Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/690

 662 SUNNITES [SUNNITES. of ulema. And, though the various places of religious dignity are conferred by the sultan, no one can hold office who has not been examined and certified by older ulema, so that the corporation is self-propagating, and palace intrigues, though not without influence, can never break through its iron bonds. The deposition of 'Abd al-Aziz is an example of the tremendous power that can be wielded by the ulema at the head of their thousands of pupils 1 when they choose to stir up the masses; nor would Mahmud II. in 1826 have ventured to enter on his struggle with the Janissaries unless he had had the hierarchy with him. The student who has passed his examinations at Con- stantinople or Cairo may take up the purely religious office of imam (president in worship) or khatib (preacher) at a mosque. These offices, however, are purely ministerial, are not necessarily limited to students, and give no place in the hierarchy and no particular consideration or social Judicial status. On the other hand, he may become a judge or cadi. offices. Every place of- any importance has at least one cadi, who is nominated by the Government, 2 but has no further dependence on it, and is answerable only to a member of the third class of the ulema, viz., the mufti or pronouncer of fetwas. A fetwa is a decision according to Koran and Sunna, but without reasons, on an abstract case of law which is brought before the mufti by appeal from the cadi's judgment or by reference from the cadi himself. For ex- ample, a dispute between master and slave may be found by the cadi to turn on the general question, "HasZaid, the master of 'Amr, 3 the absolute right to dispose of his slave's earnings'?" When this is put to the mufti, the answer will be simply "Yes," and from this decision there is no appeal, so that the mufti is supreme judge in his own district. The grand mufti of Constantinople is, as we have seen, nominated by the sultan, but his hold on the people makes him quite an independent power in the state ; in Cairo he is not even nominated by the Government, but each school of law chooses its own sheikh, who -is also mufti, and the Hanafite is head mufti because his school is official in the Turkish empire. Modern All this gives the judges great private and political in- changes. fluence. But the former is tainted by venality, the plague- spot of the East, which, aggravated by the scantiness of judicial salaries or in some cases by the judge having no salary at all, is almost universal among the administrators of justice. Their political influence, again, which arises from the fusion of private and political law in Koran and Sunna, is highly inconvenient to the state, and often be- comes intolerable now that relations with Western states are multiplied. And even in such distant parts as Central Asia the law founded on the conditions of the Prophet's lifetime proves so unsuited to modern life that cases are often referred to civil authorities rather than to canonical jurists. Thus a customary law ( c orf) has there sprung up side by side with the official sacred law (sJiaria), much to the displeasure of the mollahs. In Turkey, and lately above all in Egypt, it has been found necessary greatly to limit the sphere and influence of the canonical jurists and intro- duce institutions nearer to Western legal usage. We do not here speak of the paper constitutions (kJiatt-i-sherif] and the like, created to dupe Western diplomatists and amuse their authors, but of such things as consular and commercial courts, criminal codes, and so forth. The pre- sent sultan seems also to aim at diminishing the power of the ulema by such measures as frequent changes of the 1 Called in Constantinople softa, Persian sokhta, " burned up," sett., with zeal or love to God. 2 In Egypt before the time of Sa'i'd Pasha (1854-63) the local judges were appointed by the chief cadi of Cairo, who is sent from Constanti- nople. Since then they have been nominated by the Egyptian Govern- ment. 3 Zaid and 'Amr are the Caius and Sempronius of Arabian law. sheikhu '1-islam, though this policy is perhaps less likely to confirm his power than to rob it of its last supports. The official hierarchy, strong as it is, divides its power with the dervishes. A religion which subdues to itself a race with strongly marked individuality is always influ- enced in cultus and dogma by the previous views and tendencies of that race, to which it must in some measure accommodate itself. Mohammed himself made a concession to heathen traditions when he recognized the Kaaba and the black stone ; and the worship of saints, which is now spread throughout Islam and supported by obviously forged traditions, is an example of the same thing. So too are the religious orders now found everywhere except in some parts of Arabia. Mystical tendencies in Moham- medanism arose mainly on Persian soil (see vol. xvi. p. 594), and Von Kremer has shown that these Eastern tendencies fell in with a disposition to asceticism and flight from the world which had arisen among the Arabs before Islam under Christian influence. 4 Intercourse with India had Sufis and given Persian mysticism the form of Buddhistic monkery, <l ervis hes while the Arabs imitated the Christian anchorites ; thus the two movements had an inner kinship and an outer form so nearly identical that they naturally coalesced, and that even the earliest organizations of orders of dervishes, whether in the East or the West, appeared to Moham- medan judgment to be of one type. Thus, though the name of Sufi (see vol. xvi. p. 594) is first applied to Abu Hashim, who died in Syria in 150 A.H. (767), we find it transferred without question to the mystical brother- hood which appears in Khorasan under Abu Sa'id about 200 A.H. (815/6). Yet these two schools of Sufis were never quite similar ; on Sunnite soil Sufism could not openly impugn orthodox views, while in Persia it was saturated with Shfite heresy and the pantheism of the extreme devotees of 'All (see vol. xvi. p. 593). Thus there have always been two kinds of Sufis, and, though the course of history and the wandering habits which various orders borrowed from Buddhism have tended to bring them closer to one another, we still find that of the thirty-six chief orders three claim an origin from the caliph Abii- bekr, whom the Sunnites honour, and the rest from 'Ali, the idol of the Slri'ites. 5 Mystic absorption in the being of God, with an increasing tendency to Pantheism and ascetic practices, are the main scope of all Sufism, which is not necessarily confined to members of orders ; indeed the secret practice of contemplation of the love of God and contempt of the world is sometimes viewed as specially meritorious. And so ultimately the word siift has come to denote all who have this religious direction, while those who follow the special rules of an order are known as dervishes (" beggars," in Arabic fukard, sing, fakir names originally designating only the mendicant orders). In Persia at the present day a Sufi is much the same as a freethinker. Several of the chief dervish orders arose in the evil times before and after the invasion of the Mongols: thus 'Abd al-Kadir al-Jilani (d. 561 A.H. ; 1165/66) founded the Kadiriya order, Ahmad al-Rifa'i (d. 578 A.H. ; 1182/3) 'the Rifa'iya, Jalalu '1-din Eumi (see RUMI) the Mawlawiya, Abu '1-Hasan al-Shadhili (d. 656 A.H. ; 1258) the Shadhiliya, Ahmad al-Badawi (d. 675 A.H. ; 1276) the Ahmadiya or Badawiya, an order still very widely spread in Egypt. While civil distress drove men to flee from the world, the stupid fanaticism of Turkish rule has helped on the belief in miracles so often associated with mysticism and all those deceits that go with the spread of enthusiastic notions. Of later orders we may name the 4 Op. til. , p. 52 sq. 5 These claims to early origin are mere fables, like the claim of the Oweisi order to spring from Oweis, one of the oldest traditionalists, and so forth.