Old Texts, New Practices

Islamic Reform in Modern Morocco

Etty Terem

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780804790840
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

In 1910, al-Mahdi al-Wazzani, a prominent Moroccan Islamic scholar completed his massive compilation of Maliki fatwas. An eleven-volume set, it is the most extensive collection of fatwas written and published in the Arab Middle East during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Al-Wazzani's legal opinions addressed practical concerns and questions: What are the ethical and legal duties of Muslims residing under European rule? Is emigration from non-Muslim territory an absolute duty? Is it ethical for Muslim merchants to travel to Europe? Is it legal to consume European-manufactured goods? It was his expectation that these fatwas would help the Muslim community navigate the modern world.

In considering al-Wazzani's work, this book explores the creative process of transforming Islamic law to guarantee the survival of a Muslim community in a changing world. It is the first study to treat Islamic revival and reform from discourses informed by the sociolegal concerns that shaped the daily lives of ordinary people. Etty Terem challenges conventional scholarship that presents Islamic tradition as inimical to modernity and, in so doing, provides a new framework for conceptualizing modern Islamic reform. Her innovative and insightful reorientation constructs the origins of modern Islam as firmly rooted in the messy complexity of everyday life.

1
MODERN ISLAM AND THE RELIGIOUS REFORM TRADITION

IN 1910, at the height of a period of major crisis and change in Morocco, as fears about a full-scale French military occupation threatened the country with social disorder and anarchy, al-Mahdī al-Wazzānī (1849–1923), a prominent Moroccan Islamic scholar, published a massive eleven-volume compilation of Mālikī fatwās and named it al-Mi‘yār al-jadīd (the New Standard Measure; henceforth, the New Mi‘yār).¹ In all likelihood, al-Wazzānī began his project around 1902.² Enormous effort was involved in the compilation of the book. During a period of approximately eight years, al-Wazzānī toiled on countless manuscripts of Mālikī law and jurisprudence. He came across thousands of fatwās that had been issued in Morocco over the course of centuries of Mālikī legal activity, selecting individual fatwās to be included in his monumental work.

As a work of compilation, the New Mi‘yār constitutes an assemblage of legal opinions issued by al-Wazzānī himself and by other prominent Mālikī muftīs, both contemporaries and predecessors. The scope of the work attests to a deliberate policy on the part of al-Wazzānī to produce a digest or encyclopedia of Mālikī law. It is immediately apparent that he carefully selected fatwās that tackle an ample spectrum of topics, and he gathered, copied, and arranged the material according to thematic criteria. Many of these legal opinions treat questions concerned with concrete social exigencies and everyday life of ordinary people that emerged within the context of the world in which al-Wazzānī lived: What are the ethical and legal duties of Muslims residing under European rule? Is emigration from non-Muslim territory an absolute duty? Is it lawful for Muslim merchants to travel to Europe? Is it appropriate to impose a market tax not stipulated by the Qur’ān? Is it legal to consume European-manufactured sugar?

Al-Wazzānī’s compilation of fatwās was deeply rooted in a traditional, eclectic genre of classical Islamic texts.³ Throughout Muslim societies, fatwās issued by distinguished jurists were regularly collected, either by the jurists themselves or by their students or associates, to be taught, transmitted, and interpreted.⁴ In text-centered societies, assembling the greatest teachings of the previous generations not only reflects a deeply ingrained respect for precedent and established authority but assigns such authority and prestige to the compiler and the work.⁵ Such fatwā collections can become paradigmatic examples of legal schools and juristic thought.

Al-Wazzānī’s naming the finished work the New Mi‘yār automatically implied continuity with a leading work of the Mālikī school, the Mi‘yār of Aḥmad al-Wansharīsī (d. 1508), the most famous collection of Mālikī fatwās.⁶ In the centuries after its compilation, this encyclopedic oeuvre was one of the most widely used legal texts by Moroccan ‘ulamā’. Its juristic authority was considered impeccable, and it was regarded as an authoritative model within the Mālikī school. Al-Wazzānī’s compilation resembles al-Wansharīsī’s in its massiveness, chronological span, format, and apparatus. It is only natural to assume that al-Wazzānī’s selection of the New Mi‘yār as the title of his work was intended to echo the reputation of al-Wansharīsī’s Mi‘yār. Indeed, the modern editor of the New Mi‘yār, ‘Umar Bin‘abbād, has referred to the collection as “one more brick, in terms of its content and size, and its scholarly significance and value that is added to the edifice [ṣarḥ] of great Moroccan authors in this field, such as Kitāb al-Mi‘yār of Aḥmad al-Wansharīsī.”⁷

The New Mi‘yār is one of the central and most extensive texts of the Mālikī legal tradition written and published in pre-Protectorate Morocco (1860–1912) and is recognized as an important repository of the Moroccan juristic lore.⁸ Despite its scope and vast spectrum of topics, no comprehensive study of the collection has been undertaken to date.⁹ Who was al-Mahdī al-Wazzānī? What causes and motives led him to compile the New Mi‘yār? Why was a New Mi‘yār needed? What were his objectives for the work? And how did they shape the nature of the material he collected in it? This book is about a single text, the New Mi‘yār of al-Mahdī al-Wazzānī, its nature and meaning. It aims at providing detailed analysis of a specific project of Islamic reform initiated by a modernist religious scholar.

ISLAMIC MODERNISM RECONSIDERED

A long-standing view, if not consensus, has dominated the scholarship on modern Islamic reformist thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This view, in broad outline, maintains that reformist thinkers promulgated a sharp critique of the classical Islamic scholarship and rejected the principle of legal schools.¹⁰ More specifically, the concepts of renewal (tajdīd), revival (iḥyā’), and reform (iṣlāḥ) are understood to involve the recovering of a correct form of Islam exemplified by the Prophet and the “pious ancestors” (al-salaf al-ṣāliḥ). This focus of reformist Islam on the early community of Muslims posited a return to the basic authoritative sources, the Qur’ān and the sunna (the normative example of the Prophet). Central to Islamic reformism, as suggested by this narrative, are the notions of revival of the Prophetic sunna recorded in authenticated ḥadīth (traditions traced to Muḥammad), promotion of ijtihād (reasoning independent of precedent), and rejection of taqlīd (blind imitation of earlier authorities).

In its preoccupation with the Qur’ān and the corpus of the ḥadīth as the guide to the true essence of Islam, and the vehement opposition to taqlīd, modern reformism, as emphasized fairly consistently by scholars, denoted radical critique of the legacy and teachings of classical scholarship, the classical schools of law (madhāhib, sing. madhhab), and the religious establishment.¹¹ In one of the seminal texts on Islamic reform, Ali Merad articulates an outlook shared by many commentators on this orientation that characterized Islamic modernism:

By preaching tirelessly for a return to first principles, the reformists were led to voice severe criticism of the orthodox Schools and their teachers. In their eyes, the Schools generally identified themselves with trends hostile to reason and science; they hindered the research carried out by idjtihad and consequently helped to stop the cultural progress of the community; they in fact gave priority to the study of fikh over knowledge based on the Kuran and on the Prophet’s Sunna; they placed the authority of the “doctors” higher than the authority of the only legitimate and worthwhile madhhab: that of the Salaf.¹²

Accordingly, reformist ‘ulamā’ have been often construed as the opposite of conservative ‘ulamā’. In their attitude toward Islamic tradition, conservative ‘ulamā’ were depicted as defenders of the classical interpretations of the orthodox schools who rejected any form of change and were content with blind adherence to juristic opinions developed hundreds of years ago. Moreover, Muslim reformers, it has been often argued, were concerned with the socio-political consequences of modernization and the overwhelming Western challenge, so they espoused a dynamic and flexible understanding of Islam and provided the underpinnings for the renewal and revival of Islamic tradition. Conversely, conservative ‘ulamā’ have been tagged as protectors of the status quo who were detached from the changed conditions of the time and hostile to modern ideas and practices.¹³

Recent scholarly efforts to investigate and characterize the multifaceted movement of modern Islamic reform in the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century have aptly criticized some of the implicit assumptions underpinning the historiography of modern Islamic reform. Critics have observed that for decades, Western scholars often told the story of Islamic modernist reformism as reflecting the subjective viewpoint of a few modernist intellectuals of the early twentieth century associated with the modernist network in Cairo, with whom they had most contact and on whose writings they principally relied.¹⁴ Ultimately, the conceptual preoccupations invoked in the works of major reformists such as Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī (d. 1897), Muḥammad ‘Abduh (d. 1905), and Rashīd Riḍā (d. 1935) became a fundamental typology on which the study of modern Islamic reformism is based.¹⁵ I agree with this dissatisfaction.¹⁶ The type of reformism that emerged in Egypt undoubtedly deserves close attention.¹⁷ My general concern here, however, is with conceiving the broad movement of modernist reform, which developed within the intellectual/epistemological, geographical, and political diversity of Islam, in terms of the ideas and principles that are intimately linked to a single network of Muslim reformers.¹⁸

More specifically, my principal concern is with automatically associating Islamic modernism with a sharp critique of the medieval scholarship and rejection of the principle of legal schools. The problem with this conception of modern reformism is the implication that thinkers who abided by consensual precedent, invoked the authority of the conventional legal schools, and were important members of the religious leadership in their communities did not (indeed, could not) offer any change as a basis for Islamic revival and reform. This study offers a new way of conceptualizing Islamic reformers and their projects. Redefining such an established view uncovers yet another chapter in the narrative of the origins of modern Islam.

Over the past few decades, a growing body of literature on tradition and religious authority in Islam has aimed at offering new approaches to thinking about Islamic tradition and historical change.¹⁹ The emergent view posits Islamic tradition as a sphere of fundamentally variable and shifting truths and principles rather than a set of stagnant beliefs and understandings. Scholars have argued that definitions of what constitutes Islamic tradition emerge within competing discourses and arguments, further eroding the simpler association of Islamic tradition with a fixed, essentialized body of knowledge. Interrogations of the concept have been particularly fruitful in redirecting the attention of scholars from prominent formulations of tradition as “traditional” that simply mimics the past to complex conceptions of pursuing continuity and coherence with the past. This approach is connected to the idea that appeal to tradition does not always entail opposition to change but can effectively enable it, that innovation may be articulate entirely within the terms of an age-old tradition. It is this body of knowledge on which I draw. My own view is profoundly inspired by the works of Talal Asad, an anthropologist of religion, and Daniel Brown, a scholar of Islam.

Asad understands Islam as “a discursive tradition” consisting of ongoing discourses in a variety of historical circumstances that seek to orient practitioners regarding the authorized practices. For him,

These discourses relate conceptually to a past (when the practice was instituted, and from which the knowledge of its point and proper performance has been transmitted) and a future (how the point of that practice can best be secured in the short or long term, or why it should be modified or abandoned), through a present (how it is linked to other practices, institutions, and social conditions).²⁰

Moreover, Asad argues that Islamic tradition is constituted and reconstituted not only by ongoing interactions between the present and the past. For him, interpretative debates, confrontations, and conflicts are intrinsic to the constitution and development of Islamic tradition, as of others. In Asad’s view, central to the concept of tradition is orthodoxy, which conveys the correct authoritative doctrine. As he suggests, orthodoxy “is not a mere body of opinion but a distinctive relationship—a relationship of power. Wherever Muslims have the power to regulate, uphold, require, or adjust correct practices, and to condemn, exclude, undermine, or replace incorrect ones, there is the domain of orthodoxy.”²¹

Particularly instructive to my thinking is the conception of power and change. The construction and reconstruction of Islamic orthodoxy, or the definition of what constitutes a Muslim, emerges in conditions of conflict and contestation of interpretations; “incorrect” concepts, beliefs, and practices are dismantled and replaced with “correct” ones. Furthermore, Asad suggests in a related article that because orthodoxy “aspires to be authoritative,” what is involved in the process of determining orthodoxy “is not a simple ad hoc acceptance of new arrangements but the attempt to redescribe norms and concepts with the aid of tradition-guided reasoning.” In fact, for Asad, those who speak for Islamic orthodoxy “cannot speak in total freedom: there are conceptual and institutional conditions that must be attended to if discourses are to be persuasive.”²² From this point of view, then, a reconfigured orthodoxy necessarily engages Islamic forms of reasoning and is firmly rooted in the Islamic discursive tradition.

Closely related to this position is Daniel Brown’s approach to the relationships between Islamic tradition and modernity. He points out,

A tradition emerges from the prism of modernity as a multi-colored spectrum of responses. Some responses will show the effects of modernity much more dramatically than others, but none will be entirely untouched. At the same time, each color of the spectrum, each different response, is clearly rooted in the tradition. All responses to modernity from a religious tradition, and even those that seem to have left the tradition altogether behind, maintain a certain continuity with the tradition, just as each band of the spectrum is present in the light entering a prism.²³

Brown invokes the transforming relationships of modernity and tradition. His point is that in the modern competition over the definition and content of tradition, there are no nonmodern formulations of tradition. He urges us to imagine tradition as “refracted by the prism of modernity.” For him, modern Muslims are engaged in an ongoing process of rethinking the traditions in which they part...