Murja'a

Murdschi'a ( Arabic مرجئة, DMG Murǧiʾa  'procrastinator') is the name of a religious-political movement of Islam that formed in Kufa during the Umayyad period and sought to overcome the division among Muslims that occurred after the first Fitna . After it had spread to Khorasan and Transoxania , it was particularly committed to the interests of the Mawālī . On a dogmatic level, the movement was characterized by a special understanding of belief ( īmān ), which excludes human actions. At the end of the 8th century, Murji'ite theology entered into a symbiosis with the Hanafi school of law . However, due to the generally poor reputation of the Murji'a, the Hanafis later distanced themselves from this movement. At the present time, the term Murji'a is mainly used polemically by Islamists and Salafists , who use it to identify Muslims who, in their opinion, are not sufficiently committed to the application of Sharia law .

The name of Murji'a is derived from the active participle murǧiʾ of the Arabic verb arǧaʾa ("postpone, wait"). He refers to sura 9 : 106 of the Koran , where it says: "And others are waited until God decides about them ( wa-āḫarūn murǧaʾūn li-amri Llāh ). Either he punishes them or he turns against them (gracious ) close again. "

Beginnings

According to Muhammad ibn Saʿd and other Arabic sources, the Murji'a movement goes back to Hasan, the son of Muhammad ibn al-Hanafīya . He was based in Kufa and wrote an open letter in the early 690s in which he developed the doctrine that according to Sura 9: 106 the judgment about the people who had participated in Fitna, i.e. Talha, az-Zubair ibn al-ʿAuwām , ʿAlī ibn Abī Tālib and Uthman ibn Affan , must be postponed until God (in the hereafter) decides on them. In doing so, he referred directly to the views of the Kharijites , Shiites and Umayyads , who, depending on their position, declared various of these people to be unbelievers . Hasan taught that Muslims should abstain from any partisanship since God alone judges these people. According to the term adopted from the Koran for postponing the judgment of God, Hasan's open letter has become known as the “Book of Postponement ” ( Kitāb al-Irǧāʾ ), and those who followed his teaching became “procrastinators” ( Murdschi'a ) called. Other Arabic sources name two other people from Kufa as founders of the Murji'a movement: Dharr ibn ʿAbdallāh and Qais ibn Abī Muslim.

Even at this early stage, the movement seems to have encountered opposition. Ibrāhīm ibn Yazīd an-Nachaʿī (d. 715), one of the most important legal scholars of Kufa at that time, is quoted as saying that one should not talk to the Murji'a or sit with them. He is said to have hated the Murji'a more than Jews and Christians.

Working for the rights of the Mawālī

At the turn of the 8th century, the Murji'a took on a new political role by starting to fight for the rights of the Mawālī in Khorasan and Transoxania. In 718/9 a murdschi'itischer complained Maula , Abu s-Saidā' in the Umayyad caliph Umar II about the fact that 20,000 mawali served in Khorasan in the army without pay and a similar number of new converts to pay the Jizya was forced. ʿUmar then made sure that these new non-Arab converts were equated with the Arabs. In 728/9 Abū s-Saidāʾ was commissioned by the Umayyad governor in Khorasan to spread Islam in Transoxania, with the promise that the new converts would be exempted from the jizya payment. When this promise was broken by the Umayyad side and the Sogdian converts resisted, Abū s-Saidāʾ joined their revolt with some other Murji'ites. He and Thābit Qutna, another Murji'ite fighter, were subsequently imprisoned.

The secession of Harith ibn Suraij

In the year 734 the Arab fighter al-Harith ibn Suraij, a man who was closely connected with the Murjiʾites of Abū s-Saidāʾ, instigated an uprising against the Umayyads in Khorasan. Ibn Suraij, who in a public statement demanded that the governor of Khorasan be elected by a shura and act according to the Book of God and the Sunnah of the Prophet, was able to conquer the Chorasan city of Balkh . After a defeat by Umayyad troops, he allied himself with non-Muslim Turkish tribal leaders who fought the Arabs from Transoxania during this time.

Although the Umayyad governor Ibn Suraij and his Turkish allies were able to inflict defeat in 737, he did not succeed in defeating Ibn Suraij once and for all. For the following years he retired to northern Transoxania and lived there on the territory of Turkish tribal associations who adhered to a Buddhist faith. Ibn Suraij's secretary was a Jahm ibn Safwān . It is said that he had arguments with Buddhist monks, who are referred to as Sumanīya in the Arabic sources . Ibn Suraij only returned to Islamic territory in 743 after the Kufic legal scholar Abū Hanīfa for him with the caliph Yazid III. Interceded and obtained his pardon.

The circle around Abu Hanīfa

Abū Hanīfa himself was also said to be a Murji'it. In a letter he sent to the cloth merchant ʿUthmān al-Battī (st. 760) in Basra, he rejected this designation for himself, but at the same time defended the group of people to whom this term was assigned as respectable and orthodox people . In addition, he affirmed the Murji'ite teaching that a Muslim who commits a great sin should still be regarded as a believer ( muʾmin ). In his opinion, all Ahl al- Qibla , i.e. those people who pray to Mecca , were to be regarded as believers.

The later Islamic doxography , which names "Abū Hanīfa and his companions" as a subgroup of the Murjiʾa, ascribes to them the doctrine that belief ( īmān ) consists solely of knowledge ( maʿrifa ) and public confession ( iqrār ) of God, his Prophets and their message, "in summary, without explanation in detail". An anecdote of Muʿtazilite origin caricatures Abū Hanīfa's indulgence on this point. He is said to have even accepted as believers those people who knew the pork ban, but related it to something other than what is commonly referred to as "pigs", who knew the duty of pilgrimage but made a pilgrimage to a Kaaba other than that of Mecca, who recognized the prophethood of Muhammad, but actually meant some "negro" ( zanǧī ). Faith, as reported by Islamic doxography, was, in the opinion of Abū Hanīfa's teaching, not divisible and neither can it increase or decrease.

Abū Hanīfa's disciples like Abū Mutīʿ al-Balchī and Abū Muqātil as-Samarqandī spread Murjiʾite beliefs in Khorasan and Transoxania in his name in the following period. Here they also worked with works that they ascribed to Abū Hanīfa, such as the "Book of the Teacher and the Learner" ( Kitāb al-ʿĀlim wa-l-mutaʿallim ) and the work " Expanded Knowledge" ( al-Fiqh al-absaṭ ) . These works formed the basis of later Hanafi theology, including its māturīdite formulation. In this way, Hanafi and Murjiʾite ideas came together firmly. Abū Hanīfa's commitment to the Mawālī's claim to recognition as full Muslims also explains why his school of law has spread particularly among the Turks in Eastern Iran and Central Asia.

The opposition to the Murji'a

Strong opposition to the Murji'ite doctrine came from traditionalist circles in Kufa and Basra as early as the end of the 8th century . They accused the Murji'ites of a tendency towards moral laxity and excluded them from Islam. This was due to the fact that the Murji'ites generally made no distinction between Islam and faith ( īmān ) and also classified the great sinner as a believer. The opponents of the Murji'ites, especially Sufyān ath-Thaurī , on the other hand, drew the boundaries of belief very narrowly. They said that one could not even know about oneself whether one was a believer, and demanded that such a statement should always be accompanied by the istithnā ' , the exceptional formula: "God willing". Conversely, the Murji'ites rejected the istithnā ' and ridiculed those who practiced it as "doubters" ( šukkāk ).

Abu ʿUbaid al-Qāsim Ibn Sallām (d. 838) was among those who fought against the Murji'a in the early 9th century. He used the so-called " Hadith of the Parts" ( ḥadīṯ aš-šuʿab ) in his polemic against them. It reads: "Faith consists of more than seventy parts ( šuʿba ). The highest of these is the statement that there is no god but Allaah. The lowest of them is to clear a dangerous object from the street. Shame is also a part of faith. " Abu ʿUbaid saw in this evidence that the Murji'ite doctrine of the indivisibility of faith is wrong.

In general, the term Murji'a became the name of all those theologians in the course of the 9th century who stretched the boundaries of faith very far and thereby excluded works. This could also be Muʿtazilites like Abū l-Husain as-Sālihī, who lived towards the end of the 9th century. Al-Ashʿari narrates from him that he reduced faith solely to knowledge of God, which in turn is identical with love of God. He did not recognize prayer as a service because he regarded faith as the only service.

Such a use of the term deteriorated the reputation of the Murji'a in the central areas of the Abbasid Empire . In one of his confessional writings, Ahmad ibn Hanbal excluded the followers of this current from Islam along with the Qadarīya , the Rāfida and the Jahmīya, by which he meant the followers of the Muʿtazila . This harsh judgment was also adopted by later Hanbalites such as Ibn Taimīya . Ibn Taimīya, however, distinguished between two types of Murji'a, the " Fiqh -oriented Murji'a " ( murǧiʾat al-fuqahāʾ ) on the one hand, to which he included Abū Hanīfa, and the " Kalām -oriented Murji'a" ( murǧiʾat al-kalām ) or the "extreme Murdschi'a" ( ġulāt al-murǧiʾa ) on the other hand, by which he mainly meant Jahm ibn Safwān and his followers. Both groups, in his opinion, had deviated from the true doctrine, but he was forgiving of the first group while he was hostile to the second group. Ibn Taimīya saw the difference between the teachings of Abū Hanīfa and Jahm in the fact that Abū Hanīfa implied belief as “holding for truth in the heart” ( taṣdīq bi-l-qalb ) and “affirming with the tongue” ( iqrār bi-l -lisān ), Jahm , on the other hand, restricted him only to “holding it to be true in the heart”.

The poor reputation of the Murji'a as a heretical group led to the fact that in the early modern period the Hanafis tried to wash their group of the stigma of belonging to the Murji'a. For example, the Hanafi legal scholar ʿAlī al-Qārī wrote three writings around the turn of the 17th century to show that the Hanafis have no relation to the Murji'a.

Significance in contemporary intra-Islamic polemics

In contemporary religious and political discourses among Muslims, the Murji'a plays an important role , especially as a battle term . In Egypt, for example, some of Sayyid Qutb's imprisoned supporters characterized the views of Hasan al-Hudaibi , the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood , as Murji'ite. The Egyptian Tāriq ʿAbd al-Halīm, who radicalized himself under the impression of the trial and execution of Sayyid Qutb in the 1960s and turned to the teachings of Ibn Taimīya in the 1970s, wrote Ḥaqīqat al-īmān ("Truth of the Faith ") the first modern anti-Muji'ite polemic. It too was directed against al-Hudaibī and the moderate Muslim Brotherhood. ʿAbd al-Halīm meant that they inadmissibly restricted the belief to "holding for truth " ( taṣdīq ) without connecting it with outward "affirmation" ( iqrār ) and "obedience" ( ṭāʿa ).

The Saudi scholar Safar al-Hawālī , who ascribed himself to the Salafīya , wrote a dissertation on "The Phenomenon of Murji'aism in Islamic Thought" in Mecca in the 1980s under the direction of Muhammad Qutb, the brother of Sayyid Qutb. Ẓāhirat al-irǧāʾ fī l-fikr al-islāmī ), in which he castigated the lax and indulgent attitude of his fellow Muslims towards politicians who do not adhere to Islam as Murji'a and made it a "declaration of unbelief "( Takfīr ) this politician called on Sayyid Qutb. In addition, the jihadist ideologue Abū Muhammad al-Maqdisī in his polemics against those who do not apply the principle of al-Walā 'wa-l-barā' , often falls back on this fighting term.

literature

• Michael Cook : Early muslim dogma: a source-critical study. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge et al. a., 1981.
• Michael Cook: "Activism and Quietism in Islam: The Case of the Early Murjiʾa" in Cudsi, Alexander S./Ali E. Hillal Dessouki (eds.): Islam and Power . Croom Helm, London, 1981. pp. 15-23.
• Josef van Ess : Theology and society in the 2nd and 3rd centuries of the Hijra. A History of Religious Thought in Early Islam . 6 vols. Berlin: De Gruyter 1991–97. Vol. I, pp. 152-221.
• Daniel Lav: Radical Islam and the revival of medieval theology . Cambridge [u. a.]: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012.
• Wilferd Madelung: "The early Murjiʾa in Khurāsān and Transoxania and the spread of Ḥanafism" in Der Islam 59 (1982) 32-39.
• Wilferd Madelung: Art. "Mur dj iʾa" in The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition Vol. VII, pp. 605b-607b.
• J. Meric Pessagno: "The Murjiʾa, īmān and Abū ʿUbayd" in Journal of the American Oriental Society 95 (1975) 382-94.
• Joseph Schacht : "An early Murciʾite treatise: the Kitāb al-ʿĀlim wa-l-mutaʿallim" in Oriens 17 (1964) 96-117.
• M. Talbi : "Al-Irǧāʾ ou de la théologie du salut à Kairouan au IIIe / IXe siècle" in files of the VII. Congress for Arabic and Islamic Studies ed. by A. Dietrich. Göttingen 1976, 348-63.
• Joas Wagemakers: 'Seceders' and 'Postponers'? An Analysis of the 'Khawarij' and 'Murji'a' labels in Polemic Debates between Quietists and Jihadi-Salafis , i: Deol, Jeevan / Zaheer Kazmi (eds.): Contextualizing Jihadi Ideologies . Hurst, London, 2012, pp. 145–54.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Cf. van Ess TuG I 154-161.
2. ↑ Cf. Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb Ibn Sufyān al-Fasawī: Kitāb al-Maʿrifa wa-t-tārīḫ . Ed. Akram Ḍiyāʾ al-ʿUmarī. 3 Vols. Baghdad: Maṭbaʿat Aršād 1975. Vol. II, p. 605f.
3. ↑ Cf. van Ess TuG I 160.
4. ↑ See Madelung in EI2 606a.
5. ↑ See also Madelung EI² 606.
6. ↑ Cf. the German translation in van Ess TuG V 24-13.
7. ↑ Cf. van Ess TuG V 29.
8. ↑ Cf. van Ess TuG V 28.
9. ↑ Cf. the text from Abū l-Hasan al-Aschʿarīs Maqālāt al-islāmīyīn, quoted in van Ess TuG V 32 .
10. ↑ See Ulrich Rudolph: Al-Māturīdī and Sunni theology in Samarkand . Leiden: Brill 1997. pp. 25-77.
11. ↑ See also Madelung EI² 606b.
12. ↑ See also Madelung EI² 607a.
13. ↑ Cit. Lav: Radical Islam . 2012, p. 33.
14. ↑ Cit. Lav: Radical Islam . 2012, p. 33f.
15. ↑ cf. to him van Ess TuG IV 133-141.
16. ↑ Cf. his work Maqālāt al-Islāmīyīn pp. 132-133, digitized version .
17. ↑ See Lav: Radical Islam . 2012, p. 31.
18. ↑ See Lav: Radical Islam . 2012, p. 31 f.
19. ↑ See Lav: Radical Islam . 2012, p. 35.
20. ↑ Cf. Patrick Franke: "Cross-reference as self-testimony - individuality and intertextuality in the writings of the Meccan scholar Mullā ʿAlī al-Qārī (st. 1014/1606)" in St. Reichmuth u. Fl. Schwarz (ed.): Between everyday life and written culture: horizons of the individual in Arabic literature of the 17th and 18th centuries. Beirut texts and studies 110. Beirut-Würzburg 2008. pp. 131–163. Here p. 151f.
21. ↑ See Lav: Radical Islam . 2012, p. 73.
22. ↑ See Lav: Radical Islam . 2012, pp. 61, 73.
23. ↑ See Lav: Radical Islam . 2012, pp. 79-83.
24. ↑ See Lav: Radical Islam . 2012, pp. 86-120.