“Islam” is a word we can understand whether we are Muslims or not. It means “submission,” and, more specifically in the context where it first and most familiarly appears, “submission to the will of God.” That context is the Quran, the Sacred Book of the Muslims, “those who have submitted.” We do not use the word so simply, however. It has been built into an abstract cathedral of connotation, on the same scale and grandeur as “Christianity” and “Judaism.” This larger significance of the term is of our own making, of course, derived from whatever else we can read out of the rich pages of the Quran or, more broadly, what we can glean from the writings or observe in the deeds of those who acknowledge themselves as “submitters.”
This book is designed to enable the reader to shape, or perhaps reshape, the design and dimensions of his or her understanding of that larger “Islam” by presenting a substantial body of literary evidence on what both the Quran and Muslims understood by that term and its context. For all its broadness, the evidence is limited, however. It is constituted of words rather than deeds, and words derived from the highest of high literary traditions. What follows are the thoughts of professors, lawyers, and littérateurs, Muslims all, and masters of the pen as well as of the spiritual life. Popular religion or the actual behavior of actual Muslims is not part of the portrait. Indeed, not a great deal is known of such things, not, at any rate, for the period under consideration here, what I have chosen to call “Classical Islam.”
“Classic” or “classical period” is likewise a construct, all the more obviously so since it is being borrowed from one phenomenon, Greek and Roman antiquity, and used to somehow periodize another quite different one, Islam. Muslim historians do not much engage in such categorizations, and if one were to look to them for a “Classical Islam,” or an “Age of the Fathers,” it would likely embrace a far shorter interval than what is understood here, the generation of Muhammad’s own contemporaries, those revered “Companions of the Prophet,” or, somewhat more generously, the sub-Apostolic age of the first four rulers of the Muslim community, the so-called Rightly Directed Caliphs (632–750 C.E.). The emphasis on such notions is itself a rather recent phenomenon in Islamic circles. The harking back to a more authentic era of belief and practice is obviously a function of a sense of decline, of moral nostalgia, when agents of renewal or reform search the past for a model for the present troubled times.
That is not the immediate concern here, however. “Classical” is understood in both a broader and a more restricted sense. It refers primarily to religious literature and to Islam as a religious society, but it does not reflect on the political or social or economic rise and decline of that society. It means most simply the era when the classics of Islamic law and spirituality were written, works of such universally acknowledged importance that subsequent generations of Muslims understood themselves as “successors” and assumed scholasticism’s unmistakably characteristic posture of casting their own meditations on Islam in the form of commentaries or glosses on the works of the masters. Concretely, the selections presented here, almost all of them originally in Arabic, the “classical” language of Islam, extend from the early seventh-century Quran to about 1400 C.E. After a brief look at the Muslims’ own regard for their pagan, pre-Islamic past (chapter 1), and a survey of what the Muslim sources tell us of the life of the Prophet (chapter 2), the selections are arranged topically, and, in the manner of the writers themselves, with only very rapid glances at the political history of the community.
Before entering the somewhat dense body of texts, we begin with a rapid overview of the forms and modalities of “Classical Islam.”