The Sharing Group Discussion on the Clericalising of Prophesy

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ 

The following was posted by Brother Tim, on The Sharing Group, on the 26^th March, 2015: “Is the biggest heresy in Islam not, in fact, the clericalising of prophesy and with it, the commodification of spiritual knowledge by an elite political class of scholars?” 

Brother David Rosser Owen: Or pseudo-scholars, perhaps? 

Brother Abdul-Halim Vazquez: If Islam is something real and objective and not just an imaginary game, then there is such a thing as a right way and a wrong way.  And if you are not sure about the right way, then you go to experts.  I can object to the commodification of automotive knowledge, but unless I go to the mechanic my car might stop running.  I can object to the commodification of medical knowledge but unless I go to the doctor I might not get better when I am sick. 

Now, I definitely think there should be greater transparency.  Scholarly interpretations should not be imposed.  We should be able to question and criticise and discuss.  But I actually think it is important to recognise and respect actual scholars.  In a lot of ways, the Reformation was a disaster in Christianity as that now there literally hundreds if not thousands of different Christian denominations, not just seventy-something, because of a flattening of authority and that is also part the rise of Wahhabism. 

Brother David W Roesler: Agreed when it stifles new insight and positive change.  The Reformation came about because of the refusal of the Catholic Church to change with the times and allow other points of view to be heard.  I have always thought the Catholic Church missed a chance to be the tent pole encompassing a variety of different interpretations of Christianity.  Only God knows absolute truth and to argue over dogma especially arcane hair splitting over minute differences of theology is insane. 

Brother Tim Luckcock: Being dependant on an expert begs the question if the experts are serving their self-interest as experts in a way which is disabling of others.  What safeguards are there to prevent a political class of religious experts elevating themselves above a servile class of ordinary incompetent Muslims?  Is this not just a perverse doctrine of Muslim priestcraft similar to the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church?  How can a prophetic Divine Revelation accessible to all of us without human mediation be so reduced to a theocratic form of technocracy? 

Brother Hamayoon Sultan Qurayshi: I have a problem with assuming that everyone can be an appropriate authority on a subject, because they cannot.  Not everyone knows the same amount as someone else; and we are seeing just what happens when someone who has barely read and understood even one hadits, thinks that they are an authority on Islam, and is articulate enough to gather a following.  I agree that when it becomes incestuous then this can lead to stagnation.  But I would not let my children learn mathematics from someone who had not appropriately studied the subject, so why would I take seriously anyone who has not studied Islam appropriately? 

We do desperately need more Western-born scholars rather than the imported variety; but as long as all of the best seats of learning remain open to the best from each social group so that anyone can rise to the top no matter what their social background, rather than because their parents were able to pay to get them there, then we still have hope. 

Brother Joel Troxell: The comparison to expertise in a particular vocation is a bit apples to oranges.  The vast majority of us are not faced with moral and ethical dilemmas of such complexity that require an expert.  And even then, no one knows each individual situation as well as the person in it.  We also believe that God is Closer to the heart of each person than their own jugular vein.  No one has a medical manual for their illness sown to their body or the one who wrote it occupying their minds, and that is why we have doctors.  But matters of guidance are completely different.  If anything, we need a lot more guides who know how to facilitate Muslims into understanding how to think and how to connect with God through revelation and tradition.  Does that mean a certain level of proficiency in these things?  Of course.  But the difference is understanding that ultimately the power to do what is right, and to choose truth over error is not in the pen of the scholar, but in the heart of each person. 

Brother Tim Luckcock: Yes, I think I am also grappling with the notion that the only leadership in Islam is scholarly so the unlearned become inferior followers.  The early Christian church for example had a variety of leadership functions and I do not see this balance in Islam unless it is more subtle and I am missing something? 

Brother Hamayoon Sultan Qurayshi: I do not believe that the only leadership is scholarly.  But I also do not believe that anyone who has not appropriately studied the Islamic and spiritual sciences can legitimately claim to be an authority on such, any more than a layman claiming knowledge of medicine based on nothing more than a rudimentary knowledge of human biology.  Not having knowledge of the shari’ah is not an inferiority; knowledge like everything is rizq, hence why we ask Allah (s.w.t.) to Increase us in knowledge, a du’a that He Grants by His Will.  To consider myself inferior to a scholar, to me, would be immensely ungrateful to the One who has Given me other skills with which I am earning a comfortable living, al-Hamdulillah.  Would I have liked to have been an Islamic scholar?  Sure, but ar-Razzaq had other plans for me. 

We are living in a time when the blood of a martyr is considered more sacred than the ink of a scholar; we see the results of this every day on our television screens with ignorant fools thinking they are scholars and thus able to make their own rulings.  Opening up knowledge to everyone regardless of social background is of course important, but this does not mean that everyone deserves to have their opinions taken equally seriously - some people know more than others on any given subject and this is just reality.  Only when we have reversed this back to what it should be, and thus give to our appropriately trained scholars their rightful due, will our state begin to change. 

Brother Tim Luckcock: As a school teacher, I have followed a vocation dedicated to academic learning.  But the Christian idea of leadership being a spiritual gift also indicates that God is instrumental in selecting spiritual leaders who are not self-selecting by virtue of their cognitive intelligence and academic aptitude.  After all, that is how prophets are selected according to Islam too. 

Brother Hamayoon Sultan Qurayshi: Of course, Brother Tim; but Islam is a religion of the law and so for our appropriately trained scholarship, cognitive intelligence and academic aptitude are a pre-requisite given the immense amounts of information that they have to study, analyse, and internalise.  That is not to denigrate Christian leaders - Archbishop Rowan Douglas Williams, for example is an extremely learned and spiritual man who I met only once but with whom I was very impressed.  But the knowledge of the scholars acquired through years of dedicated study of the field therefore makes them more appropriate to approach for an opinion than someone who doesn't have this.  The scholars I have found have often also given bay’ah to other spiritual leaders too, so there are different levels of leadership at play. 

Brother Joel Troxell: I sure hope not.  Maybe I still cling to certain vestiges of Christian thought, but I always understood law to be for the lawless.  Those whose conduct is in accordance with the Divine will do not need law. 

Brother Tim Luckcock: Maybe that's what I find so alienating as in my mind the law is all too easily opposed to spirit.  But it is not in balance if there has been an institutionalised fixation with “the law” throughout the bulk of Islamic history. 

Brother Joel Troxell: My understanding is that Islam is supposed to be a middle path, one that balances the sunnah of Moses (a.s.), which is one of law and justice, with the sunnah of Jesus (a.s.), which is one of spirit, love, and mercy.  One is a path of the head, and the other the path of the heart.  You need a little of both, I think. 

Brother Tim Luckcock: This is the point I am making: that the prophetic spirit which Islam epitomises has been captured and neutralised by lawyers. 

Brother Joel, are you suggesting that the more Muslims think of themselves as separate from the Jewish and Christian paths and possessing a complete self-contained final Revelation they are in error?  So Islam may be a balancing middle way but not if it sheds the two earlier ways?  That the Prophet (s.a.w.) came to unite all believers but not to found a distinct religion?  That is close to my understanding, I am bound to say. 

Brother Hamayoon Sultan Qurayshi: Islam is a religion of balance and I agree completely that this balance has been disturbed too far down the path of mindless legalism without spirituality, but the law is a vital component, and for which we need scholarship.  Perhaps it is my own instinctive opposition to anything anti-intellectual however, but I just do not believe that the solution is therefore to neuter the integrity of the scholarly process by dumbing it down.  The scholars should have their authority as the inheritors of the Prophet (s.a.w.), whilst the spirituality needs to be brought back in. 

Brother Tim Luckcock: I am not denigrating scholarship, Brother Hamayoon, but seeking to understand why it is scholars who are inheritors of the Prophet’s (s.a.w.) authority and nobody else.  He did not found a school as far as I am aware?  So how come the shift from immediate Revelation to bureaucratic control? 

Brother Joel Troxell: Brother Tim, I would agree.  I think there are portions of the Qur’an that are largely unintelligible without a good understanding of prior Revelation.  I think a lot of Islamic exegetes have arrogantly assumed otherwise. 

Brother Hamayoon, I am also against anti-intellectual approaches, but I do not see the task of scholars as one of intellect.  Taking a bit of direction from Plato’s philosophy of psychology and politics in the “Republic”, I see humans as a composite of three things: will, intellect, and soul.  Islam, in order to meet the needs of Muslims, should have those who embody duties based on each of these.  Scholars form a type of the will, philosophers are a type of the intellect, and mystics are a type of the soul.  Take one away, or make one a complete authority over all others, and you lose a sense of completeness.  No human can survive without a balance of those three things. 

Brother Hajj Ahmad: Agreed, Brother Tim, and also mathematics or auto mechanics or software development is just not the same as religious knowledge.  The bureaucratic control of spiritual revelation has denuded Islam of a great deal of its spontaneous beauty and turned it into a priestcraft as you so aptly coined the word.  But the devotion to scholarship of an intellectual class has been the case with every major world religion.  So perhaps it is inevitable.  This stifling of the original beauty of religion is the reason why the spiritually minded have sought to regain the original impulse through spiritual movements such as Sufism, Hesychasm, Gnosticism and the Kabbalah to name but a few. 

Brother Hamayoon Sultan Qurayshi: I am guessing, Brother Tim, that as systems become big enough, there needs to be some element of bureaucratic control to maintain the integrity of the whole; Islam did spread very quickly and so it was necessary to manage.  Out of this though did emerge some fantastically vibrant cultures - Baghdad, Andalusia, and so forth, which were very different from each other but which still conformed to the principles of Islam.  We are too obsessed with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and their like nowadays and need to allow such to develop again - but for the principles to remain adhered to, scholarship is needed, otherwise it will be chaos. 

I would also assume the inheritors are such of the Prophet’s (s.a.w.) religious authority and legitimacy, as people who studied with teachers, who had teachers, who had teachers going back to the Prophet (s.a.w.) himself.  I was not trying to argue that the appropriately trained scholars were the only authority in Islam - just the authority as far as the law was concerned. 

Brother Jak Kilby: But, Brother Tim, if we are “being dependant on an expert”, surely that would mean we actually listen to what they say and follow this.  I thought that today nobody did actually listen to these people, or anyone else for that matter.  We are all full of our own opinions in any case which, as we know full well, are the only “correct” ones.  Oh, or was I talking just about myself? 

Brother Hamayoon Sultan Qurayshi: I agree, Brother Hajj Ahmad, though we have seen how individual groups within some of these spiritual movements have morphed into ignorance.  Even within Sufism, we have some groups who claim spirituality, but who have almost completely abandoned the shari’ah in favour of their own whims and desires.  We also see the excessively legalistic who abandon all context and spirituality in favour of literal interpretations of the law. It is a balance.  The advent of Musaylimah ibn Habib al-Kadzdzab so soon after the return of the Prophet (s.a.w.) to Allah (s.w.t.) was a sign of just how challenging this would become. 

Brother Abdul-Halim Vazquez: Agreed about the Catholic Church missing the opportunity to be that tent pole.  They seem to be slowly trying to do that now by creating different rites.  They apparently created a new one tailored for refugees from the Anglican church. 

Brother Terence Helikaon Nunis: The issue with the Catholic Church is a false dichotomy.  The various Crusades, the Inquisitions, the purges; they had very little to do with doctrine and more to do with political control.  When the Arians, Monophysites and Nestorians diverged from Roman Catholicism, the Church used the bludgeon of the Roman military before the emphasis on dialogue.  All that we have in terms of major refutations came after the fact.  When the Cathars diverged from the Church, the root cause was sociopolitical first and then it evolved into a divergent creed.  It was crushed militarily, but the issues were never addressed.  The “Ninety-Five” theses of Martin Luther did not significantly diverge from the Church.  It was again, about political control.  And the rest is the result of a failed attempt to control everything. 

Will this be the future of the ummah?  I do not know.  But the issue we face is far more subtle.  What you are highlighting is the symptom, not the problem.  The problem we have is Muslims who have lave of their trust in God and availed themselves solely to the law, and even then, at a textual level with no concern for depth and nuance.  We get the leaders and scholars we deserve.  Consider this, if Muslim needs a fatwa to be kind, then he does not know his religion.  If the opinion of a scholar is needed to wish someone on an occasion, to celebrate a birthday, to show bereavement, then the problem is the people, not shari’ah.  Shari’ah is a tool.  If praying for the non-Muslim deceased is a controversy, if attending a non-Muslim wedding arouses questions of iman, then the so-called scholars we have, have failed.  That is our problem. 

Brother Tim Luckcock: I still suspect that Islam was hijacked at an early stage of formation by violent and murderous political leaders, and legalists who gained a bureaucratic scholarly monopoly over the prophetic spirit.  It was these people that defined “orthodoxy” and created a separate religion called Islam when it was never meant to be so.  This is not in the least a symptom but more a fatal flaw built into what most Muslims regard as the very foundations of Islam. 

Brother Abdul-Halim Vazquez: Brother Tim Luckcock, I think you are really giving fanatics too much symbolic power over what defines Islam and orthodoxy in a big way. 

Brother Tim Luckcock: The spirit and truth of Islam is surely an open source that does not suddenly require me to act as a guardian of orthodoxy.  The fanatics you will have with you always. 

Brother Hajj Ahmad: I cannot argue with you, Tim.  That is my suspicion as well.  There were, of course, scholars of integrity, and perhaps a very few rulers of integrity, but for the most part history does reek of suspicion.