Blog Post 1-22

Ignaz Goldziher’s account of the development and authority of the sunna is often at pains to emphasize the extreme concern which “rigorists” often expressed with the concept.  The sunna governing a particular area of human behavior were derived from the words and, later, actions of the Prophet. On these grounds, pious Muslims strove to conduct even the most apparently minor matters of everyday life, from forms of greeting to the liceity of wearing certain kinds of jewelry. Correspondingly, Goldziher observes that, in the early Islamic period, this reverence for sunna gave rise to the doctrine that “the worst things of all are innovations” (Goldziher 64).  Particularly in the early period, this was interpreted to condemn “not only everything contrary to the spirit of the sunna, but also everything that cannot be proved to be in it” (68). All such innovations might be viewed, according to one strand of thought, as heretical and, consequently, damnable.  

On its face, this is extreme, and Goldziher observes that it led to a theological reaction fairly early in Islamic history.  To avoid the condemnation of any possible convenience or development unknown to the early decades of Islam, there emerge a distinction between heretical and unobjectionable innovations — those which contradict the Quran, and those which do not, respectively.  It seems a salutary development in Islamic thought. And yet, as Goldziher observed, this doctrine “supplied the motives for the approval of entirely new arrangements. Only a little broadmindedness is needed for men to approve…things which are absolutely contrary to Islam” (70).

The tension between these two poles is a familiar and, perhaps, predictable; as far as description goes, Goldziher sketches it admirably.  But the problem raises a fundamental, and unanswered, question: where does Islam strike a balance between these two poles? If rigorism ends in ossified hostility to any change whatsoever, and “broadmindedness” rapidly leads to the contradiction of foundational tenets of Islam, on what basis is it possible to steer a middle way between them?