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Posted on 12/16/2006 6:51:54 PM PST by Valin

By now, most people know that Sunnis and Shiites make up the two major sects in Islam, but very few are aware that Sunnis adhere to four major schools of Islamic jurisprudence: Hanbali, Hanafi, Shafii and Maliki.

These schools vary from the most conservative Hanbali to the most tolerant Hanafi. The Hanbali is the literalist school and, as such, promotes strict adherence to literal interpretation of the Koran and the Prophet's sayings. An act that does not conform to either is regarded as out of the ordinary (bidaa), and in the Hanbali view all "bidaas" are acts gone astray (thalalah), and all thalalahs are destined for hellfire.

There is no room for conscious mistakes in the Hanbali tradition and even less in the Wahhabi sect that adheres to it. This tradition is very different from the one advocated by the Maliki school, which is predicated on knowledge. Imam Malik, the founder of the tradition, was a scholar of science, mathematics, logic, philosophy and jurisprudence. All these are reflected in the school's teaching of religion and the concept of faith.

Indeed, while the Hanbali school leaves little room for initiative or novel interpretation, the Maliki leaves too much. What is clear, however, is that the Maliki school opposes religion as a burden and refuses the literalist tradition as a path. Intentions play a huge role in the acts of individuals; reason a larger role; and in some instances, attention to the general at the expense of the specific an even larger one.

Islamic jurisprudence is predicated on the following sources: the Koran, the Sunna (way of the Prophet), Kiyass (measurement to a comparable dictum in the first two sources), Ijmaa (consensus by religious scholars) and Ijtihaad (one's own initiative at doing right). To determine if one's actions are religiously correct, they need to be passed through the first four criteria, and if no answer can be found, then one is permitted to do one's best to do right. Here intentions become paramount, for in the final analysis one is responsible for his own actions.

As such, Maliki societies of North Africa tend to be far more religiously and socially tolerant and free than the Arab peninsula. In North Africa, there is no chopping of heads or hands or religious police. There are movie theaters and nightlife, libraries and bookstores with materials on everything except criticism of indigenous regimes. The interesting aspect of this school has been the absence of religious institutions, which permitted indigenous ones to emerge.

However, the most liberal and lax of all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence is the Hanafi school. It is even more liberal than the Maliki because it evolved to cater to non-Arab Muslims. Just as Catholicism had to adapt to believers in Africa by incorporating some local traditions or Latin America by developing liberation theology, the Hanafi schools accommodated the societies it came into contact with. The major adherents to the Hanafi schools can be found in non-Arab Asia.

The final school is the Shafii school. Its founder was a student of Malik but differed from Malik in that he institutionalized his teacher's teachings. His greatest success has been in Lower Egypt, China and Southeast Asia where, like the Hanafi tradition, his brand of Islam catered to non-Arab Muslims.

I don't expect many in the West to know or care about the differences between Islamic schools. But for anyone to judge the majority of Muslim believers by acts or edicts of the minority made up of conservative Wahhabis is silly. The Wahhabis are not bad; they are merely afraid of straying from what they believe to be the righteous path. I don't agree with their philosophy and firmly believe there are many paths to righteousness, but I am not their judge.

Islam has no clergy as is the case in Christianity, and hence the concept of God is not uniform. How a Muslim perceives God is highly personal. And unlike Christianity, which identifies and humanizes the father with the son, Islam doesn't make it easy to understand God. It is much harder to be a Muslim because the purpose of the faith is not to understand God but to understand oneself. Unfortunately, some Muslims have not gotten that message yet.

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