A Critical Exposition of the Popular 'Jihád'/Introduction/42
[Sidenote: Adaptability of the Koran to surrounding circumstances.]
42. (5) The Koran keeps pace with the most fully and rapidly-developing civilization, if it is rationally interpreted, not as expounded by the Ulema in the Common Law Book and enforced by the sentiment of a nation. It is only the Mohammadan Common Law, with all its traditions or oral sayings of the Prophet,—very few of which are genuine reports, and the supposed chimerical concurrence of the learned Moslem Doctors and mostly their analogical reasonings (called Hadees, Ijma, and Kias), passed under the name of Fiqah or Shariat, that has blended together the spiritual and the secular, and has become a barrier in some respects regarding certain social and political innovations for the higher civilization and progress of the nation. But the Koran is not responsible for this all.
Mr. Stanley Lane Poole writes:—
- "The Koran does not contain, even in outline, the elaborate ritual and complicated law which now passes under the name of Islam. It contains merely those decisions which happened to be called for at Medina. Mohammad himself knew that it did not provide for every emergency, and recommended a principle of analogical deduction to guide his followers when they were in doubt. This analogical deduction has been the ruin of Islam. Commentators and Jurists have set their nimble wits to work to extract from the Koran legal decisions which an ordinary mind could never discover there; and the whole structure of modern Mohammadanism has been built upon the foundation of sand. The Koran is not responsible for it."[1]
I can only differ from the above in the allegation that Mohammad recommended a principle of analogical deduction.
Footnotes[edit]
- ↑ The Speeches and Table-talk of the Prophet Mohammad, by Stanley Lane Poole, pages lii and liii, Introduction, London, 1882.