Schisms and Sects
Written by: Nancy Khalek
The formative period of Sunni law had taken on distinct shape by the beginning of the 10th century C.E. This is the period in which scholars began to compile guides, or handbooks, for the application of law. While the madhahib comprise their own methodological approaches, the shariah itself is a system that relies upon a vast corpus of legal and exegetical scholarship. It comprises criminal, family, and commercial law. Rights and responsibilities are either individual or communal, and a broad vision of civil society is contained within the elaboration of the shariah.
Strictly speaking, each school of law or madhhab (pl. madhahib) was not a sect, but a methodological approach to religious and legal interpretation. There was no compulsion in the school of thought to which one adhered. More often than not, people simply advocated the methodology of their given locality.
Many Sunnis did and still do advocate, however, that a person choose a madhhab and follow it consistently, in spite of the fact that other schools are deemed equally valid. Current incarnations of Sunni Islam, as is typical of modern reform movements, have their own, less rigid, views about the necessity of adhering to a madhhab consistently, if at all.
|Six core beliefs of Islam|
Leaving aside the matter of legal differentiation for a moment, there were also other lines along which different groups of Sunnis arranged themselves when it came to more interior questions about Islam. The articles of faith, iman, are enumerated as belief in God, the Angels, the revealed books, the Messengers who brought those books, the final Day of Judgment, and the belief in God's knowledge and control over everything (al-qadaa wa al-qadar). Specific views about some of these articles of faith would become defining aspects of theological controversies between Sunnis and other denominations, as well as among Sunnis themselves.
One theological school was the Mu‘tazilite, sometimes referred to as the "school of speculative theology." It was based primarily in Iraq, in Basra and Baghdad, flourishing from the 8th to the 10th centuries. While less relevant for the overall development of Sunni theology, Mu‘tazilite theological views about the nature of God influenced Shi‘ism more profoundly, especially Twelver(-Shi'ism) or Imami Shi‘ism. Its followers are generally not accepted by Sunni scholars, allegedly due to its belief in the superiority of reason to tradition, and the tendency to generate less literal interpretations of particular, namely ambiguous, verses of the Quran. The nature of the scripture, however, was to be a controversial matter in another, somewhat puzzling, episode in early Islamic history.