The Legitimacy of Taqlīd

Aug 06

The last lecture I gave during my recent trip to Morocco was delivered at the Muhammad VIth Institute for the Training of Imams and Murshidat in Rabat. This is a post-graduate institution (i.e., students are admitted after graduating from another degree program) intended to produce graduates with the skills required to meet the daily religious needs of Muslim communities, such as prayer leaders in public mosques (imams) and spiritual care. Standards, as far as I can tell, are relatively high: no one is admitted who has not, for example, already memorized the Quran.

One of the innovations of this institute was that it opened itself to female students (murshidāt). While Islamic law does not permit women to lead mixed-gender congregational prayers, and Maliki fiqh does not even allow women to lead congregational prayers consisting solely of women (although other Sunni schools of law do), clearly Muslim women need religious instruction just as Muslim men do. The creation of a program for women to serve as murshidat was intended to make sure that women, too, had access to high-quality teachers of religion.

This institute reflects the domestic and international aspects of Morocco’s religious policies. Domestically, Moroccan policy seeks to create a Moroccan national religious identity based on three elements — Ash’ari theology; Maliki jurisprudence; and moderate, “Junaydi” Sufism. Internationally, Morocco seeks to project itself as a bastion of moderate and authentic Sunni Islam. The institute, therefore, is international, accepting students from other North African countries, Subsaharan Africa, and France.

I have no idea whether these policies “work” as a matter of statecraft, but as this video shows, the Moroccan state seems to take them quite seriously as this video of the king marking the completion of the third stage of the institute along with his attendance at the distribution of awards to the top students seems to indicate. The video, based on what I saw when I gave my lecture, gives a fair representation of the diverse nature of the student body. When I gave my lecture, there were large numbers of female students as well as large numbers of students from Subsaharan Africa. Any yes, the lecture hall is quite large. I don’t think I ever gave a lecture in a larger lecture hall than that of the Muhammad VIth Institute.

It was also quite a humbling experience: I think of myself as a legal academic, no more, and otherwise, just an ordinary Muslim doing my best to live a reasonably Islamic life. When I entered the lecture hall, the students welcomed me by standing up and reciting the opening lines of Busiri’s Mantle Poem in praise of the Prophet Muhammad. They did the same when I left. Despite my general cynicism, the warm welcome the students gave me was deeply moving.

In choosing my lecture topic, I wanted to both be respectful of my guests and their policies toward religion while at the same time say something substantive. In preparing for my lecture, I came across this document on the website of the Moroccan Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs, “The Guide for the Prayer Leader, the Friday Preacher and the Religious Adviser (Dalīl al-Imām wa’l-Khaṭīb wa’l-Wāʿiẓ).” This document attempts to assist those religious functionaries who interact with the public on how to go about delivering the most important Muslim public ritual – the sermon at the Friday congregational prayer.

The Friday sermon has always been political in Islam, it being the prerogative of the ruler to deliver the sermon. Traditionally, the Friday congregational prayer could not be held without the permission of the ruler. For this reason, the Shi’a have generally refused to recognize the validity of Friday prayers in the absence of the Imam, but that discussion must be deferred for another day. In any case, the aforementioned Guide for the Prayer Leader, in addition to being a practical reference guide, amounts to a clear articulation of the political theology of the Moroccan state, and is worth of an academic study from that perspective alone.

But there was one topic it touched upon that overlapped with my narrow interests as a legal academic: the obligation of religious functionaries to follow the well-established (mashhūr) position of the Maliki school when they publicly perform rituals. The continued salience of taqlīd is a point of major contention in Muslim societies in the modern period. In my lecture, I defended the legitimacy of the duty of taqlid, particularly in the domain of ritual, from a theological perspective and a political one: theologically, taqlid is legitimate because Muslims are not obligated to follow “true” opinions, only reasonable opinions, and the fact that a doctrine is “well-established” means by definition that it is a reasonable understanding of what God requires; and politically, taqlid in matters of worship is defensible because the point of ritual is discipling the self through practice, something that is fulfilled by acting in accordance with the well-established rules of the Maliki school, while opening the doors of reinterpretation (ijtihad) in matters of ritual will only have the effect of creating dissension and confusion without furthering the principle aim of ritual — disciplined practice — the least.

I also argue in this lecture that just as the common good vindicates taqlid in matters of ritual, it also places limits on taqlid in non-ritual matters: we cannot use taqlid as an excuse to continue following rules that are neither theologically absolute or consistent with our common good, and that this was the kind of taqlid that earned the criticism of modern reformers like Muhammad Abduh, Rashid Rida and the 20th century Moroccan jurist, Muhammad b. al-Hasan al-Hajwi . It is in this latter category of actions that ijtihad is required, not out of fear that practicing taqlid results in not following God’s will, as certain kinds of Salafists would have it, but out of fear of not pursuing the common good.

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Lessons from Translating the Muwatta

Aug 06

In 2019, the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School published a new translation of the seminal Islamic legal text, the Muwaṭṭaʾ of Imam Mālik b. Anas (d. 179/795), according to the recension of the Andalusian legal scholar, Yaḥyā b. Yaḥyā (d. 234/848). This translation was the culmination of several years of work involving a team of translators from Morocco and North America. I was responsible for ensuring the accuracy of the translation from the perspective of Islamic law.

Our translation of the Muwatta is available for free download from ShariaSource, a project of the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School.

In recognition of the importance of the translation, the Moroccan Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs invited me to give a lecture to the High Council of Religious Scholars on June 29, 2022, to discuss the work behind the translation and the methods we used. The High Council of Religious Scholars supervised the editing and publication of the Royal Moroccan Edition of the Muwatta of Yahya b. Yahya (the “RME”).

The RME was the first critical edition of the text based on the oldest North African and Andalusian manuscripts of the text. The Arabic text of the RME also includes many of the copious notes and glosses found in the marginalia of these ancient manuscripts that were left by the North African and Andalusian scholars who studied the Muwatta in the centuries after the introduction of the text to Muslim Iberia and North Africa.

For those interested in the subject of translating Arabic texts, they might find my lecture on how we approached the translation to be of interest. I also prepared slides illustrating the different stages of the translation process, and the differences between our translation and prior translations.

The Arabic text of the second edition of the RME is available on line at this link. A downloadable and (mostly) searchable pdf version of the Arabic text of the RME is available here.

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The Place of the Sharīʿa in a Modern Muslim State: Between Juristic Reasoning (al-Istidlāl al-fiqhī) and the Common Good (al-naẓar al-maṣlaḥī)

Aug 01

Last June, at the invitation of the Moroccan Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs, I gave a series of lecture at different Moroccan educational institutions. This is the text of the first lecture I gave, at the esteemed Qarawiyyin University in Fez. It was a great honor for me to give a lecture at this venue, which is arguably the oldest university in the world and without doubt one of the oldest centers for the study of Maliki law.

My lecture, which was delivered to the University President, senior administration, and graduate students in Islamic law, raised the question of the legitimacy of the modern state from the perspective of Islamic law, the sharia. I argued, contrary to certain Islamist groups and post-modern intellectuals, that there is no reason to believe that the modern state is per se illegitimate from the perspective of Islamic law.

Drawing on the Maliki tradition of Islamic law, I show that the legitimacy of decisions of rulers is not based on substantive conformity with the shari’a (or justice) as much as it is based on the consent of the ruled and the substance of the decision not being manifestly unjust. Based on this principle, I argue that states that enjoy popular legitimacy are, by virtue of that fact alone, substantially legitimate from the perspective of Islamic law. Accordingly, working toward achieving representative institutions that enjoy effective public consent is a crucial condition for the legitimacy of the modern Muslim state.

With regard to what it means for a decision not to be manifestly unjust, I also rely on Maliki authors to point out that jurists did not demand that particular decisions be in conformity with what jurists believed was the correct rule of the Shari’a, only that decisions not violate certain clear rules and principles of the Shari’a. Finally, I pointed out that what many radical Islamists take to be “ruling based on something other than what God has revealed” — and therefore is illegitimate or worse — is in fact nothing more than the state exercising its lawful discretion to organize the public interest through the issuance of positive laws. Far from undermining the shari’a, these help make the law more effective by replacing informal and discretionary methods of dispute resolution with clear rules.

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The Mālikī School and Contemporary Morocco, July 1, 2015

Jul 17

This is the text of the Presidential Lecture I gave two years ago at Akhawayn University in Morocco. It addresses the current attempts of the Moroccan government to enlist historical conceptions of Sunni orthodoxy along the three dimensions of the legal (Malikism), theology (Ash’ari) and mystical (Sufism) to help resist the allure of Jihadi-Salafism, and the challenges Salafism in general poses to historical Sunnism, but why historical Sunnism, despite these challenges, offers important resources for establishing a democratic Morocco. To take advantage of those resources, however, there must be a sincere commitment to those principles. A cynical attempt to deploy  those resources to resist Salafism while failing to reform the foundations of the public order, however, risks increasing the attractiveness of heterodox religious movements, including, but not limited to, Jihadi-Salafism.

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