Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - Mohammedanism (1916).djvu/91

 84 whose agreement was the test of truth, should not consist of the faithful masses, but of the expert elect. In a Christian church we should have spoken of the clergy, with a further definition of the organs through which it was to express itself: synod, council, or Pope. Islâm has no clergy, as we have seen; the qualification of a man to have his own opinion depends entirely upon the scope of his knowledge or rather of his erudition. There is no lack of standards, fixed by Mohammedan authorities, in which the requirements for a scholar to qualify him for Ijmâʿ are detailed. The principal criterion is the knowledge of the canon law; quite what we should expect from the history of the evolution of Islâm. But, of course, dogmatists and mystics had also their own "agreements" on the questions concerning them, and through the compromise between Law, Dogma, and Mysticism, there could not fail to come into existence a kind of mixed Ijmâʿ. Moreover, the standards and definitions could have only a certain theoretical value, as there never has existed a body that could speak in the name of all. The decisions of Ijmâʿ were therefore to be ascertained only in a vague and general way. The speakers were individuals whose own authority depended on Ijmâʿ, whereas Ijmâʿ should have been their collective decision. Thus it was possible for innumerable shades of catholicism and protestantism to live under one roof; with a good deal of friction,