Because Islam draws no distinction between the religious and the temporal spheres of life, the Muslim state is by definition religious. The main differences between the Sunni, Khārijite, and Shiʿi concepts of rulership have already been pointed out above. It should be noted that, although the office of the Sunni caliph (khalīfah, one who is successor to the Prophet Muhammad in rulership) is religious, this does not imply any functions comparable to those of the pope in Roman Catholicism. The caliph has no authority either to define dogma or, indeed, even to legislate. He is the chief executive of a religious community, and his primary function is to implement the sacred law and work in the general interests of the community. He himself is not above the law and if necessary can even be deposed, at least in theory.
Sunni political theory is essentially a product of circumstance—an after-the-fact rationalization of historical developments. Thus, between the Shiʿi legitimism that restricts rule to ʿAlī’s family and the Khārijite democratism that allowed rulership to anyone, even to “an Ethiopian slave,” Sunnism held the position that “rule belonged to the Quraysh” (the Prophet’s tribe)—the condition that actually existed. Again, in view of the extremes represented by the Khārijites, who demanded rebellion against what they considered to be unjust or impious rule, and the Shiʿah, who raised the imam to a metaphysical plane of infallibility, Sunnis took the position that a ruler has to satisfy certain qualifications but that rule cannot be upset on small issues. Indeed, under the impact of civil wars started by the Khārijites, Sunnism drifted to more and more conformism and actual toleration of injustice.
The first step taken in this direction by the Sunnis was the enunciation that “one day of lawlessness is worse than 30 years of tyranny.” This was followed by the principle that “Muslims must obey even a tyrannical ruler.” Soon, however, the sultan (ruler) was declared to be “shadow of God on earth.” No doubt, the principle was also adopted—and insisted upon—that “there can be no obedience to the ruler in disobedience of God”; but there is no denying the fact that the Sunni doctrine came more and more to be heavily weighted on the side of political conformism. This change is also reflected in the principles of legitimacy. Whereas early Islam had confirmed the pre-Islamic democratic Arab principle of rule by consultation (shūrā) and some form of democratic election of the leader, those practices soon gave way to dynastic rule with the advent of the Umayyads. The shūrā was not developed into any institutionalized form and was, indeed, soon discarded. Soon the principle of “might is right” came into being, and later theorists frankly acknowledged that actual possession of effective power is one method of the legitimization of power.
In spite of this development, the ruler could not become absolute, because a basic restraint was placed upon him by the Sharīʿah law under which he held his authority and which he dutifully was bound to execute and defend. When, in the latter half of the 16th century, the Mughal emperor Akbar in India wanted to arrogate to himself the right of administrative–legal absolutism, the strong reaction of the orthodox thwarted his attempt. In general, the ʿulamāʾ (religious scholars) jealously upheld the sovereign position of the Sharīʿah against the political authority.
The effective shift of power from the caliph to the sultan was, again, reflected in the redefinition of the functions of the caliph. It was conceded that, if the caliph administered through wazīrs (viziers or ministers) or subordinate rulers (amīrs), it was not necessary for him to embody all the physical, moral, and intellectual virtues theoretically insisted upon earlier. In practice, however, the caliph was no more than a titular head from the middle of the 10th century onward, when real power passed to self-made and adventurous amīrs and sultans, who merely used the caliph’s name for legitimacy. Education
Muslim educational activity began in the 8th century, primarily in order to disseminate the teaching of the Qurʾān and the Sunnah of the Prophet. The first task in this endeavour was to record the oral traditions and collect the written manuscripts. This information was systematically organized in the 2nd century ah, and in the following century a sound corpus was agreed upon. This vast activity of “seeking knowledge” (ṭalab al-ʿilm) resulted in the creation of specifically Arab sciences of tradition, history, and literature.
When the introduction of the Greek sciences—philosophy, medicine, and mathematics—created a formidable body of lay knowledge, a creative reaction on the traditional religious base resulted in the rationalist theological movement of the Muʿtazilah. Based on that Greek legacy, from the 9th to the 12th century ce a brilliant philosophical movement flowered and presented a challenge to orthodoxy on the issues of the eternity of the world, the doctrine of revelation, and the status of the Sharīʿah.
The orthodox met the challenges positively by formulating the religious dogma. At the same time, however, for fear of heresies, they began to draw a sharp distinction between religious and secular sciences. The custodians of the Sharīʿah developed an unsympathetic attitude toward the secular disciplines and excluded them from the curriculum of the madrasah (college) system.
Their exclusion from the Sunni system of education proved fatal, not only for those disciplines but, in the long run, for religious thought in general because of the lack of intellectual challenge and stimulation. A typical madrasah curriculum included logic (which was considered necessary as an “instrumental” science for the formal correctness of thinking procedure), Arabic literature, law, Hadith, Qurʾān commentary, and theology. Despite sporadic criticism from certain quarters, the madrasah system remained impervious to change.
One important feature of Muslim education was that primary education (which consisted of Qurʾān reading, writing, and rudimentary arithmetic) did not feed candidates to institutions of higher education, and the two remained separate. In higher education, emphasis was on books rather than on subjects and on commentaries rather than on original works. This, coupled with the habit of learning by rote (which was developed from the basically traditional character of knowledge that encouraged learning more than thinking), impoverished intellectual creativity still further.
Despite these grave shortcomings, however, the madrasah produced one important advantage. Through the uniformity of its religio-legal content, it gave the ʿulamāʾ the opportunity to effect that overall cohesiveness and unity of thought and purpose that, despite great variations in local Muslim cultures, has become a palpable feature of the world Muslim community. This uniformity has withstood even the serious tension created against the seats of formal learning by Sufism through its peculiar discipline and its own centres.
In contrast to the Sunni attitude toward it, philosophy continued to be seriously cultivated among the Shiʿah, even though it developed a strong religious character. Indeed, philosophy has enjoyed an unbroken tradition in Iran down to the present and has produced some highly original thinkers. Both the Sunni and the Shiʿi medieval systems of learning, however, have come face to face with the greatest challenge of all—the impact of modern education and thought.
Organization of education developed naturally in the course of time. Evidence exists of small schools already established in the first century of Islam that were devoted to reading, writing, and instruction in the Qurʾān. These schools of “primary” education were called kuttābs. The well-known governor of Iraq at the beginning of the 8th century, the ruthless al-Ḥajjāj, had been a schoolteacher in his early career. When higher learning in the form of tradition grew in the 8th and 9th centuries, it was centred around learned men to whom students travelled from far and near and from whom they obtained a certificate (ijāzah) to teach what they had learned. Through the munificence of rulers and princes, large private and public libraries were built, and schools and colleges arose. In the early 9th century a significant incentive to learning came from the translations made of scientific and philosophical works from the Greek (and partly Sanskrit) at the famous bayt al-ḥikmah (“house of wisdom”) at Baghdad, which was officially sponsored by the caliph al-Maʾmūn. The Fāṭimid caliph al-Ḥākim set up a dār al-ḥikmah (“hall of wisdom”) in Cairo in the 10th–11th centuries. With the advent of the Seljuq Turks, the famous vizier Niẓām al-Mulk created an important college at Baghdad, devoted to Sunni learning, in the latter half of the 11th century. One of the world’s oldest surviving universities, al-Azhar at Cairo, was originally established by the Fāṭimids, but Saladin (Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ayyūbī), after ousting the Fāṭimids, consecrated it to Sunni learning in the 12th century. Throughout subsequent centuries, colleges and quasi-universities (called madrasah or dār al-ʿulūm) arose throughout the Muslim world from Spain (whence philosophy and science were transmitted to the Latin West) across Central Asia to India.