Speakers: Thomas Small & Aimen Dean
Thomas: Hello, dear listener, Thomas Small here with another episode of Conflicted. Aimen, I came across a couple of quotes about our subject for this episode, Ahmad bin Hanbal, the great eighth, ninth century Muslim scholar.
A couple of quotes from people who knew him at that time. Here it goes: “I was once sitting with senior men of learning when they began praising Ahmad bin Hanbal and describing his virtues.
Someone said, enough already, don't get carried away. To which someone else replied, as if one could go too far in praising Ahmad. Even if we'd come here to do nothing but speak of his merits, we would still fail to recount them all.
I've never seen anyone like ibn Hanbal or anyone tougher to stand up the way he did with people being flogged and executed. He was persecuted and hounded all those years, but he stayed the course.
Aimen: What a classical veneration of Ahmad bin Hanbal. And in a sense, he deserves the respect that is shown by those scholars who got together to praise him and to heap such praise on him because of what he did and what he did still reverberate to this day.
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Thomas: Yes, absolutely. We're embarking on a two-episode exploration of Ahmad bin Hanbal’s fascinating life. We're going to be focusing on his relevance for today. We're going to be telling his story. It's amazing. Let's get into it.
Right Aimen, our topic today, Ahmad bin Hanbal, who gave his name to one of the four classical schools of Islamic law, the Hanbali School is really the foundation of the modern Salafi movement.
That's the same Salafi movement that we've talked about before on Conflicted, Muslims who seek to live by and emulate the practices of the earliest generations of Muslims living at the time of the Prophet Muhammad. And for a few generations after.
Well, the Salafis in many ways came out of the Hanbali school of jurisprudence. And to this day, Ahmad bin Hanbal, is held in high esteem by all Muslims, but especially by those who call themselves Salafis, including our friends, the Salafi jihadists.
When we're talking about Ahmad bin Hanbal and his life, we're talking about a time period the eighth, the ninth centuries, the Abbasid Caliphate. When prophecies were in the air, eschatological expectations of the end of the world were in the air.
Everyone expected at any moment, all of the prophecies were going to come true. And those prophecies, the prophecies you always talk about, Aimen, the prophecies that Salafi jihadists all around the world are reading and which motivate them. They have the Ahmad bin Hanbal's name attached to them more often than not.
Aimen: Thomas, you're talking about eschatology here. You know what, from 2009 until 2013, I spent four years of my life putting together a manuscript for a failed book that unfortunately never saw the light of day, because as some publishers said at that time, I lack the academic credentials.
Can you believe it? Me, me? Anyway, poor me, the amateur scholar.
But anyway, so basically this book was titled Jihad and the Power of Prophecy, where I trace the prophecies that influenced the jihadist thinking and the narrative about the end of time and the epic battles between Muslims and the West, and the Jihad that is going to usher in the era of the Mahdi and the return of the Messiah and all of that.
And so, I looked into all of these texts and eschatological prophecies, and I always used to see that the old trace back to Imam Ahmad bin Hanbal, that he is the one who collected them in his book of Hadith, known as Musnad Ahmad.
And this is when I noticed that if Ahmad bin Hanbal far more careful about what Hadith he used to collect the world could have been a much different place by now, Thomas.
Thomas: Well, we're going to explore that question and many more questions in this deep dive into Ahmad bin Hanbal's life and times.
Now, Aimen, Ahmad bin Hanbal still animates the sort of religious formation of Muslims today, especially Salafi Muslims. How about you personally? What kind of presence did Ahmad have in your life as a young Muslim?
Aimen: His influence was so profound on me when I was young, because first of all, I was born into perhaps one of the very few countries in the Muslim world that adopt the Hanbali school of jurisprudence to be the codified law of the country, which is Saudi Arabia in terms of transactions, jurisdiction, laws of marriages and divorce and inheritance.
So, of course, it affected me personally, but also because I began to become what they call in Arabic knowledge seeker, a student of Sharia.
And I remember in one of my many at attendance of lessons by great scholars, I was on the rooftop of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in Ramadan of 1992.
Thomas: Oh wow.
Aimen: Yeah. So, in Ramadan 1992, one of the greatest Salafi Sunni scholars of Saudi Arabia in modern times, Sheikh Muhammad bin al-Uthaymin, I think my Saudi listeners will recognize his name immediately.
He was giving a lesson, and in the lesson, he is talking about the resilience and the decisiveness, resilience and decisiveness that must come in sometime to save Islam.
And he said that there were two people who truly saved Islam after the death of the Prophet Muhammad.
The first one was the Caliph Abū Bakr. When he, after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, decided to fight the apostates, the tribes that had recanted Islam and returned back to Paganism in Arabia, he decided to fight them in order to reestablish Islam as the dominant force in the Arabian Peninsula. So, he said this action of his saved Islam from disintegration.
And then he said the second person credited with saving Islam was Ahmad bin Hanbal, when he stood against the Mihna, which we will talk about later, the Mihna of the creation of the Quran, which is a theological question that tore apart the Muslim world during the life of Ahmad bin Hanbal in the second and early third Muslim century.
Thomas: That is the climax of our story, Aimen, let's not give the game away too soon. So, let's get started. Let's go back in time to the year 780AD. That's 164 hegirae, 164 of the Muslim calendar, Ahmad bin Hanbal is born.
Now, just to put that into context, for Christian listeners, this might help. So, Ahmad stands relative to Muhammad in the beginning of Islam in the same sort of relation that Origen, the great, great church father of the third and fourth centuries AD stood in relation to Christ. That's the kind of era we're talking about.
So, the memory of the initial revelation, the first generation, the second generation, even the third generation after the prophet, they're dying or dead. And now the community is needing to consolidate and codify that memory to determine what the religion is.
Or in a more secular term, so Americans might sort of think of it this way. So, if we think of the beginning of Islam as the American Revolution in 1776, Ahmad Bin Hanbal is born during FDRs presidency and dies in the year 2011.
So, people say, Ahmad bin Hanbal is from early Islam, but we need to put that in perspective. I mean, no one would call 2011 early American.
And just like in America today, 200 and bit years after its founding, the question, what is America? What is the Constitution? What is the right relationship between the people and the government, between the President and the Congress? All of these questions are being contested right now in America.
The same thing was going on in the ninth century, the beginning of the ninth century, during Ahmad's time. And he would play a leading role, possibly the leading role in defining what Sunnism would become, which was still in development at that time. Today, the majority Islamic position, Sunnism, then in development. It was by no means certain that the Sunni party would prevail.
Aimen: Remember Thomas, that up until the year 100 of the Hegirae of the Islamic calendar, it was a taboo to write the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, that the only religious text that can be written is the Quran, and that's it.
It was kind of agreed that it was forbidden to write the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, and that the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and his actions need to remain as part of this collective memory of the Muslim community.
Thomas: And oral tradition.
Aimen: Yes, oral tradition and oral tradition was very strong amongst the Arabs, even before Islam. So, the Hadith and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad remained purely oral tradition until the year 100. This is the time when people started saying, let's write them down. And this is when the tradition of so-called Hadith collection started to emerge.
Thomas: Ahmad himself stands as part of that transition from an oral to a written culture within the Hadith. He himself was not entirely comfortable with writing things down. I mean, he did write an immense amount of Hadith, but you get a sense from him that he always felt a little bit bad about that.
Like by writing the Hadith down, you opened the door to a kind of codified hyper rationalised engagement with the Hadith, which in fact did happen down the line. He probably wouldn't have been happy about it.
And yet, down the line, one such school of Hadith codification, juristic rationalisation, what's given his name, the Hanbali school.
Aimen: Indeed. And for someone who was shy about writing the Hadith, he did write a lot, 27,000, 600 of them.
Thomas: He sure did. Back to 780, Ahmad bin Hanbal is born, he's born into a family of warriors and governors. His ancestors had participated in the initial Arab invasions of the Sasanian Empire, the great Persian Empire of late antiquity. They had participated in the conquest of that empire and then had positions as governors in cities in Iran, in Khorāsān, and what is today Central Asia.
So, he comes from an illustrious family of Arab conquerors and governors, but he himself is born in Baghdad. Now Baghdad we think of as the great city of classical Islam, the great capital of the Abbasid Caliphate.
But of course, in 780, when Ahmad bin Hanbal is born, it was brand spanking new. It had just been built.
Aimen: Absolutely, it was just out of the boxes, as we can call. And it was built precisely to be the capital of this new Abbasid dynasty. A dynasty which Ahmad's family supported during the uprising against the previous dynasty, the Umayyad and overthrew them.
And that's why Ahmad bin Hanbal in opposition to the other founders of the other three schools of jurisprudence was Abbasid man through and through, and he was born in their capital.
Thomas: And do you know, you were talking earlier about prophecies, the end of the world, eschatology. I think to this point, it's interesting to remember that the name of the Caliph when Ahmad bin Hanbal was born was al-Mahdi. The Mahdi, the end of times Savior of Islam that will rise up and vanquish the enemies, the Caliph of the Abbasid Empire had given himself that name. That means something.
Aimen: Indeed, because of course, the Abbasids used eschatology, fabricated most likely. But anyway, that's my opinion. But used fabricated eschatology in order to overthrow the Umayyads, to galvanise the Muslim world behind them, and to usher in a new era.
And the legacy and the remnants of these prophecies would influence of course, the mindset of Ahmad bin Hanbal as he is growing up in Baghdad. And unfortunately, it wasn't the happiest of beginnings of life, he was born but soon to be orphaned.
Thomas: Well, he was semi-orphaned. So, in 782, so when Ahmad was two-years-old, the Caliphate launched a massive campaign that penetrated deep into Anatolia. So, this modern day Turkey.
Regular listeners will remember that in the last season of Conflicted, we did an episode on Turkey and Cyprus where we covered in detail the wars between the Caliphate and the East Roman or Byzantine Empire.
Well, when Ahmad was born, those wars were raging at their absolute hottest. And in this campaign in 782, the Arab armies advanced all the way to the Bosphorus just across from Constantinople. And Ahmad's father was among the soldiers. He was fighting for the Caliph against the East Romans.
I can't tell you, Aimen, how romantic the idea of these wars are in my mind. Reading about this, I came across this just amazing fact that the Roman emperor in Constantinople had built a line of beacons, of fire beacons on the mountaintops across the Anatolian Highlands.
A line of beacons, that when the Arabs would approach the southernmost beacon, they would light the beacon, and then one after another beacon after beacon would be lit all the way to the capital, all the way to Constantinople. Now, what does this remind you of?
Aimen: Yeah, Lord of the Rings.
Thomas: Exactly.
Aimen: Are you insinuating that somehow, we are the Orcs?
Thomas: Yes, exactly. Tolkien was inspired by this line of beacons in his description of Gondor’s beacons, which were lit when the bloody Orcs or the agents of Sauron would advance upon Minas Tirith. You Arabs, you are the Easterlings, the vile Orcish minions of Sauron.
Aimen: Are you saying basically that we are ruled by Ayatollah Sauron? Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
Thomas: So, Ahmad's father, who was a soldier fighting for the Caliph, he died when Ahmad was only three-years-old. It's not exactly sure how he died. I like to think, he died valiantly in war, but Ahmad was left without a father.
And from then on, he was raised by his mother. This is a bit of cod Freudian analysis here, but I sort of like to think that that Ahmad's personality, his character, may have been informed by this position he found himself. Without a father being raised only by his mother, because his whole family, all his ancestors had been warriors and governors, politicians, men of action.
He did not grow up to be like that at all. Quite the opposite. He became a scholar, and more importantly, a very pious spiritual renunciate. An ascetic, someone who withdrew from the world.
And it's interesting to think that if he had grown up with a father around, maybe Ahmad would've joined the family business, and become a warrior like his ancestors.
Aimen: Well, technically, he was a hermit. He lived a life akin to a monk, except he got married, of course. And however, he lived the life of poverty and a life that is as far away from luxury and seeking worldly pleasures as possible.
So, you could call him a scholar. You could call him a semi-monk, since he was technically married. Yeah.
Thomas: Well, this pious streak in him was in evidence from a very young age. There's a great story widely reported by his followers, that his mother had to hide the young Ahmad's clothes each night after he went to bed, so that he wouldn't get up hours before the dawn prayer, get dressed and go to the mosque on his own steam, really.
He was so pious, he was desperate to be in the mosque, and his mother was like, “Oh, this kid needs to sleep. I need to hide his clothes, so he won't go to the mosque.” That's how pious he was.
Aimen: It is the hallmark of Muslim scholars, Thomas, at that time is that piety proceeded the rise to fame through their excellent memory and then knowledge.
And if you remember that it is, most of the Muslim knowledge at the time was part of an oral tradition. If you are not physically there in the mosque, how would you memorise and collect that huge trove of religious teachings?
Of course, you need to be somewhere in order to do it. And usually the most bias of people, if you want to seek their knowledge, will be in the mosque in the early hours.
Thomas: Well, he spent a lot of time with these very, very pious Hadith scholars, learning from them in the mosque in Baghdad. And as he grew, his personality really was stamped by this knowledge, by this scholarship.
He had a great seriousness about him. He was very, very much always aware of the fear of God, aware of death as an ever-present possibility, aware of the last judgement, aware of standing before God, and being forced to make an account of his life.
He was a serious, quite melancholy soul in a way. There's that famous Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad saying, “If you knew what I knew, you wouldn't laugh, you would weep.” And that kind of spirit definitely animated the young Ahmad bin Hanbal.
Aimen: Well, I mean, just to reinforce what I said before about him being almost a monk, he used to actually recite one seventh of the Quran every day. And he used to make 300 bows every day in prayer, not to mention the nightly recitations that used to last the early hours of the morning.
All of this worship, which happened mostly in his teens, would inform the young man, the young Ahmad bin Hanbal as he embarks on a journey, because Baghdad became small for him, and he wanted to explore the wider Muslim world to seek greater knowledge and to collect more Hadith.
Thomas: That's right. Now, we're going to take a break now but when we get back, we're going to launch Ahmad as a young man upon his lifelong quest to memorise the Hadith. We'll be right back.
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Welcome back, Conflicted listeners, we are still talking about Ahmed bin Hanbal, the great eighth, ninth century Muslim scholar. When we left him, he was 18-years-old, about to leave Baghdad and travel the Muslim world, gathering Hadith to memorise Hadith.
He left Baghdad. He first went to Kufa in Iraq, and from there to all the other major centres of the Islamic world in the Middle East at that time, Basrah, Mecca, of course, Sanaa in Yemen, Damascus in Syria, even to cities along the Byzantine frontier.
He travelled widely, sat at the feet of great and renowned Hadith scholars, men who had memorised sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, sayings of the companions of the Prophet Muhammad. And he built up an incredible repository of Hadith in his memory.
Aimen: Absolutely. In fact, Thomas, the travelling to seek Hadith and to collect these fragments of the saying of the Prophet Muhammad from one city to another and from one village to another, and from one school and seminary to another, was a tradition, not only a tradition, in fact, it was an act of worship.
It was an act of reverence, in order to go and to preserve and to protect that collective oral holy memory coming down through the generations from the Prophet Muhammad.
And this is why for Ahmad, as well as it was the case for many others who proceeded him, and many others who would follow him, this was in fact a journey of a lifetime, because Imam Shafi'i himself, the one who proceeded Ahmad as one of the founders of the other three schools of jurisprudence in Islam, he said, who does not travel in the seeking of the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad is not a worthy to be called a scholar.
So, without the travel, without the journeys, you are not considered to be a scholar. The only exception that people will make is that if you were born and lived in Medina, because of course, Medina was the epicentre of Islam in terms of learning, and many people were coming and going, and people were travelling to Medina rather than Medina going to them.
Thomas: So, that ideal of memorising the Hadith, of travelling in order to find out Hadith and to put them to memory, that ideal was held as a great religious vocation by a section of the Muslim community.
But I think it is interesting to point out that that was not necessarily the ideal held by all Muslims at the time.
Aimen: Oh, of course.
Thomas: And this is all part of that developmental process, which would culminate in Sunnism, what is called Sunnism today.
Aimen: In fact, the word Sunni, what is the word Sunni? Sunni means the follower of Sunnah. And what is the word Sunnah? Sunnah means the sayings and the traditions and the actions of the Prophet Muhammad.
So, the people who seek to emulate the Prophet Muhammad through the legacy that he left in terms of oral legacy, non-Quranic legacy, they are called Sunnis because they have followed the Sunnah, the Sunnah is what I described early, the legacy oral and otherwise of the Prophet Muhammad.
Thomas: And this endeavour to memorise the Hadith in order to define for the Muslim community what their religion is. This is what the religious scholars were doing. This had already caused the religious scholars to clash with the political authority, with the Caliph in Baghdad.
And in order to tell this story, we flashback a little bit to the year 755. So, that's 25 years before Ahmad was born. This clash had already happened. So, there was a very famous Abbasid courtier called Ibn al-Muqaffa and he complained to the Caliph, Al-Mansur at the time, that each city in the Caliphate had its own laws and in fact that even within a single city, there were different legal regimes in force.
This only stands to reason. If you have a whole legal regime based upon the memory of sayings and doings of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions, which haven't been written down, really, and which are open to interpretation by the those who have memorised it, the law is going to have a much more fluid and less kind of codified form.
And Ibn al-Muqaffa thought, this is terrible. He looked across at the Romans, and they had this very illustrious tradition of codified law, one law throughout the empire. He wanted something like that for the Abbasid Caliphate.
The Caliph, Al-Mansur actually agreed with Muqaffa and tried to draw up such a law code for the empire. But the legal scholars, the men who had memorised the Hadith and who were in charge of defining the religion for Muslims, they totally rejected this effort. They resisted it. And so, the scheme failed.
Aimen: One of the biggest missed opportunities, I will call it one of the biggest missed opportunities in Islam, in order to actually finally settle a lot of the disputes.
Thomas: Well missed opportunity, it may have been, this clash between the Caliph and the religious scholars would continue really until the present day in Islam. It's a constant feature of Muslim history. And later on in his life, Ahmad bin Hanbal will become like the stereotypical example of someone resisting Caliph authority.
Aimen: Absolutely. Ask me, I'm from Saudi Arabia. I mean, goodness. Even Saudi kings were always opposed by upstart clerics who always fancied themselves as Ahmad bin Hanbal, speaking truth to power and trying to masquerade their political opposition as a religious purity fighting against modernising pollution. You see what I mean.
Thomas: So, here he is, he's travelling around the caliphate. He's sitting at the feet of the great Hadith scholars. He's memorising Hadith, and his reputation is growing.
There are quotes from the time of other Hadith scholars older than Ahmad, men from whom he had learned the Hadith. Quotes like, “I have never seen a more erudite and God-fearing person than Ahmad Ibn Hanbal.”
Or Imam Shafi’i, as you said, someone who preceded Ahmad, who Ahmad knew, also learned from. He said, “When I left Baghdad, there was no one more righteous, God-fearing, or more knowledgeable than Ahmad bin Hanbal.”
So, Ahmad bin Hanbal's reputation was really great. He had earned for himself high status amongst the Hadith scholars of his time.
Aimen: Actually, Ahmad bin Hanbal's son, after Ahmad's death was told that, you know what, your father memorised one thousand thousand Hadith, as you know, the Arab-
Thomas: 1 million Hadith.
Aimen: Yeah, the Arabs didn't know a million at the time, so they used to say one thousand thousand. So, 1 million Hadith.
I find this to be rather an exaggeration. I mean, obviously. However, decades later Bukhari, Imam Bukhari, who has written the Bukhari, the book of Hadith that is considered to be the most authentic by all Sunni Muslims, said that he chose the 4,400 Hadith in his book out of 600,000 Hadith.
So really, he chose only less than 1% of all the Hadiths that he heard, and he included them in his book. So, Ahmad did the same. He sifted through the hundreds of thousands of Hadith, most likely he heard, and he chose 27,400 Hadith to be the contents of his book, the Musnad.
Thomas: The Musnad. This is Ahmad bin Hanbal's own compilation of the Hadith that he thought were authentic, were genuine. He compiled it into a big, huge multi-volume book the Musnad.
And Aimen, I guess the Musnad is something that maybe you, when you were a young Hadith scholar yourself would've referred to. It's still a common reference point for Sunni Muslims.
Aimen: It's still a common referencing point. However, the Musnad does not enjoy the same reputation of authenticity and reliability as the other six books of Hadith that are above it which include, of course, Bukhari and Muslim as the number one and number two.
Why? Because Ahmad bin Hanbal unfortunately had three flaws. The first flaw is that he was extremely trusting, so he did not have the level of personal scepticism that maybe the person in front of him had political motives, maybe the person in front of him is at the end of his life, and maybe he had Dementia or Alzheimer or Parkinson's or whatever, basically, that could have ailed him. And therefore, his memory is not as solid as he might think.
As well as the fact that there could be people who were bribed, people who actually had nefarious motives in order to insert into the religion something that wasn't there.
But nonetheless, he just persevered and was really taking Hadith from people at face value. That's the first error.
The second error is the fact that he did not apply any scepticism into the text. So, someone would narrate to you, Hadith. And this is an example, there is a Hadith where he narrated, where he is talking about the Prophet Muhammad saying, “Oh, from my family, they will come Al-Mansur, Al-Hadi and Al-Mahdi.”
Oh my God, these are three caliphs out of the first four of the Abbasid Caliphs. And of course, this Hadith was narrated during the time of the Abbasid rebellions, when already they had these nicknames, Al-Mansur, Al-Hadi and Al-Mahdi.
So, wait a minute, isn't that too convenient? He brushed over that because he was, I literal, he did not apply any scepticism to the text. He was literal. In other words, if this is what the Hadith say, and I believe that the person who narrated this Hadith is genuine and authentic, then who am I to question the Hadith?
Thomas: Yeah, it was part of his pious stance, really. He just thought it was humble to give everyone the benefit of the doubt especially it must be said, like the companions of the prophet and the followers of the companions. Those first two generations of Muslims Ahmad, like many Sunnis to this day, he just assumed that the companions and the followers didn't misbehave. They didn't do things bad.
He held them up to a very high moral standard and assumed that of them. And this stance of piety that he adopted, kind of marries with this general sceptical attitude, and this unwillingness to use personal, rational speculation to sift through the material and reach definite conclusions based on rational principles.
He was a literalist. He read the Hadith. He said, “Well, who reported this Hadith? Oh, that guy. He's a good guy. We got to believe it. We must, it's an act of faith to believe it.”
Aimen: Exactly. And this, which lead to the third flaw in Ahmad's collection of the Hadith and his methodology in doing so, which is the detachment from the political and social and economic environment that he was living in.
The Hadith is not narrated in a vacuum. Absolutely not. And therefore, he did not apply the scepticism of understanding that I am living through a tumultuous time and tumultuous times always encourage people to fabricate things in order to spew propaganda and to support one side against another.
Already, there is a schism in Islam between Shia and Sunnis. The beginning, the embryonic stages of Shia Islam and the embryonic stages of Sunni Islam, there is already schism.
So, of course, lots of fabrications and lies will be flying around. So, he did not take into account that many of the Hadiths he was listening to actually were invented just 30, 40, 50 years ago in order to support the Abbasid rebellion against the Umayyads.
And all of them were engineered and fabricated and narrated in order to support a particular side against another. And these Hadiths are the Hadiths that unfortunately seeped through the ages, thanks to Ahmed, to create the poisonous eschatology that is poisoning the minds of young people right now in about the Mahdi, the end of time, the black banners of Afghanistan, the black banners of Pakistan, the black banners of Khorasan.
The Yemeni and the Houthis, Hezbollah's yellow flags, all of these things are actually in Ahmad’s Musnad. And this is why you see; it wasn't his intention. He just felt that as an act of pious purity, he must believe in the Adalah. The word Adalah means authenticity and integrity of the Hadith narrators.
And this was naive at that time, because the detachment from what we call in Arabic, fiqh al-waaqi, what is fiqh al-waaqi, fiqh al-waaqi means, the wise understanding of the political and social environment of the day. If you are detached from it, and Ahmad was detached, then he did not understand how the fabrications were coming into being.
Thomas: To defend Ahmad, or at least to explain him, he believed that by collecting hadith, by memorising Hadith, by contemplating Hadith in his mind, by not subjecting the Hadith to doubt or speculative thought, he believed that this was a way of worshipping God correctly.
Because in his mind, you worship God by following the law. You know the law, by knowing the Sunnah, by knowing the Hadith, and constantly meditating upon it, day and night.
If you question it, if you subject it to rational speculation, to rational categories, you are interposing yourself and your own ego between the holy and divine words and memories of the prophet and his companions, and God, and God's law, which is wrong to do.
Aimen: Thomas, the ever-present clash in Islam between the rational thinking and the narration of the old traditions. How do you marry the two together?
Thomas: This clash will become the underlying cause of the climax of Ahmad's life, which we'll get to. One last point about his personality, who he was. I think I can imagine him quite positively. I have kind of a positive view of Ahmad. He's clearly very humble. He's clearly very sincere.
His embracing of poverty, his compassion and love for people was real, based on all of the reports from his disciples.
However, this is also remembered of him, “A disciple said of him in matters of religion, his anger became intense. He loved in God, and he hated in God.”
This kind of gets back to what we were talking about at the end of the last episode, Aimen, between this kind of part of Islam that I often find a bit difficult to understand, the idea of hating in God, of becoming angry and intense when you see something not in accordance with the law of God.
I don't want to take this too far. I know that throughout Christian history, Christians have had absolutely every opportunity to get angry, to rise up, to burn down temples, to kill heretics. It's not about Christianity in Islam.
It's really about his personality. He loved in God, and he hated in God. And that fire, that capacity for anger and for unmovable, unshakable certainty would inform the great sort of crisis of his life, for sure.
So, when Ahmad was 40-years-old, he stopped his travels, and he settled down in Baghdad. He began compiling the Musnad. He began attracting a number of disciples around him, teaching them Hadith, passing on the wisdom he'd learned.
These were very tumultuous times for the Abbasid Empire. In the few years before he stopped his travels, the fourth Fitna broke out, Fitna meaning civil war, civil strife. The Fourth Fitna, as it is known, broke out between the Caliph Al-Amin and his brother al-Ma'mun.
This is a fascinating, wonderful, dramatic story in its own right, hopefully one day, Aimen, we can do an episode just on it.
Aimen: Indeed.
Thomas: The upside of it is that the brother al-Ma'mun overthrew Al-Amin and became Caliph in his place. This is another example of how the things that we see happening in the Muslim world today, the conflicts we are always talking about are as old as Islam.
You often say, Aimen, that Islam today is going through a civil war of Fitna contested between who is going to rule the Islamic community, who is going to speak with that authority? How is Islam best interpreted in terms of its relationship to politics, its relationship to morals, its relationship to social cohesion.
This has happened again and again, and in Ahmad's life, it happened during the Fourth Fitna.
Aimen: Indeed. I mean, and this is why the six-year civil war between al-Ma'mun and Al-Amin culminated most importantly in al-Ma'mun winning the war. Now, why al-Ma'mun won the war?
Simple. Because first, he was smarter, he was the older. But Al-Amin was chosen by his father to be the successor because his mother was an Abbasid Princess Zubaidah, while al-Ma'mun’s mother was a Persian concubine.
So, the Persian alliance supported Ma’mum, matched with him to Baghdad and swept away the Arabs who supported the Al-Amin. And this is, in my opinion, marks the end of Arab hegemony over the Muslim world. It's being replaced by first the Persians and later the Turks.
And this is the last time the Arabs had a greater say in the affairs of the Muslim world. This is the moment.
Thomas: The rest of Ahmad's life will be spent in a way responding to this development. As you say, this movement away from an Arab dominated to a more Persianified dominated culture within the Caliphate.
And in fact, around this time Ahmad composes a number of creeds, a number of explications of what he believes Islam is to be. And in one of these creeds, he actually lists a number of heretics, a number of heresies, heretical groups.
One of those groups that he lists are known as the Shu'ubiyya. Now, the Shu'ubiyya were a movement of Persian and Persianified Arabs who held that Arabs did not have some kind of special dispensatory role in Islam, the Arabs weren't special. Islam was for all people, that there was nothing particularly special about Arabs or their language, Arabic.
Now, it's funny, this to us, I think today that strikes us as quite reasonable. Islam is a universal religion. Obviously, God loves everyone, blah, blah, blah.
But in fact, Ahmad stood against this idea and he said, no, the Arabs are special, and their language is special. And of course, that makes sense if what he thought the most important part of the tradition was memorising the Arabic language reports of the prophet and his companions. Arabic is so important.
Aimen: Yeah. And Shu'ubiyya, by the way, we were taught in school in Saudi Arabia that Shu'ubiyya was a racist exclusionist movement. That's what we were told, that it was directed at the Arabs, not because it was trying to build a inclusive Muslim society, but to build an exclusive society for the Persian attacks.
Thomas: Well, it's fascinating. As I say, these things from Ahmad bin Hanbal's life resonate today. Islam and the Muslim world has been stamped by certain features throughout its history. They come back again and again. That's why knowing the history helps us understand the present. That's what we're trying to do for you, dear listener.
I think it's safe to say that as a result of the Fourth Fitna and the conquest of the caliphate by al-Ma'mun may have rocked, may have shaken a little bit, Ahmad's faith in the secular, if you like, or at least the political authority.
He began to develop a little bit more of a reserved attitude towards the Caliph and towards the government. He believed more and more that it was a mark of piety to refuse to have anything to do with the government.
And in fact, he was often put forward by supporters as a great candidate to become a kadhi, to become an official judge for the Caliphate. And he always refused.
More and more, he didn't want anything to do with the government. And that's where we're going to leave him now in this episode.
There he is, he's memorised a million Hadith. He's got a great reputation as a man of learning, a man of piety. He loves in God. He hates in God. He has renounced anything to do with politics in his single-minded pursuit of holiness.
And yet, just around the corner, something was going to happen that would rock the Caliphate and would lead Ahmad directly into the belly of the beast, standing in front of the Caliph himself, having almost alone to defend as he saw it, true Islam.
We're going to cover this story in the next episode of Conflicted. It's a doozy. Can't wait to share this with you. See you, then.
Aimen: See you.
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Thomas: A reminder that you can follow the show over on Facebook and Twitter at MH Conflicted. And for a deeper dive into all the subjects we talk about here on Conflicted, head over to Facebook and search Conflicted Podcast Discussion Group. There you will find other fans of the show engaging in heated debates, enlightening conversations, and just generally geeking out over Conflicted related topics.
Conflicted is a Message Heard production. This episode was produced and edited by Harry Stott. Sandra Ferrari is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley and Tom Biddle.