produced in
considerable quantities in Indonesia, South Africa, Malaysia and Dubai.

22
This has resulted in their availability for the payment of Zakah in various
places throughout the world. However, because it is the actual weight of
gold and silver which are the vital factor where Zakah is concerned, there
is no reason why Krugerrands or gold sovereigns or indeed any other
form of gold and silver should not also be used to pay Zakah, provided of
course they are of the right weight and purity. The important points,
which must again be stressed, are that firstly, according to the Shari'ah,
the Zakah owed on monetary wealth may only be paid in actual gold and
silver and secondly that there is in fact no difficulty in obtaining the gold
and silver necessary to accomplish this.
In conclusion we have seen that a combination of factors – namely the
fact that Zakah is no longer collected and distributed under Muslim politi-
cal authority and the fact that there has been a total change in the nature
of wealth in recent times – has meant that Zakah, the pivotal third pillar
of the deen, has, to all intents and purposes, ceased to exist in anything
like its original form and is certainly not being implemented in the way
demanded by all sound Muslim legal authorities throughout Islamic his-
tory. At best it has now been left to individual choice and relegated to the
realms of private sadaqah, which is very different from the pillar of Zakah
commanded by Allah and instituted by His Messenger, , and the rightly
guided khalifahs who succeeded him,  ajma‘in.

This being the case it is clearly the duty of all Muslims to do everything
within their power to put this right and restore the pillar of Zakah to its
rightful place as one of the essential mainstays of Islam. As we have seen,
to make this possible certain steps need to be taken, which can be sum-
marised under four main headings.

POLITICAL LEADERSHIP: – As we have seen, recognised and active political

leadership within each Muslim community is absolutely indispensable for
the correct collection and distribution of Zakah. Therefore, we should
either appoint new leaders from amongst ourselves who we then em-
power to organise the proper implementation of the pillar of Zakah, or
we should approach and empower existing leadership to take it on.

23
ASSESSMENT & COLLECTION: – One of the first tasks of such leadership
will be to appoint Zakah assessors and collectors. Not only will they have
to be trustworthy and discrete, but they will also have to have the requi-
site knowledge of the fiqh of Zakah needed to calculate a person’s Zakah
in the present situation and be able to deal with any special circum-
stances. So even if they are well versed in the traditional fiqh of Zakah
they will also need to be clear on how to address the many new matters
that the current financial system has thrown up.

GOLD AND SILVER COINAGE: – As we have seen access to gold and silver
coinage is essential for the correct payment of Zakah. Dinars and dirhams
of the correct weight and purity of gold and silver are now available from
a number of sources. As well as this other types of gold and silver coinage
can also be easily obtained. It will be necessary to value cash and other
assets in terms of the amount of gold or silver they can buy at that mo-
ment in that particular geographic location so that the exact weight of
the metal concerned owed as Zakah can be correctly calculated. It must
also be said that although Zakah must be collected and distributed in gold
or silver, there is no harm in that gold or silver subsequently being ex-
changed for other forms of currency if that would make it easier for re-
cipients. It is, however, hoped that within a reasonably short period of
time the use of gold and silver coinage by traders and shopkeepers will
become more and more commonplace so that such exchanges will cease
to be necessary.

DISTRIBUTION: – The matter of the distribution of Zakah must be taken

very seriously. Collected Zakah should be given as soon as possible to
identified recipients within the Qur’anically defined eight categories. The
leader of the community will have to liaise with the collectors and others,
firstly to prioritise the categories of people entitled to receive Zakah in
their particular location and secondly to decide how much each individual
should be given.

I would like to finish by saying that what we have been talking about here
is not just a theoretical possibility, some pie in the sky idea, some unreal-
isable dream about how things might be. This method of collecting and
24
distributing Zakah in gold and silver, according to the original model first
demonstrated for us by the Prophet, , and continued down through the
centuries of Islam until comparatively recent times, has already been re-
activated without difficulty in a number of Muslim communities through-
out the world. It is in fact easy to do this and requires nothing more than
the will to make it happen. And what greater incentive for us could there
be than the words of our beloved Prophet himself, who told us: “Anyone
who revives an aspect of my Sunnah that is forgotten after my death, will
have a reward equivalent to that of all the people who follow him, with-
out that diminishing their reward in any way.” (At-Tirmidhi) He also said,
, on the same lines: “Anyone who revives my Sunnah in the time of cor-
ruption will receive the reward of a hundred shuhada.” (al-Baihaqi) And in
this case Fard and Sunnah combine together because we are talking
about the re-establishment of Zakah, one of the fundamental obligations
of our deen, and Allah ta’ala assures us on the tongue of His Messenger,
, in a famous hadith qudsi: “My slave draws nearer to Me by nothing I
love more than what I have made obligatory for him.” What more could
we want; what greater reward could there be? Therefore we ask Allah,
tabaraka wa ta’ala, to give us success in re-establishing the third pillar of
His deen, Zakah, in the way He has prescribed it for us in His Book and the
way it was implemented by His Messenger, , and those who have fol-
lowed him down through the ages and that by doing that we may earn a
great reward from Him and contribute significantly to the victory of Islam
in our time.

25
 The Nature of the Four Madhhabs of Islam and
their Relationship with the Present Time

All Muslims agree that the basis of Islam is the Book and Sunnah and al-
most all Muslims agree that if someone follows the teachings of any one
of the four orthodox madhhabs of Islam – the Hanafi Madhhab, the
Maliki Madhhab, the Shafi‘i Madhhab and the Hanbali Madhhab – they
will certainly be living within the parameters of the Book and Sunnah. The
great majority of Muslims are affiliated to one or the other of these
madhhabs but for almost all of them this affiliation takes place for purely
geographical reasons and very few know very much about the nature of
the madhhab they belong to. There is a common perception that the
madhhabs are all more or less the same and only differ in respect of slight
legal points such as where you put your hands in the prayer and other
things of that nature. But that does not really explain why there should
be these four madhhabs at all. In order to discover the reason for their
existence it is necessary to look at each of them and find out how and
why they came into being in the first place.

The first of the four madhhabs in historical terms is the Madhhab of Abu
Hanifah who was born in roughly 80AH and died in 150AH. The salient
fact about Imam Abu Hanifah, rahimahullahu ta’ala, was that he did not
live in Madinah, where the deen had originally been established; he lived
in Iraq and his school developed in Iraq. He grew up in Kufa, was edu-
cated there and lived most of his life there, first as a merchant, then as a
student and finally as a teacher. Kufa was one of the two great Iraqi cities
of the time and Iraq was home to many different religions, sects and be-
liefs because, apart from containing the capital of the recently defeated
Persian empire, it was also the home of various other ancient civilisa-
tions. Syriac Christians were dispersed throughout it and they had schools
there in which Greek philosophy and the ancient wisdom of Persia were
studied. In other words, at the time we are speaking of, Iraq was a melt-
ing pot of diverse races, cultures and beliefs and a place rife with confu-
sion and disorder. There were frequent clashes of opinion on the subject
of politics and religion. The Shi‘a and Mu‘tazilites stemmed from there

26
and there were Kharijites in its deserts.

Along with this was the fact that comparatively few Companions had
travelled from Madinah and settled in Iraq. Indeed it was an explicit pol-
icy of the second khalifah ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab, , to discourage Com-
panions with knowledge from leaving the Hijaz. He did this in order to
prevent knowledge of the deen becoming too dispersed. For this reason
most of the great men of knowledge among the Muhajirun and Ansar
stayed within the confines of Madinah. Two notable exceptions who did
go to live in Iraq were Ali ibn Abi Talib, karama'llahu wajhah, and Abdal-
lah ibn Mas’ud, , but the overall number was in fact very small. What
that meant, in real terms, was that the people of Iraq had very limited
direct access to the Sunnah, because there were very few exemplars of it
who came to them. All these factors meant that the Iraqi environment in
which Islam was beginning to take root in the first and second centuries
after the Hijrah was a very different one from that of Madinah in which
the deen had originally been established.

Another corollary development was that, due to these multifarious for-

eign influences, many situations arose which were quite alien to anything
confronted in the earliest days of Islam. Nevertheless, it was, of course,
necessary for the establishment of the deen that solutions should be
found for these new contingencies so that they could find their place
within the compass of Islam.

This was the environment within which the Iraqi school developed and
which caused it to have the particular form which came to characterise it
so clearly. As we have seen, for historical, geographical and social rea-
sons, the situation in Iraq was markedly different from that of the Hijaz
where the deen had originally been established and taken root. This
meant, as we have noted, that new situations were continually arising
and it was a question of how to apply the Book and Sunnah to these
novel circumstances in such a way that the deen would remain un-
changed. As far as the Book of Allah was concerned, of course, the Iraqis
had the same access to it as the Muslims in the Hijaz and those in every

27
other place to which the deen had spread. The difference was in their
access to the Sunnah.

We have already noted that direct knowledge of the Sunnah in Iraq was
limited because of the small number of Companions who moved there.
On the other hand in Sayyidina ‘Ali and ‘Abdallah ibn Mas‘ud, , they
had two of the most knowledgeable Companions and two of those clos-
est to the Prophet, , and so their direct access to the Sunnah, although
very limited in extent, was at the same time of the very highest quality.
This led to the distinctive approach to the Sunnah which characterized
the Iraqi school and in turn even coloured their attitude to the Qur’an
itself. Because of the irreproachability of their direct sources to the Sun-
nah they were quite rightly supremely confident concerning what had
reached them through them, but because of the limited scope of what
they received there were many gaps in their knowledge.

In the period we are talking about there was already much forgetfulness
and it was even the case that instances of hadith forgery were beginning
to be recorded so that, rather than relying on sources about which they
were not sure, the scholars of Iraq preferred to come to a judgement
based on the use of their own reason within clearly defined parameters
based on the knowledge of Book and Sunnah about which they did have
absolute certainty. In this they were in fact following the example of Ibn
Mas‘ud himself who refrained from attributing statements or actions to
the Prophet, , unless he was absolutely sure they were correct and, in
cases where he was not certain, would prefer to exercise his own opinion
rather than falsely ascribe something to him.

This led to a way of looking at texts which was typical of the Iraqi school,
whereby they would examine the reasons behind the judgements con-
tained within them. It was almost as if they did not depend on the out-
ward words but would, instead, look to the meaning behind them and
what was intended by the statement involved and would then apply that
analogically to the new situation confronting them. This methodology of
implementing the Book and Sunnah, which developed in Iraq, caused the

28
Iraqis to be known as the people of ra’i or opinion. Another of the charac-
teristics of this school was that its adherents did not confine themselves
to the deduction of rulings to be applied to actually existing cases but
also posed hypothetical questions and gave judgment on them as well on
the basis of their own reasoning, with the object of pre-empting situa-
tions which might well occur in the future.

The great Iraqi scholar Ibrahim an-Nakha'i is generally credited with being
the founder of the Iraqi school of fiqh we have been talking about but
there is no doubt that its greatest exponent and the man who gave it his
name and who became most closely associated with it in the minds of the
Muslims throughout history was Abu Hanifa an-Nu‘man. He started out
as a silk merchant but soon devoted himself to learning and became a
student of Shaykh Hammad ibn Sulayman with whom he studied all the
Islamic sciences. There is no doubt that Abu Hanifa was a man of the ut-
most integrity and was imbued with intense fear of Allah which informed
all his acts and decisions. He was also extremely generous and a man
characterised by great self control. It is, however, for his scintillating in-
tellect and his ability to apply it to the questions which confronted him
for which he is justly most remembered and which led to him becoming
the leader of the madhhab of the people of opinion.

His profound thinking led to him penetrating to the core of the questions
presented to him. This meant that he did not stop at the outward mean-
ing of texts but went beyond that to their intentions. He would study a
text, seeking the causes of any judgment it contained, examining the im-
plications of its words, phrases and intentions and the circumstances sur-
rounding it. Once he became satisfied about its underlying cause, he used
analogy based on that and took that very far indeed. His general attitude
is well summed up by a simile he coined. He said, “One who learns
hadiths but does not have fiqh can be likened to a chemist who makes up
remedies but does not know what they cure until the doctor comes and
tells him. Anyone who learns hadiths but does not grasp their true impli-
cations is just like that.”

An illustrative example of the way Imam Abu Hanifa’s mind worked can
29
be seen in the famous account of his meeting with Muhammad al-Baqir,
the great-great-grandson of the Prophet, . It seems that the imam met
al-Baqir when visiting Madinah near the beginning of his scholarly career.
It is reported that al-Baqir said to him, on the basis of what he had heard
of the direction things had taken in Iraq, "Are you the one who changes
the deen of my grandfather and his Sunnah through the use of analogy?"

Abu Hanifa replied by saying, "I seek refuge with Allah!" and told al-Baqir
that he respected him in the same way that his forebear, the Prophet, ,
had been respected by his Companions during his lifetime.

Abu Hanifa then said to al-Baqir, "I am going to present you with three
questions to answer. The first is: Who is weaker, a man or a woman?"
Al-Baqir replied, "A woman."
"What is a woman’s share in inheritance?" continued Abu Hanifa.
"A man has two shares and a woman one," responded al-Baqir.
"That is what came from your great grandfather," said Abu Hanifa. "If I
were to have changed his deen by analogy I would have said that a
woman should have two shares and a man one because she is the weaker
of the two, but I have not."

Abu Hanifa then asked al-Baqir, "Which is better, the prayer or fasting?"
"The prayer," he replied.
"That is what your great grandfather said," agreed Abu Hanifa. "If I were
to have changed his deen, I would have said using analogy that, because
the prayer is better, a woman who has finished menstruation should be
ordered to make up the prayer and not the fast."

Abu Hanifa then put his third question. "Which is the more impure, urine
or sperm?"
"Urine is more impure."
30
"If it was true that I had changed the deen of your great grandfather
through the use of analogy I would, on account of that, have made peo-
ple do ghusl after urinating rather than for the emission of sperm. I seek
refuge with Allah from altering the deen of your great grandfather
through analogy."

In this instance Imam Abu Hanifa used his incisive, analytical intellect to
uphold the orthodox position of Islam regarding these matters, but it
gives us a clear indication of the way that he, in another situation when
the position about a matter was as yet undecided and so open to inter-
pretation, would use his mind to come to a decision about it. This great
mental agility which characterised Imam Abu Hanifa was recognised by
Imam Malik who said of him, "If he had gone to these stone columns and
formed an analogy showing that they were made of wood, you would
have thought that they were made of wood."

This brings us to the school of Imam Malik, rahimahullahu ta’ala, who

was, in chronological terms, the second of the four imams, living from
93AH to 179AH. Just as when examining the madhhab of Imam Abu
Hanifa we discovered that what we were really looking at was the school
of Iraq, the methodology used by the early Muslims of Iraq to establish
what constituted the Book and Sunnah in that region, so we find that
Imam Malik, who lived all his life in Madinah al-Munawwarah, the
“Illuminated City”, was in fact the foremost exponent of the school of
Madinah and passed down to posterity the methodology used by the
people of Madinah in their implementation of the Book and Sunnah. The
situation of Madinah was completely different to that of Iraq. Madinah
was the place where much of the Qur’an was revealed, the place where
Allah’s deen became established as a living social and political reality. It
was in Madinah that Islam became flesh and bones and took on its defini-
tive, final form.

So whereas in Iraq it became necessary to work out how Islam could be

implemented in the new situation, in Madinah it was simply a matter of
preserving unchanged what was already there. In the time of Imam Malik
in Madinah people were doing the prayer, making hajj, doing wudu', col-
31
lecting zakah, carrying on every aspect of their lives as Muslims in exactly
the same way that they had been doing without interruption from the
time of the Prophet less than a century earlier. And, moreover, there had
been conscious effort expended to ensure that the original teaching and
practice of Islam remained unaltered in Madinah, borne out by the in-
junction of Sayyidina Umar ibn al-Khattab, , forbidding knowledgeable
Companions from leaving the city, precisely so that the body of knowl-
edge and practice which constituted Islam in action in the world would
remain whole and intact and would not become dispersed and frag-
mented. In Madinah, therefore, transmission of the deen was immediate
and direct. As Malik himself said, "If you want knowledge, then take up
residence (i.e. in Madinah). The Qur'an was not revealed on the Euphra-
tes (i.e. in Iraq)."

This leads us to the vital difference between the Iraqi and Madinan
schools. In Iraq, as we have seen, it was a question of taking the available
knowledge of the Book and Sunnah, understanding what was intended,
and applying it in the new environment, giving rise to what became
known as the school of ra’i (opinion). In Madinah the Book and Sunnah
were established as an integral element of the community – daily life in
Madinah was the Book and Sunnah in action – so in Madinah it was sim-
ply a matter of absorbing and taking on the practice of the people there
which had been preserved and transmitted unchanged, with the con-
scious collaboration of two generations of brilliant scholars, to be inher-
ited and encapsulated and passed on to all subsequent generations by
Imam Malik ibn Anas, rahimahullah, as the school of the ‘amal ahli’l-
Madinah (the practice of the people of Madinah).

It is also acknowledged unanimously by the early ‘ulama of Islam that no

bid‘ah (innovation) entered Madinah during the first three generations,
meaning the generation of the Prophet and his Companions, their succes-
sors and their successors, the Followers of the Followers, one of whom
was Imam Malik. So up until the time of Imam Malik nothing extraneous
to the Deen, with regard to the Deen, entered into the environment
where they lived. In other words what Imam Malik received and what he
passed on to his students, and down to our own time in his great work al-

32
Muwatta, was nothing other than the whole body of the Deen that had
come down through those three generations to him in Madinah al-
Munawwarah. Imam Malik himself expressed the nub of this matter very
cogently in a famous letter he sent to al-Layth ibn Sa‘d in which he wrote:

Allah Almighty says in His Mighty Book: The Outstrippers, the first of
the Muhajirun and Ansar. (9:100). Allah Almighty further says: So
give good news to My slaves, those who listen well to what is said
and then follow the best of it. (39:18). It is essential to follow the peo-
ple of Madinah. The Hijrah was made to it, the Qur’an was sent down
in it, and the halal was made halal and the haram was made haram
there. The Messenger of Allah was among them and they were pre-
sent when the Revelation was revealed. He instructed them and they
obeyed him. He imparted the Sunnah to them and they followed it
until Allah caused him to die and chose for him what is with Him, may
the blessings of Allah and His mercy and favour be upon him always.
Then after his death, the Muslims followed those from among his
community who were given authority after him. When something
happened which they already knew how to deal with, they did so. If
they had no knowledge of the matter in question, they asked about it
and then followed the best line they could. In this they were helped by
having very recently been in personal contact (with the Prophet) …
Then the Tabi‘un after them travelled this path and followed those
sunan. If there is a practice which is clearly acted upon in Madinah, I
do not think that anyone may oppose it because of the inheritance
that the people of Madinah received which no one else can lay claim
to. If the people of any other city were to say, “This is the practice in
our city,” or “This is what those before us used to do,” that would not
be permissible for them.

What is very evident from all this is that, for the Madinans, the Sunnah
was defined by what had been done much more than what had been
said. It was a matter of transmitted action rather than transmitted text.
Zayd ibn Thabit, , the famous Companion, stated, "When you see the
people of Madinah doing something, know that it is the Sunnah." This is a

33
very important distinction in the light of developments, which, as we shall
see, were shortly to follow and which were to meld together the two
terms Sunnah and hadith and make them virtually indistinguishable one
from the other. Understanding this point is pivotal to grasping the nature
of the Madinan school and its methodology. ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab stated
on the mimbar, "By Allah Almighty I will make it difficult for a man who
relates a hadith different from it (the ‘amal)." Ibn al-Qasim and Ibn Wahb
said, "I saw that in Malik's opinion ‘amal (transmitted practice) was
stronger than hadith (transmitted statement)." Malik said, "The people of
knowledge among the Followers would sometimes transmit a hadith
which had been conveyed to them from others and then say, 'We are not
ignorant of this, but the ‘amal which has come down to us from the past
is other than it.'"

Malik said, "I saw Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr ibn ‘Amr ibn Hazm who was a
Qadi. His brother was ‘Abdullah, a truthful man who knew a lot of hadith.
When Muhammad gave a judgment in respect of which a hadith had
come contrary to it, I heard ‘Abdullah criticise him, saying, 'Hasn't this
and this come in this hadith?' He replied, 'Yes.' His brother said to him,
'Then what is wrong with you? Why don't you give judgment by it?' He
said, 'Where are the people with respect to it?' meaning what is the con-
sensus regarding the actual practice in Madinah? He meant that the prac-
tice is stronger than the hadith regarding it." Ibn Mahdi, who died in 186
AH and was one of the greatest hadith scholars of his time in Madinah,
said, "It may be that I know a hadith on a subject and then I find that the
people of the courtyard do something different from that. Therefore it
becomes weak in my estimation." And finally there is the famous state-
ment of Rabi‘a, "I prefer a thousand from a thousand – in other words
the established practice in Madinah – over one from one – meaning a
singly narrated hadith – even if it is sound, because one from one can
strip the Sunnah out of your hands."

So from what we have seen it is clear that for Imam Malik and the people
of Madinah, applying the Book and Sunnah basically constituted taking on
unchanged the body of lived practice which had come down to them in
their city uninterruptedly from the time of the Prophet, , and his Com-

34
panions,  ajma’in.
We now arrive at the third of our madhhabs, that of Imam Muhammad
ibn Idris ash-Shafi‘i, rahimahullahu ta’ala. Imam ash-Shafi‘i was born in
Makkah in the year of Imam Abu Hanifa’s death, 150AH, and pursued his
early studies there under teachers steeped in the fiqh and tafsir of the
great Companion ‘Abdallah ibn ‘Abbas, , which was to prove a strong
influence on Imam ash-Shafi‘i later in his life. Although he reached a high
level of proficiency in his studies he was not satisfied with what he had
learned and travelled north to Madinah to sit at the feet of Imam Malik
whom he was to consider the "Luminous Star" among the many teachers
under whom he studied. He stayed with Imam Malik until 179AH when
he died, although it is known that during that time he visited other places
for short periods in search of knowledge.

After Imam Malik's death Imam ash-Shafi‘i was appointed Qadi in Najran
by the governor of Yemen. He remained there for five years but his un-
compromising implementation of justice and his condemnation of all in-
justice made him unpopular with those in power and they slandered him
to the khalifah accusing him of rebellion and he was sent to Baghdad in
184AH for trial. He exonerated himself but did not return to Yemen, re-
maining in Iraq and studying with Muhammad ash-Shaybani, the close
follower of Imam Abu Hanifa. After a couple of years he returned to his
birthplace, Makkah and it was there that his career as a teacher really
started. He remained in Makkah for almost ten years and then visited
Baghdad for the second time in 195AH, staying there on this occasion for
about two years. He returned again to Baghdad in 198AH and then went
on from there in 199AH to Egypt where he spent the remainder of his life,
dying in Fustat on the last day of Rajab 204AH at the age of 54.

The reason for dwelling for some time on the varied movements of Imam
ash-Shafi‘i during the course of his life is because it has a considerable
bearing on the development of the method by which he determined
what constituted the Book and Sunnah. Both Imam Abu Hanifa and Imam
Malik remained comparatively stationary throughout their lives, which
meant that the source of their knowledge was geographically limited and
therefore quite consistent in its approach to the deen. As we have seen
35
Imam ash-Shafi‘i, on the other hand, travelled a lot and because of this
saw many different approaches taken to the deen. In fact it is true to say
that he learned the fiqh of most of the schools existing in his time.

He started by learning the fiqh of Ibn Abbas in Makkah. He went on to

learn the fiqh of Imam Malik in Madinah. He learned the fiqh of al-Awza'i,
the school of Syria, from his companion, ‘Umar ibn Abi Salam. He learned
the fiqh of Imam Abu Hanifa, the Iraqi school, from his follower Muham-
mad ash-Shaybani and he learned the fiqh of al-Layth ibn Sa‘d, the faqih
of Egypt. As we have seen, there was a considerable difference between
the Madinan and Iraqi schools and this was equally the case with all the
other schools, with the result that quite distinct judgements were being
made about almost identical issues in different areas. Because of his wide
learning Imam ash-Shafi‘i was well aware of these differences and it be-
came clear to him that, unless a uniform system of coming to judgment
was devised and imposed, there was a very real danger of Islam becom-
ing divergent. He saw that it might rapidly become changed out of all
recognition from the original teaching as it had been implemented by the
Prophet, , and the first community in Madinah.

In order to combat this clearly perceived threat – that Islam might suffer
the fate of previous revelations by becoming changed and adulterated
from its original form due to increasingly divergent rulings on virtually
identical situations – Imam ash-Shafi‘i devised a brilliant system to ensure
uniformity of legal decision-making and to prevent any further dispersal
and dilution of the original teachings of Islam. He did this during his long
stay in his birthplace, Makkah, to which he returned after his first visit to
Iraq, and it is significant that he based his system on his earliest studies of
the knowledge and methodology of the great Companion, Ibn ‘Abbas,
may Allah be pleased with him and his father.

The teaching of Ibn ‘Abbas was firmly based on his explanation of the text
of the Qur‘an for which he had received explicit permission from the
Prophet, . The Qur‘an is, of course, a book, the Book, and for that rea-
son a major element in the methodology transmitted from Ibn ‘Abbas

36
was textual analysis involving detailed examination of the text itself. This
involved a concern with the mujmal (unspecified) and mufassal
(detailed), the mutlaq (unrestricted) and muqayyad (qualified) and the
khass (specific) and the ‘amm (general). In the hands of Imam ash-Shafi‘i
this type of textual analysis produced a new discipline for fuqaha which
had not previously existed although all the elements of it had been pre-
sent.

This detailed examination of the written word formed the core of the
methodology for which Imam ash-Shafi‘i became famous and was the
cornerstone of his system for ascertaining an authoritative and consistent
standard for what constitutes the Book and Sunnah. He founded a sys-
tematic method of deduction which allowed judgments to be made on
the basis of sound textual evidence and did not accept the latitude in the
derivation of judgments which, as we have seen, had existed up until
then. Under Imam ash-Shafi‘i’s system no opinion could be expressed
which could not be traced to an authenticated text and so the possibility
of innovation in the Shari'ah became vastly reduced. In this rigorous reli-
ance on texts, however, lie both the strengths and weaknesses of Imam
Ash-Shafi‘i’s superlative system.

It certainly fulfilled its intended task of halting the accelerating break-up

in the homogeneity of the practice of Islam in the various areas of the
Muslim world of that time and ensured a consistency of practice which
was to safeguard the integrity of Islam right down to our own time. In-
deed it is true to say that it is largely due to Imam ash-Shafi‘i’s superlative
system that we owe the extraordinary uniformity of Islamic practice
throughout the world, so that even today 1200 years later, wherever a
Muslim travels in the world, despite all the geographical, ethnic and cul-
tural differences which undoubtedly exist, there is no significant differ-
ence in any of the basic practices of Islam. This is a tremendous achieve-
ment. Another thing is that, because of the need for trustworthy textual
evidence on which to base actions and judgments, it became necessary to
collect together as many sound traditions from the Prophet as possible.
This in turn led to the great hadith collections and all the sciences of
hadith which were devised to ensure their authenticity, and it is signifi-
cant that nearly all of the great hadith collections were put together by
37
scholars who were adherents of the Shafi‘i madhhab.
However what this also meant was that both the Book and Sunnah be-
came restricted in a way that had not previously been the case. Until that
time the Sunnah had consisted in the transmitted practice of the Prophet,
, and the first community of Muslims in Madinah. In many cases there
was textual corroboration of the actions concerned but in many other
instances the practice in question had simply been passed down from
one generation to the next without there being any textual justification
for it. Thus the Sunnah was an organic pattern of behaviour, consisting of
the implementation of Allah's guidance in the Qur'an by the first Muslims
under the direction of the Messenger of Allah, , covering every aspect
of life. This was passed down as a direct inheritance by two generations
from those who brought it into being. The Sunnah was, in broad brush
strokes, the way the first generations of Muslims had lived, and contin-
ued to live, their daily lives, particularly in Madinah. They made a contin-
ual and conscious effort to avoid admitting any change into what had
come down to them and the men of knowledge among them spent their
lives preserving it.

So up until Imam ash-Shafi‘i came along the Sunnah was in many cases
simply the way the Muslims lived their lives protected by men of knowl-
edge whose lives were dedicated to ensuring that no change occurred in
what they had received from the past. After Imam ash-Shafi‘i, however,
and his insistence on textual justification for action, the Sunnah became
more and more identified with hadiths. This meant that unless there was
an actual text explicitly authorising a particular action it was no longer
considered to be part of the Sunnah, even if it had been practised by the
Muslims from the earliest times. Not only that, but the rigour of Imam
ash-Shafi‘i’s system of textual analysis meant that even the actions that
did have textual justification were tempered by the way the texts were
interpreted so that in some instances the actions themselves were
changed by Imam ash-Shafi‘i’s unique methodology and this applies to
the Qur‘an as well as hadith.

Two examples, one from the Book and the other from the Sunnah, will
illustrate how the practice of the Muslims was affected by the application
38
of Imam ash-Shafi‘i's methodology. We find in the Qur‘an in Surat an-Nisa
the ayah:
43 O you who believe!
Do not approach the prayer when you are drunk
so that you know what you are saying,
nor in a state of major impurity – unless you are travelling –
until you have washed yourselves completely.
If you are ill or on a journey,
or any of you have come from the lavatory
or touched women,
and you cannot find any water,
then do tayammum with pure earth,
wiping your faces and your hands.
Allah is Ever-Pardoning, Ever-Forgiving.

In reference to the words “or touched women” the Muslims, before Imam
ash-Shafi‘i devised his system, had always understood them to have a
sexual connotation. In other words, it was only necessary to renew wudu
after some form of sexual contact with women. However, the word used
here for “touch”, lamasa, can mean simply just that, without any sexual
contact being implied. Applying his method of rigorous textual analysis,
Imam ash-Shafi‘i reached the conclusion that the broadest possible inter-
pretation must be allowed and, therefore, ruled that any touching what-
soever between men and women was sufficient to break wudu. This con-
stituted a considerable change in practice from an accepted understand-
ing – that what was intended by the ayah was sexual contact – which had
been acted upon universally by the early Muslims, to an interpretation
based on textual analysis which involved a completely different judge-
ment than the one previously implemented.

With respect to the Sunnah an example of a similar alteration of practice

can be seen in connection with the prayer. We find in Sahih al-Bukhari
from ‘Ubada ibn as-Samit, , that the Messenger of Allah, , said,
“There is no prayer for anyone who does not recite the fatiha of the
Book.” The early Muslims all accepted that the fatiha must be recited in
every rak‘ah of the prayer. There was, however, an almost universal ac-

39
ceptance that the recital of the fatiha by the imam in the audible prayers
was sufficient to cover the recitation of everyone following him. But after
the application of Imam ash-Shafi‘i’s system to the text of the hadith
quoted above, it was judged necessary for every individual doing the
prayer to recite the fatiha in every rak'ah and because of that the imam
was required to pause for a while after his own recitation of the fatiha to
allow those following him to do the same. This again introduced a prac-
tice which had not been performed by Muslims anywhere before Imam
ash-Shafi‘i.

So we can say that in his exposition of the rulings of the deen, in other
words his implementation of the Book and Sunnah, Imam ash-Shafi‘i re-
lied almost entirely on the outward and apparent indication of texts. He
disapproved of both the Iraqi and Madinan approaches to fiqh because
the former tended to be based on the principle perceived to be governing
a particular transmitted ruling and depended on the state of the faqih
making the judgment and of the latter because of its tendency to accept
transmitted rulings which had no textual authority to support them. As
we have seen, Imam ash-Shafi‘i based his system almost entirely on texts
and took a more literal and objective approach to them, causing him per-
haps to err on the side of caution.

He took upon himself the task of setting out the principles for a consis-
tent methodology of deduction to provide guidance for all those qualified
to make judgments in the deen and to formulate the criteria involved. He
set out a universal system founded on firm principles, not contingent
upon opinion or precedent or the resolution of hypothetical questions,
and succeeded in devising a methodology for all subsequent scholars and
judges to follow. His influence on the later development of Islam cannot
be overstated and it is fair to say that the Islam we have inherited today
is in no small part due to the system which Imam ash-Shafi‘i formulated
twelve centuries ago.

We now come to the last of the four Imams who have given their names
to the madhhabs followed by the Muslims, Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal.
There is, however, a marked difference between Imam Ahmad and the
40
other imams. The three earlier imams all definitely represented a particu-
lar methodology: Imam Abu Hanifa the Iraqi school of opinion; Imam
Malik the Madinan school of direct transmission; and Imam ash-Shafi‘i his
own system based on textual analysis. Imam Ahmad, on the other hand,
cannot be said to have devised a particular methodology of fiqh. The
great historian of Islam, at-Tabari, for instance, did not even include the
madhhab of Imam Ahmad when discussing the early fuqaha. He said of
him: “He was a man of hadith not a man of fiqh.”

Qadi ‘Iyad states in his great book Tartib al-Madarik: “He was less than an
imam in fiqh although he was brilliant in investigation of its sources.” And
there were many other great ‘ulama who did not consider him the foun-
der of a school of fiqh. Indeed he only became an imam in fiqh after his
death and that was because some of his students collected together his
statements, fatwahs and opinions, forming a legal corpus which was
posthumously ascribed to him. Sometimes the transmissions from him
varied considerably and sometimes they agreed. We will understand
more of this ambivalence about his status as a faqih if we look at his life
and how he studied and taught during the course of it.

He was born in Baghdad in Rabi‘ al-Awwal 164AH, half a generation after

Imam ash-Shafi‘i, making him, historically speaking, the last of our four
imams. This fact and the fact that he was born in Baghdad have a consid-
erable bearing on the course his life and studies were to take. By the time
Imam Ahmad came into the world and was brought up in Baghdad, the
‘Abbasid caliphate was thoroughly established and Baghdad had become
a truly cosmopolitan imperial capital, a world away from the Madinan
environment in which Islam had originally been established. By Imam
Ahmad’s time Persian elements had come to dominate Arab elements
and the sophistication of Persian civilisation was in the ascendance in
general throughout the Muslim world. The cities of Islam were inundated
with differing nations and races, and texts of all kinds were being trans-
lated from Persian, Syriac, Greek, Latin and other languages into Arabic.
The result of this was that the more or less homogenous cultural environ-
ment of early Islam had become fragmented as all these different influ-
ences became part and parcel of the Islamic world. Add to this the clash
of earlier religious traditions together with the attempts of their adher-
41
ents to mould Islam towards their own world views and the result was an
ambience, both religious and physical, which would have been all but
unrecognisable to the first generations of Muslims.

This was what confronted Ahmad ibn Hanbal as he grew up in the

‘Abbassid capital and, as a pure-hearted, intelligent, deeply pious youth,
he was left with the quandary of how, in the light of all the sophisticated
deviation he was facing, he could regain something of the light, clarity
and simplicity of the formative early days of Islam. The way he went
about achieving his aim has already been indicated in the quotation from
at-Tabari – he became a muhaddith. In order to get as complete and de-
tailed a picture as possible of the life of the first community he devoted
himself to accumulating the maximum possible number of reports from
that time, not only from the Prophet, , himself but also from the Com-
panions,  ajma‘in.

So from very early in his life Imam Ahmad chose the men of hadith and
their method and dedicated himself to it, to the extent that it certainly
appeared that he had taken the path of the hadith scholars rather than
that of those who combined fiqh with hadith. In his search for hadiths
Imam Ahmad travelled widely throughout the heartlands of Islam and
may have been the first muhaddith to collect the hadiths of every region
of the Muslim world and record them. Another thing which marked him
out was his use of the pen in his compilation of hadith. In spite of his well
known prodigious memory Imam Ahmad wrote down the hadiths he col-
lected. The end result of all this hadith recording which started when he
was sixteen years old and continued through much of his life was his
great Musnad which contains almost thirty thousand hadiths.

For Imam Ahmad the Musnad was like a great painting in which the myr-
iad reports it contained were the individual brush strokes which together
made up the most accurate portrayal he could possibly convey of what
the deen of Islam had been like in its original, pristine condition. It was
this picture, made up of sayings of the Prophet, , and reports and deci-
sions from the Companions,  ajma’in, which was the bedrock on which

42
Imam Ahmad built his life and on which he based all his judgments. In as
far as he had a methodology for deriving judgments from these sources,
he depended upon Imam ash-Shafi‘i under whom he studied and who
was one of his most revered teachers. When he met Imam ash-Shafi‘i he
learned the rules for sound understanding of the Book and reports of the
Sunnah, comparison of textual sources, knowledge of the abrogating and
abrogated, and in general how to deduce secondary rulings from the ba-
sic sources of the Shari'ah. So in this respect he was certainly not the
same as the other three imams, each of whom had their own very distinct
methodology for deriving judgments in the deen.

Another reason, perhaps, why Imam Ahmad was made the founder of a
new school of fiqh was because of his absolutely exemplary character
which inspired many people to take him as a model during his own life-
time. There is no doubt that all four imams were impeccable in their per-
sonal behaviour and all of them had superlative qualities of character
that marked them out among their contemporaries. Imam Ahmad, how-
ever, had a reputation for saintliness which outshone all of them. From
his earliest youth he was famous for his incorruptible integrity which was
put a severe test later in his life when he, unlike almost all his contempo-
raries, suffered over two years of imprisonment and constant severe
beatings rather than adopt the rationalist Mu‘tazili doctrine of the creat-
edness of the Qur’an which had become official Abbasid government
policy and which was clearly contrary to the position held by the early
Muslims. This event also showed his steadfastness and patience which
saw him through the many other difficult periods which punctuated his
long life.

Other qualities he possessed were great generosity in spite of scant

means, transparent sincerity, scrupulousness and abstinence, modesty
and cheerfulness, and a natural authority which ensured that people paid
attention to what he said. So strong was his connection with the early
days of Islam, and so brightly was light of that time reflected in all he said
and did, that some of his contemporaries described him as being a great
Follower removed from his proper time. All these things and his status as a
man of knowledge meant that when he died on 12th Rabi‘ al-Awwal 241AH
more than three hundred thousand people joined his funeral procession.
43
All in all then it must be said that from very early times there has been
much discussion about whether Imam Ahmad can really be said to have
been the founder of a separate madhhab. It is certainly clear that he was
in a different category to the other three, who all represented very spe-
cific methodologies in their implementation of the Book and Sunnah. He
was definitely one of a kind in terms of the time and place where he lived
and ploughed his own furrow in his determination to cleave as closely as
he possibly could to the path followed by the first community in
Madinah, remaining absolutely orthodox in his views while at the same
time being somewhat at odds with the prevailing ethos surrounding him.
This is significant in the light of some of those who were to adopt him as
their imam in fiqh later on, several of whom were people who found
themselves at odds with the authorities of their own time and found in
Imam Ahmad a way of remaining firmly within the bounds of orthodox
Muslim belief and practice while at the same time differentiating them-
selves from the power structure of their time.

He himself said, “A man should not set himself up to give independent

judgment about the deen unless he possesses five qualities. He must
have a clear intention because unless he has he will have no light. He
must have knowledge, forbearance, gravity and tranquillity. He must be
firm in his knowledge. He must be independent and not dependent on
other people. And he must be known to people.” There are few people in
the history of Islam who have fulfilled these criteria to the extent that
Imam Ahmad himself did. So what can certainly be said is that Imam
Ahmad was a mujtahid of the very highest rank, absolutely able to make
independent judgments concerning matters of the deen. That does not in
itself, however, automatically make him the founder of an independent
school of fiqh and, if he was, it was certainly in a very different way to
that of his three pre-eminent predecessors.

Seeing Imam Ahmad’s work in this light, as an heroic attempt to recap-

ture both for himself and his contemporaries the ethos of what was al-
ready by his time a bygone age, we are left with three distinct method-
ologies each of which aimed in their own way to embrace and define the
Book and Sunnah and pass it on to subsequent generations.

44
The first was the Iraqi school also known as the “School of Opinion”, de-
finitively formulated by Imam Abu Hanifa and known to future genera-
tions as the Hanafi Madhhab. The essence of this methodology was that,
in the absence of a known, direct precedent, a new ruling could be made
on the basis of understanding the legal purpose behind a previous ruling
from the Book or Sunnah about a similar situation and analogously attrib-
uting that same legal aim to the new situation. In other words it aimed to
distil certain legal principles from the body of the Book and Sunnah which
could then be applied as new circumstances demanded. This process was
obviously subject to great knowledge of the sources, scrupulous piety,
and a rigorous adherence accepted limits on the part of the faqih con-
cerned but it nevertheless allowed a certain leeway in the definition of
what could be included within the parameters of the Book and Sunnah.
For this reason it was an ideal system for those entrusted with the gov-
ernance and administration of the Ummah and it is noteworthy that the
first great power structure of Islam, the Abbasid Caliphate, was based in
Iraq and that the two main dynasties of later times, the Osmanli Dawla
and the Mughal Empire, who between them ruled over the vast majority
of the Muslim world for centuries, both appointed the Hanafi Madhhab
as the official legal modality of their administrative systems.

The Madinan school, definitively formulated by Imam Malik and outlined

in his great work al-Muwatta, took a very different approach. For the
Madinans the Book and Sunnah were a matter of direct transmission.
They were simply what had been passed down and conscientiously and
scrupulously preserved through the two generations that had elapsed
since the Prophet, , and his Companions,  ajma’in, as a lived reality.
The textual sources were, for them, sounding boards or yardsticks against
which their ongoing practice should be measured to make sure that there
was no deviation and the road remained clearly delineated. The proof
that the deen could be transmitted in this way is shown by the fact that
the third generation received it in this way from the second, none of
whom had had direct personal contact with the original phenomenon.
The school of the ‘amal ahli’l-Madinah (the practice of the people of
Madinah) flowed in a river of transmission down through the centuries
along the North African coast and then into West Africa with small pock-
ets remaining in the Arabian peninsular. It is significant that Qadi ‘Iyad in

45
his great work Tartib al-Madarik, which traces the history of the Madinan
school down to his own time, does not dwell on the texts written within it
over the centuries but rather devotes himself to describing the type of
men it produced, showing that it remained in his view much more a mat-
ter of transmitted behaviour than of recorded judgments.

This is again very different from the approach to the Book and Sunnah
adopted by Imam ash-Shafi‘i. As we have seen, in order to counteract the
growing tendency towards unacceptable variations in the practice of the
deen he had observed on his travels and to preserve Islam within the
clear parameters delineated by Allah and His Messenger, , he devised a
system based on rigorous textual analysis of the ayaat of the Qur’an and
the hadiths of the Prophet, . This certainly achieved his desired aim but
at the same time limited the Sunnah to only those actions for which tex-
tual evidence could be produced. It is also very different from the Madi-
nan tradition in which the transmitted action exists independently of the
text which merely serves to confirm its authenticity. In the Shafi‘i system,
on the other hand, the source texts serve as engenderers of action – in
effect, the practice of the deen actually derives from the texts them-
selves.

As was pointed out earlier, this approach necessitated a vast increase in

the number of authentic textual sources available and so brought about
the development of all the sophisticated sciences surrounding the collec-
tion and authentication of hadiths. This and the complex intellectual dis-
cipline required to implement Imam ash-Shafi‘i’s demanding criteria,
which became known to subsequent generations under the general head-
ing of usul al-fiqh, entailed a new class of specialist scholars who became
a necessary element in Islamic society from this time on. And it is true to
say that many fuqaha from the other schools soon began to incorporate
aspects of Imam ash-Shafi‘i’s methodology into their own procedures to
the point that it might almost be said that basically all the scholars of
Islam became to a greater or lesser extent adherents of Imam ash-
Shafi‘i’s brilliant system.

46
Two things need to be said at this point as a necessary supplement to
what has been discussed so far. The first is there has been no intention, in
making these observations about the four madhhabs of Islam, to present
a complete picture of any of them. From the beginning each of them in-
cluded many elements which have not been presented in this analysis
and certainly over time each of them developed into highly complex
structures about which countless volumes have been written. My pur-
pose has been to highlight certain salient features in each of them in or-
der to show how each of them, in its own way, embodies a specific ap-
proach to the matter of exactly what constitutes the deen of Islam. The
second point is to reaffirm categorically that every one of them comprises
in itself an authentic transmission of the deen down to our own time.
Each of them in its traditionally accepted form represents a body of
knowledge and practice through which the whole edifice of Islam has
been preserved and renewed down through the centuries. It is, however,
important to observe that each of them is self-consistent, that each of
them is the result of that particular methodology which brought it into
being and, therefore, that it is not possible to chop and change indiscrimi-
nately between them.

Each must be taken as a whole and applied as it has come down in its
accepted form. The haphazard mix and match approach adopted by some
unqualified Muslims nowadays, whereby they randomly choose a differ-
ent ruling from a madhhab other than their own to suit a particular situa-
tion in which they find themselves, is erroneous. The madhhabs are clear
paths which have been laid down to be followed just as they are. A great
deal of knowledge is needed to be able to judge when its is appropriate
to use a ruling borrowed from another madhhab and anyone who does
that without the necessary learning is in effect arrogantly setting them-
selves up as a qualified mujtahid. More grievously at fault are those Mus-
lims who claim that no madhhab is necessary at all, that it is possible, or
in the worst cases even compulsory, to reject all these centuries of tradi-
tional scholarship and, returning, as they assert, directly to the sources,
to find a version of Islam which somehow escaped the notice of our sin-
cere and extremely learned ancestors.

These latter culprits can be loosely gathered into two groupings, modern-
47
ists and salafis, both of which, curiously enough, employ, in an inauthen-
tic way, the very methodologies embodied by two of the madhhabs we
have been examining. The modernists might well be termed deviant
Hanafis because they are people who, without anything like the neces-
sary knowledge, integrity and Taqwa to do so, employ an approximation
of the methodology of the Iraqi school to reach judgments about current
issues in a mistaken attempt to accommodate Islam to the times in which
we live and who, in doing so, have made compromises in the deen which
have undermined some of the basic premises of the Islamic Shari'ah.

One early instance of this trend, among innumerable examples which

have occurred since, was the infamous late 19th century fatwa of Mu-
hammad ‘Abduh permitting Muslims to invest in interest bearing ac-
counts in the British run Egyptian post office. He paid no attention to the
clearly expressed objections of his fellow ‘ulama, insisting that the
Shari'ah should be interpreted by reason, and arguing that preventing
Muslims from investing their money in this way would give an unfair ad-
vantage to non-muslims. This opened the door to the wholesale introduc-
tion of modern banking into Islamic lands and the consequent subjection
of the Muslims to the kafir economic and political domination which fol-
lowed in its wake.

In the hands of men such as ‘Ali ‘Abd ar-Raziq and ‘Abd ar-Razzaq as-
Sanhuri this school of thought gathered momentum and led to introduc-
tion of foreign legal systems in almost every Muslim country which has
resulted in the virtual abandonment of the Shari'ah everywhere in the
Islamic world. The examples of this way of thinking, on both a communal
and personal level, has resulted in a situation where the barriers between
Islam and kufr have become blurred to the point that the Qur'anic ayah,
“To you your deen and to me my deen,” has basically ceased to have any
meaningful manifestation in the world today.

The second group, the salafis, base their practice of Islam on a “return to
the sources” by which they mean a re-examination of the hadith collec-
tions. Their arrogant assertion is that by doing this they have discovered,
after fourteen centuries, that for all this time the Muslims have been fail-
48
ing to implement properly the Sunnah of the Prophet, . In as far as their
whole premise is based on analysis of hadith texts, even if lacking in the
necessary inward and outward qualifications to make it authoritative,
they could be said to be neo-Shafi‘i’s in that they use a debased form of
the methodology devised by Imam ash-Shafi‘i to derive practices from
their literal and deficient understanding of the texts involved. Their claim
that earlier generations of Muslims did not have access to the texts is
demonstrably false. The whole vast and intricate structure of the science
of hadith developed by the scholars of Islam was devoted, as we have
seen, to ensuring that the practices of the Sunnah were carefully based
on a precise understanding the hadith texts involved. To say at this dis-
tance in time that these texts have in fact been misunderstood or misap-
plied by all the Muslims throughout history demonstrates an extraordi-
nary arrogance which is almost incomprehensible.

One example of this is the salafi practice of placing the hands across the
chest in the qabd position when standing up from ruku‘ in the prayer. The
evidence for this, according to them, is a hadith in which it says that the
Prophet, , used to come back after ruku‘ into the same position he had
been in before going into it. All the Muslims have always understood this
to mean that he simply returned to the upright position. But this new
literalist salafi interpretation of the hadith has introduced into the prayer
a practice never performed before by any Muslims anywhere, with the
unwarranted implication that the whole community has been mistaken
about this matter for fourteen centuries. There are unfortunately a great
many similar examples and this new version of Islam is more often than
not propagated by its adherents with an overweening air of self-
righteousness which is far removed from the courtesy and humility dis-
played by true scholars of the deen. Another unfortunate result of this
false teaching is that it has spawned a generation of young people who
truly believe that, armed with a translation of a collection of hadith, they
can decide for themselves what constitutes the Sunnah and that, more-
over, it is their bounden duty to put every other Muslim right if they do
not agree with them.

This then is the way that the methodologies of Imam Abu Hanifa and

49
Imam ash-Shafi‘i have been ignorantly abused in the world today and the
same can also be said of the methodology of Imam Malik although, in its
case, the abuse has taken a slightly different form. As we have noted the
basis of the distinctive methodology of Imam Malik is direct transmission.
The truth is that this is, for the vast majority of Muslims, the way they in
fact take on the deen. They learn it by example from their families and
the Muslim community in which they live. This is all well and good pro-
vided that what they absorb is within the limits set out by one of the four
madhhabs we have been discussing. All too often, however, various ac-
cretions have crept in, borrowed from local culture or ancient custom,
which are considered by the people of a particular area to be part and
parcel of the deen when, in reality, they have nothing whatsoever to do
with Islam at all. These supplementary practices sometimes become so
ingrained in a particular Muslim community that it becomes very difficult
to eradicate them and many of the people think that anyone who tries to
do so is attacking Islam itself.

If this is the negative way that the madhhab methodologies are manifest-
ing themselves in the present day, what about the originals, the great
rivers of transmission of Islam from the past, we have been looking at –
what is their relationship with the world in which we now live? The truth
is that in the present context the madhhabs now have very little to do
with the methodologies which originally brought them into existence.
They are now, and have been for a considerable time, nothing but static
bodies of law, compendious compilations of legal rulings, covering every
aspect of personal and social life in the Muslim community.

As we said at the beginning a person's affiliation to a particular madhhab

has become in almost every case simply a matter of geography. The
madhhab you have depends on an accident of birth; where you were
born determines the madhhab you adopt. If you were born in Turkey or
the Indian Subcontinent you are automatically a Hanafi. If you were born
in the Far East you become Shafi’i. If you were born in North or West Af-
rica you become Maliki. Throughout the Middle East there is more of a
mixture and your madhhab tends to depend on the family you were born
into. There is no doubt that this has in many ways proved a protection for
the Muslims throughout the world and that through the teaching of their
50
madhhab they have retained access to an unbroken and authentic trans-
mission of the deen of Islam from the earliest times.

There is, however, a downside to this. It tends to give the impression that
things are still all right, that the situation of the Muslims today is some-
how comparable with what was in the past, that Islam is still a functioning
reality. That is emphatically not the case. There is now nowhere on the
surface of the earth where Allah’s deen is being implemented in anything
but a most fragmented way. The hudud have been to all intents and pur-
poses completely abandoned and replaced by various man-made versions
of criminal law. Most of the personal and social aspects of the deen, even
in those places where they are claimed to be in force, have in fact be-
come watered down and compromised to fit in with Western legal mo-
dalities. As for the financial and economic aspects of the Shari'ah, they
have been completely jettisoned in favour of the usury based capitalist
economic system engendered in post reformation Europe, which was first
used as a weapon to destroy Dar al-Islam and is now the instrument by
means of which the Muslims, along with the rest of the world’s popula-
tion, are held in a state of somnolent subjugation. The reason for this is
that the Book and Sunnah are not seen as the prime source of govern-
ance by any Muslim regime anywhere in the world. This in fact has made
all the madhhabs virtually redundant in real terms.

The madhhabs were all developed within a context of unabashed Muslim

rule, where Allah and His Messenger were seen as the only source of le-
gal authority, in which the Book and Sunnah were seen as the only valid
criteria for the government of human affairs. Their purpose was to come
up with all the rulings necessary for the correct implementation of the
Book and Sunnah in every area of Muslim life in the certainty that these
rulings would be immediately enacted. There was nothing theoretical
about them; they did not exist in a vacuum. They were a vital and active
principle in the ongoing life of every Muslim society. Under their sway
rulers ruled, judges judged, traders traded and, in every aspect, life was
lived. What a difference between then and now! In the eyes of Muslim
rulers now the madhhabs are irrelevant. Even for Muslim judges in this
time the madhhab is well down their list of legal sources. And the idea of
a modern Muslim businessman being subject to the strictures of a
51
madhhab is simply laughable. The madhhabs have been reduced to being
the domain of emasculated scholars who frequently know every ruling
there is to know about every subject under the sun but are impotent to
implement a single one of them.

So although the madhhabs do provide a link with the past and have en-
sured an authentic transmission of the deen into the present age, the
truth is that they no longer fulfill the purpose for which they were
brought into being. Their purpose was to provide the rulings for the com-
plete implementation of Islam in every area of life and they are not able
to do that because there is nowhere where Allah’s deen is established.
This is the first time since the first community in Madinah that this has
happened and our primary task as Muslims in this time must be to see
the Book and Sunnah once more put back in place as the sole fountain-
head of all our affairs. Nothing short of this is acceptable and it must be
the continual and explicit intention of every Muslim to see this come
about until it has happened.

The madhhabs were excellent tools for implementing the Book and Sun-
nah once they were in place but they had nothing to do with establishing
them in the first place. So it is most unlikely that the madhhabs as pres-
ently constituted will provide us with the means to perform the task
which faces us. Imam Malik used to say, “The last of this community will
not be put right except by what put it right in the first place.” In other
words in order to restore Allah’s deen to its rightful place at the head of
Muslim affairs we have to get right back to what was there at the begin-
ning. The question is how to do this? The modernists do not even want
to. Although the salafis claim that it is what they want their route is a non
-starter because there is no direct access to the source by the means they
espouse.

If we view Islam as a river whose source was the first community and
which has flowed down through more than fourteen centuries to our
time, then the madhhabs have clearly been an inseparable part of that
river. But the question here is do they lead back to its source? Continuing
the river metaphor and turning the years into miles, if we go back up-
52
stream, we come upon a dam about two hundred and twenty miles from
the source. Behind the dam is a huge reservoir into which much of the
headwater of the river is gathered before flowing on again towards the
sea. This dam is Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal. One hundred and eighty five
miles from the source we find that a great canal has been dug, leading off
the main river and running parallel with it for many hundreds of miles
before rejoining it far downstream. It is beautifully engineered and allows
the filtered and purified water from the river which fills it to flow uni-
formly between its well constructed banks making it easy to manage and
administrate. This canal is the madhhab of Imam ash-Shafi‘i.

Further upstream, about a hundred and twenty miles from the source we
find a tributary flowing into the river from one side and mixing with it,
whose spring is in some nearby hills. This is the methodology of the
Hanafi madhhab. Finally, a little before we reach that tributary we would
find a sluice system through which all the water from the very source of
the river is regulated and directed. This is Imam Malik. What this makes
clear is that in the end it is only through Imam Malik that we can have
access to the very source of the deen, that primal picture of Islam in ac-
tion which we need in order to be able to re-establish the deen here and
now.

In this regard Imam Malik should be seen, therefore, not as the founder
of the subsequent madhhab named after him but rather as the Imam of
the Dar al-Hijra, Madinah al-Munawwarah, and the recorder and trans-
mitter of the ‘amal ahli'l-Madinah, the practice of the people of Madinah.
As we know Imam Malik saw it as his task to capture for posterity the
living tradition of Islam in action, the Book and Sunnah in their pristine
original form, which had been passed down to him unaltered through the
two generations that had elapsed since the death of the Prophet, . This
clearly represents the closest possible exposition of Islam as it was actu-
ally lived by the Prophet and his Companions, the unbroken transmission
of the Book and Sunnah in the very place where it had been established,
preserved and unaltered in any way by the two generations who had
lived there between the days of the First Community and the time of
Imam Malik. So what it brings to us is that raw, vital energy of the first

53
days of Islam, the time of the Prophet himself, , and the time immedi-
ately following it of the Khulafah Rashidun,  ajma’in, when the deen
was in its most potent phase of expansion and establishment. For that
reason it is sometimes known as the madhhab of ‘Umar, .

It was that very behaviour pattern which made Islam happen in the first
place, so what better model could there be for this time when it is once
again necessary to start from the ground up. The historical proof of its
potency can be seen in the example of the Murabitun in the eleventh
century. The Practice of the People of Madinah was transmitted to them
by Abdallah ibn Yasin, the teacher sent to them from Kairouan, where the
living record of the ‘amal ahli'l-Madinah had been passed on unbroken
from the time of Imam Malik himself, and with it, and nothing else, they
burst out from their land in West Africa and revived Islam throughout the
Maghrib and al-Andalus, ensuring the Muslims in Spain, who had at that
time almost come under Christian domination, a further two hundred
years of Islamic governance.

Its incontrovertible authenticity has been repeatedly verified throughout

the centuries, not least by the celebrated Hanbali scholar, Ibn Taymiyya,
whose book The Soundness of the Basic Premises of the Madhhab of the
People of Madinah, makes it clear that the most complete picture of the
Sunnah, both in terms of its spirit and its actual practice, was that passed
on by Imam Malik and captured in its outline in his book al-Muwatta. This
was because of Imam Malik's great knowledge, his geographical location
in the City of the Prophet, the great number of men of knowledge who
had remained there, preserving the deen in its entirety from the time of
the Prophet, , and the fact that, as was universally acknowledged, no
innovation in the deen at all entered Madinah during the first three gen-
erations of Islam. Also worth mentioning, in a contemporary context, is
the book of Dr. Yasin Dutton The Origins of Islamic Law, a piece of scrupu-
lous scholarship. In his book Dr. Dutton shows conclusively that Malik's
Muwatta does indeed contain a direct record of the authentic practice of
the first Community and by doing so, incidentally, deals a death blow to
those orientalists who have maintained that there was a time-gap be-
tween the first Community and the development of the Shari'ah of Islam.

54
Several times during the history of the deen at times when, for one rea-
son or another, it had fallen into disrepair and decadence and was in
need of renewal, the scholars of Islam have pointed out that the
madhhab of the ‘amal ahli’l-Madinah represented a position which was
pure Book and Sunnah with no controversy in it whatsoever on which all
the Muslims could come together. A notable example, for instance was
the great Indian scholar Shah Waliullah of Delhi, who explicitly propa-
gated it as a way of reviving the deen in India in the face of the advancing
British. In our own time the mantle of this task has fallen on the shoul-
ders of Dr. Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi whose seminal text Root Islamic
Education shows definitively how the primal model of Madinan Islam
gives us all the guidance we need for the complete re-implementation of
Islamic governance. He says in it:

The duty is to come together at that point where there is no

argument and no deviation. The place is Madinah. Only there
can we all meet in that primal ‘Umari Islam, … for it was the
evidence and proof from the Messenger of Allah that men
could live together in justice and in peace and with trust in
each other, by obedience to Allah, . It is the school of
Madinah, salafi, and pure, that will unite the Muslims, and
revitalise the deen, and restore the reality of the second sha-
hada, along with the first.

So the Madhhab of the ‘amal ahli’l-Madinah, of the Actions of the People

of Madinah, represents the way that Islam came into being in the first
place, directly at the hands the Prophet, , in his explanation of the
ayaat of the Qur’an and his implementation of them in his own life
among his Companions,  ajma‘in. This was the basis of all four
madhhabs and this is what the Muslims have to get back to. This under-
standing of the Deen fresh from the source as it appeared in the actions
of the people of Madinah is what we must have if Islam is to be restored
to the position it should hold at the head of all human affairs.

55