IB World Religions 5.4.6. Schools of Thought and Law: Sunni, Shi'ah, Sufism and the Madhhabs Notes

5.4.6. Schools of Thought and Law: Sunni, Shi'ah, Sufism and the Madhhabs

The Sunni and Shi'ah division

1. The division began as a question about leadership rather than about belief. When the Prophet died in 632, most of the community accepted Abu Bakr as khalifah, while a group held that 'Ali had already been designated.
2. The two names record that origin. Sunni Muslims call themselves ahl al-sunnah wa'l-jama'ah, the people of the Sunnah and the community, and Shi'ah comes from shi'at 'Ali, the party of 'Ali.
3. The killing of the Prophet's grandson Husayn at Karbala in 680 hardened the split into two communities with separate memories. Shi'ah Muslims mark that event annually, and it shapes their devotional life.
4. Sunni Muslims are the large majority worldwide, usually estimated at around nine in ten. Shi'ah Muslims form majorities in Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan and Bahrain, and sizeable minorities elsewhere.
5. Shi'ah Islam is itself plural. Twelver Shi'ah Muslims are the largest group, Isma'ilis follow a different line of imams and today follow the Aga Khan, and Zaydis are concentrated in Yemen.
6. What the branches share is far larger than what divides them. Both hold the same Qur'an, the same tawhid and prophethood, and the same core acts of worship, differing over authority and over details of law and ritual.

Shari'ah and fiqh

1. Muslims distinguish the law Allah gives from the work of understanding it. Shari'ah means a path leading to water, and it names divine guidance for how life should be lived.
2. Fiqh, literally understanding, is the human science of working out what the shari'ah requires. Because fiqh is human, Muslims expect qualified scholars to reach different conclusions.
3. Sunni jurists derive rulings from four roots. The Qur'an comes first, then the Sunnah, then ijma', the agreement of qualified scholars, and then qiyas, reasoning by analogy from a ruling already given.
4. Every act is then sorted into one of five categories: obligatory, recommended, permitted, disliked and forbidden. Only the first and the last carry a definite ruling, which leaves a wide field of permitted choice.
5. Ijtihad is the disciplined reasoning a qualified jurist uses on a new question. Taqlid is the following of such a jurist by someone not qualified to do that work themselves.
6. A madhhab is a school that grew up around a founding jurist's method. It is a way of reading the sources, not a denomination, and Muslims commonly follow the school of their region, family or teacher.

The four Sunni madhhabs

1. The Hanafi school takes its name from Abu Hanifa, who taught in Kufa and died in 767. Known for systematic use of analogy and juristic preference, it became the school of the Ottoman state and is now the largest, predominating from Turkey and the Balkans through Central and South Asia.
2. The Maliki school follows Malik ibn Anas of Madinah, who died in 795 and compiled the Muwatta. Its distinctive move is to treat the settled practice of the people of Madinah as evidence in its own right.
3. Maliki law spread across North and West Africa, where it still shapes family law. It is often described as giving weight to custom and to the public interest.
4. The Shafi'i school follows al-Shafi'i, who died in 820 and whose Risala set out the theory of the four roots. His achievement was to discipline free reasoning by tying it firmly to authenticated Hadith.
5. The Hanbali school follows Ahmad ibn Hanbal, who died in 855 and preferred a weak report to an argument from opinion. It is the smallest of the four, is followed in the Arabian Peninsula, and later fed into Salafi thought.

The Ja'fari school

1. Twelver Shi'ah Muslims follow the Ja'fari school, named after Ja'far al-Sadiq, the sixth imam, who died in 765. Sunni tradition records that Abu Hanifa and Malik both studied with him.
2. Its sources begin from the same Qur'an but include a wider Sunnah. Reports from the imams count alongside reports from the Prophet, collected in works such as al-Kafi.
3. Its method differs at one root. In place of analogy the Ja'fari school gives a formal place to 'aql, reason, and treats scholarly agreement as valuable because it discloses the imam's own position.
4. The door of ijtihad is held to remain open. Because the twelfth imam is in occultation, qualified jurists must keep deriving rulings, and lay Shi'ah Muslims follow a living marja'.
5. Some rulings differ visibly in daily life. Ja'fari law permits combining the five prayers into three sittings, encourages prostration on a turbah of clay, and allows mut'ah, temporary marriage, which the Sunni schools reject.
6. Its financial law also differs. Alongside zakat, Ja'fari law requires khums, a fifth of surplus income, half of which goes to the marja' for religious and charitable use.

Sufism within the schools

1. Sufism, in Arabic tasawwuf, is the inward dimension of Islam rather than a fifth school. Its concern is ihsan, doing things beautifully, which a famous Hadith places alongside islam and iman.
2. Sufis therefore still belong to a school of law. A Sufi may be Sunni or Shi'ah and follows the fiqh of a madhhab for prayer, marriage and inheritance like anyone else.
3. Sufi life is organised in tariqas, orders gathered around a teaching lineage. The Qadiriyya, Naqshbandiyya, Chishtiyya and Mevleviyya are among the best known.
4. Al-Ghazali, who died in 1111, is credited with securing its place in mainstream Sunni Islam. His Ihya' 'ulum al-din rewrote the standard religious sciences with the inner life at their centre.
5. Sufism has also been criticised from within. Ibn Taymiyya and later reformist and Salafi scholars attacked shrine visitation and other practices as bid'ah, unwarranted innovation.
6. Its influence on popular practice is still wide. Sufi devotional song, shrine culture and orders remain central in South Asia, West Africa and Turkey, and Sufi communities have been targeted by militant groups.

The schools today

1. Mutual recognition is the norm rather than the exception. Scholars from a Hanafi background have long accepted a Shafi'i ruling as valid, and Muslims following different schools pray in the same congregation.
2. That recognition has been stated formally. The Amman Message of 2005 gathered scholars from across the branches to affirm eight schools as legitimate, including the four Sunni schools, the Ja'fari and the Ibadi school of Oman.
3. Modern states have reshaped how the schools operate. Family law codes often draw rules from more than one madhhab, so a single national law can combine Hanafi and Maliki positions.
4. Migration has mixed the schools together. A mosque in Europe or North America may serve worshippers raised in four different traditions, which pushes imams to teach where difference is acceptable.
5. Some contemporary Muslims reject following any madhhab. Salafi teaching calls for going straight to the Qur'an and Sunnah, while critics answer that reading texts always requires a method.
6. Muslims commonly frame the plurality positively. The saying that difference among the scholars is a mercy is widely quoted, and the schools are presented as several careful readings of one revelation.