From Kavad to al-Ghazali

Religion, Law and Political Thought in the Near East, c.600–c.1100

Patricia Crone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000385533
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

This volume brings together twelve articles by Patricia Crone dealing with pre-Islamic and Islamic religion, law and political thought. The first section focuses on the centuries before Islam, with studies on Mazdakism in Iran and on Islam as the key factor behind the outbreak of Iconoclasm in Byzantium. The second group of studies looks at problems in legal history, including the codification of the Qur'an, while the third investigates questions of political thought, amongst them a study of early Muslim anarchists, and an examination of the authorship of a work ascribed to al-Ghazali.

VII


SHŪRĀ AS AN ELECTIVE INSTITUTION*

Shūrā means consultation, usually between a person in authority and his subordinates, as in Q. 3:159 (shāwirhum fī ’l-amr), and occasionally between peers sharing power, as perhaps in Q. 42:38 on those “whose affairs are decided by consultation” (1amruhum shūrā baynahum).¹ Either way, it is a procedure leading to a decision by people in charge of government. Shūrā also has a second and more specialized meaning, however. In sources relating to the Rāshidūn and the Umayyads it is normally a procedure for deciding who should be in charge of government. The participants here deliberate in order to elect a ruler, not to convey their advice to one or to act as joint rulers themselves; and al-amr shūrā is a call for the ruler to be elected by this procedure, not for affairs to be decided by consultation in general. Shūrā in this sense is a highly distinctive institution. It was famously adopted by ʿUmar for the choice of his successor, with the result that it figures in Sunnī constitutional law, but precisely wherein did it consist and what was its history?

I. ʿUmar’s shūrā

As usual in connection with the Rāshidūn, the earliest sources are akhbārī accounts compiled a century or so after the event. All are highly partisan and marked by hindsight.² But the doctrinal disputes by which they are shaped concern the participants in the institution, not the institution itself, the nature of which they mostly take for granted. How do they envisage it, then? The answer can be presented under six headings.

^* I should like to thank Michael Cook and Chase Robinson for insightful comments on earlier drafts. The following abbreviations have been used: Aghānī, see note 77; BA, see notes 4, 54, 66; IAH, see note 9; Imāma, see note 6; IS, see note 4; Tab., see note 5; TG, see note 51; YT, see note 15.

¹ The meaning of 42:38 is not clear from either the verse itself or the exegetes, but cf. ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s definition of an acephalous society: kawn al-nās shūrā lā raʾīs lahum wa-lā muqawwim wa-lā rāʿin wa-lā māniʿ (al-Mughnī, xx, ed. ʿA.-Ḥ. Maḥmūd and S. Dunyā, Cairo 1966, part 1, 24.12).

² They know that ʿUthmān became a nepotist, that ʿAlī became caliph after him, that civil war ensued, that the Umayyads were to introduce dynastic succession, and that the descendants of al-ʿAbbās were eventually to become caliphs. For their bias, see M. J. Kister, ‘Notes on an Account of the Shura Appointed by ʿUmar b. al-Khattab’, Journal of Semitic Studies 9, 1964; G. Rotter, Die Umayyaden und der zweite Bürgerkrieg (680-692), Wiesbaden 1982, 7ff; S. Leder, ‘The Paradigmatic Character of Madāʾinī’s Shūrā-Narration’, Studia Islamica 88, 1998, 42ff.

1) Evaluation

All the akhbārīs approve of ʿUmar’s shūrā (there clearly was no Rāfiḍī recollection of the event),³ and some present it as the best way of regulating the succession: ʿUmar instituted it saying that Abū Bakr’s election had been a coup (falta) and that his own had been effected without consultation (ʿan ghayr mashwara), but that hereafter the matter was to be shūrā.⁴ More commonly, however, it is seen as a second-best solution: ʿUmar only used this method because he did not know whom to designate. ”Whom shall I appoint as my successor?”, he replies when people ask him to settle the succession. “If Abū ʿUbayda had been alive, I would have appointed him… if Sālim, the client of Abū Ḥudhayfa, had been alive, I would have appointed him”.⁵ Elsewhere he would have appointed Abū ʿUbayda, Muʿādh b. Jabal or Khālid b. al-Walīd;⁶ or he wanted to appoint ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿAwf, but the latter asked to be excused.⁷ Whomever he might have appointed, we are left in no doubt that people would have respected his choice: they are presented as wholly united around him and happy to leave the decision to him. To these sources, the ideal would have been a situation in which there was a single man endowed with the same outstanding merit and ability to elicit consensus as ʿUmar himself, so that all the dying caliph needed to do was to nominate him. But there was no such man now, only several men of equal merit and influence. This is why a shūrā was necessary.

³ Many accounts in the mainstream sources are partial to ʿAlī, but no akhbārī rejects the whole procedure as absurd on the grounds that ʿAlī had been designated by the Prophet himself. When the Imāmīs discuss the shūrā, they do so on the basis of the same akhbārī accounts as everyone else (cf. esp. al-Faḍl b. Shādhān, al-Īḍāḥ, Beirut 1982, 84ff, 128f, 211f; al-Majlisī, Biḥār al-anwār, Beirut 1983, lx, 83f; also Kitāb Sulaym b. Qays al-Hilālī, ed. M. A. al-Anṣārī, Qum 1995, ii, 751, though this book mainly offers Imāmī elaboration; note that the shūrā here is invariably of the classical six (pp. 631, 651, 653, 751, 800); contrast below, notes 8, 9).

⁴ al-Balādhurī, Ansāb al-ashrāf v, ed. S. D. F. Goitein, Jerusalem 1936 (hereafter BA), v, 15.13. Compare the passages in which ʿUmar wishes it to be remembered that he did not appoint a successor, e.g. Ibn Saʿd, K. al-ṭabaqāt al-kabīr (hereafter IS), ed. E. Sachau and others, Leiden 1904-17, iii/1, 242f, 256, 261 (ed. Beirut 1957-60, iii, 335f, 352f, 359). For Abū Bakr’s election as falta, see W. Madelung, The Succession to Muḥammad, Cambridge 1997, 29ff.

⁵ al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa’l-mulūk, ed. M. J. de Goeje and others, Leiden 1879-1901 (hereafter Tab.), i, 2776f; similarly IS, iii/1, 248 (iii, 343).

⁶ Ibn Qutayba (attrib.), al-Imāma wa ’l-siyāsa, Cairo 1969 (hereafter Imāma), i, 23f.

⁷ Tab. i, 2723f, reflecting the better known claim that ʿAbd al-Raḥmān withdrew from the competition as a member of the shūrā (below, note 22).

2) The candidates

ʿUmar nominated five, six or seven men and told them to choose a successor from among themselves. The canonical figure is six: ʿUthmān, ʿAlī, Ṭalḥa, al-Zubayr, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿAwf and Saʿd b. Abī Waqqāṣ. The seventh man is Sa‘īd b. Zayd, a kinsman of ʿUmar’s, but his appearance on the list is rare.⁸ Many sources deny that Saʿd b. Abī Waqqāṣ was nominated, taking the number down to five,⁹ and most say that Ṭalḥa was away on business and failed to come back in time, so that the real number is usually four.

Whatever their number, ʿUmar chose the candidates on the grounds that they were “your chiefs and leading men” (ruʾasāʾ al-nās wa-qādatcihun),¹⁰ or that he could think of none better entitled,¹¹ or that if there were to be splits in the community it would be over these men.¹² Nobody had voted on them; it is not even clear, in most accounts, that people had been consulted about them.¹³ But we are left in no doubt that ʿUmar got it right: had there been a modem-style election, these were the men who would have won the votes; had ʿUmar left the succession unresolved, these were the men who would have fought it out.

⁸ For the figure seven, see the Ibāḍīs below, note 46. Saʿīd is included in Ibn Ḣabīb, al-Muḥabbar, ed. I. Lichtenstädter, Hyderabad 1942, 65f (where ʿAlī and ʿUthmān should be added). ʿUmar excludes him in Tab. i, 2777f; Ibn Shādhān, Īḍāḥ, 211; cf. also al-Jāḥiẓ, al-ʿUthmāniyya, ed. ʿA.-S. M. Hārūn, Cairo 1955, 248.7 (ʿUmar did not include him though it was suggested to him).

⁹ ʿUmar appointed five men (al-Bazdawī, Uṣūl al-dīn, ed. H. P. Linss, Cairo 1963, 185). Saʿd was not in the shūrā (Zulirī and Wāqidī in BA, v, 21.4,6). He was removed by ʿUmar so that only four were left (ʿAwāna in Ibn Abī ’l-Ḥadīd, Sharḥ nahj al-balāgha, ed. M. A.-F. Ibrāhīm, Cairo 1965-67 (hereafter IAH), ix, 50.6; or perhaps he was just declared ineligible by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿAwf after the latter had stepped down because both of them were of Zuhra (below, note 22).

¹⁰ Tab. i, 2778.8.

¹¹ Ibn Abī Shayba, K. al-muṣannaf fi ’l-aḥādīth wa ’l-āthār, Bombay 1966-82, xiv, 577; IS, iii/1, 245 (iii, 338).

¹² ʿAbd al-Razzāq b. Hammām al-Ṣanʿān...