The Shafi'i Madhab and Dogs
I'm trying to my best to so far through my blogs to lay out the path I went down in terms of losing my belief in Islam.
It took a few years and it all started with trying to understand hadith, so that's why I am focusing on it so much at the moment in my current musings.
If you come from a traditional Sunni madhab teaching, life can be fairly strict when it comes to dos and donts. You are told that by following one of the madhabs that you are safe - that the Imams have done all the hard work for us in terms of understanding the hadith and Quran, and translating this into laws, i.e. the Shariah.
From this we have seen the Islamic science of fiqh arise - fiqh (jurisprudence) is obsessed with interpreting Islam to make laws for people to follow.
As a Sunni, you follow the fiqh of a school - Hanafi, Shafi, Hanbali and Maliki. It dictates everything you do from how you pray to how you fast to how you can invest your money.
I was a strict Shafi'i. So strict I even visited his grave in Cairo and asked to be blessed with knowledge of Shafi'i fiqh! Well, that didn't quite work out!
As a result of being a strict Shafi'i I followed what the school of law taught, pretty much to the dot as I believed I was obeying God in doing so. I was told I would not fall foul of false interpretations or falling foul of those who may twist the religion for their own devices, such as the Salafis/Wahabbis (who all tend to be angry so use it for angry means).
Reliance of the Traveller
As a Shafi'i, the book I would always turn to when looking into matters of fiqh was 'Reliance of the Traveller', which is a Shafi'i book of laws by Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri (with the English translated by Sheikh Nuh Ha Min Keller - now he's someone I would like to blog about as I have spent time with his people in Jordan and the UK).
So in the early days of wanting a dog I turned to this book and this is what I found:
Filth means:
1) urine 2) excrement 3) blood 4) pus 5) vomit 6) wine 7) any liquid intoxicant 8) dogs and pigs and so on. (See page 95 if you have a copy).
At first I just accepted this. I assumed Imam Shafi'i and his school knew what they were doing.
It must be so clear that dogs are bad in Islam and I must be blind for not seeing it. If they are the 8th most filthy thing according to the Shafi'i school then damn!!! That's bad!
Then just to kill off any hopes of ever having a dog a few pages later it states that....
"Something that becomes impure by contact with something from dogs or swine does not become pure except by being washed seven times , one of which must be with purifying earth mixed with purifying water...."
'No chance of me doing that every time I touch a dog,' I thought, so I stopped thinking about getting a dog for a while. But not for long.
This whole dog thing still nagged at me! It made no sense and contradicted reality!
This led me down the rabbit's hole of hadith and Islamic history and the corruption that has become "Islam". Or Sunni Islam at least. Although the Shia are no better.
The Four Madhabs are State Sanctioned Islam
To cut a very long story short, and to condense years of reading into a few sentences, I believe the schools of law, the madhabs, were something the State invented, financed and manipulated. They were an official version of Islam sanctioned by those in power.
You also need to ask yourself what happened to all the other Imams that once had students and could give fatwas and who had their own understandings of Islam. Where did they go? The official line is, "Oh well the other four madhabs were so strong and well reasoned that the others died out over time." Bullshit. They were made to be "unofficial" and were extinguished over time as otherwise we would have their books, etc.
A History of Extinguishing Ideas
And this is a theme of Islam from the very beginning that Muslims look through and really start needing to look at in more detail. Right from the death of Muhammad his followers were infighting, non-stop till today.
Ideas had to constantly be extinguished by those in power in Islam, with some rare exceptions. From the time of Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, Ali, Hassan, the Ummayids, the Abbasids, etc, etc. there are numerous examples of having to fight, kill and try to extinguish and idea or its adherents. For God's sake, they slaughtered the Prophet's Grandson at Karbala!
Wake up! Something has been wrong with Islam from the beginning because it's been controlled by those who want to tell their version of things. The same is just as true today in government and politics. Lots of Sunnis now look to Imam Ghazali as a saviour of Islam yet his works were being burnt at one time. Islam has a long history of burning books, including Quran and Hadith.
Look how splintered Islam is - the Sunni/Shia divide actually hides a much more complex picture of Islam. From the start, the community has been divided as the message was never clear or succinct. It's been made to seem that way by generations afterwards. It's evolved and looks nothing like it ever was or did.
Hadith Have Tied Sunni Islam's Hands Behind its Back
The four schools of law approach of Sunni Islam has basically tied Islam's hands behind its back. The madhabs were established on the back of hadith and Quran. It was all a reaction to what was happening in Islam both within and without. It was the Ahle Hadith who raised the banner of hadith and called Muslims to only stick to them to understand the law. In reaction to this we saw the State support the schools to combat this way of thinking.
The hadith were made to be important - remember, hadith were not used for law making for some 200 years or so after the Prophet's death. It is well documented that many Muslims used reasoning and local customs for their laws rather than hadith. This whole idea of a set religion with clear rules that were handed down from the Prophet is rubbish. The reality is he came with a simple message that in the early days people adopted and life pretty much stayed the same. Over time Islam was turned into a tool of the State and from there we have all the modern day inventions and rituals that have come to be called "Islam".
Hadith, and using them as a basis for law, is blatantly a ploy. First you make it orthodox to follow the hadith, then you control which hadith are OK and then you control the people who are able to interpret the hadiths! Sounds very suspicious to me.
The schools of law were a vessel for achieving this aim, in the process also creating a new profession within Islam that has to this day clung to its positions of power and privilege within Muslim societies.
In short, I look on the schools of law as as stupid waste of time. It's a load of nonsense that makes people's lives complicated and distances them from God and from reality. The schools of law passed their stupid laws on dogs because they were all engaged in debates over 'questions of the day'. As they all had to abide by the Sahih hadith of Bukhari, they naturally used the either stupid or fake hadith about dogs in there to justify their positions...then stick to them to prove their scholastic abilities. All the while destroying man's bond with creation. Just stupid.
This is what I mean when I say Sunni Islam has had its hands tied behind its back for so long. Its been forced into this false paradigm of orthodoxy when in fact its anything but orthodox - its fudged.
For generations Muslims now have to abide by the rulings of men made 1,000 years ago? Really?
The Salafi Approach to Hadith
As a madhabi Muslim, and a Sufi at that, I was taught to hate Salafis for their approach to the schools of law. They rejected them as unnecessary. We believed they were crucial in saving the religion from their crazy hands. One of the Salafi's main criticisms of the Imams of fiqh was in their approach to and use of hadith. Now, I never really paid much attention to this in detail as I assumed they were wrong to even dare question the Imams.
So, after 19 years of really being a Salafi-hater, it opened my eyes when I came across a You Tube video of Bilal Philips talking about the fiqh of dogs.
I used to hate this man with a passion. He was everything I did not like in Islam. However, as he was talking about dogs, I had to listen...and if you're a Muslim so should you.
He makes some fantastic points which help start to strip away the layers of nonsense covering hadith and fiqh rulings.
For one, he uses the hadith in which it states that using a dog for hunting and guarding livestock are permissible and applies logic and reason to argue that is must therefore also be possible to keep dogs say if you're blind, or to protect your life. However, he stops at this point as he seems to identify having dogs with "Western culture", whereas in reality all cultures have a deep bond with dogs, even the Arabs pre-Islam.
He shows how this hadith has been completely manipulated by the schools of law and the following scholars to essentially ban people from having dogs other than for obscure reasons.
The next excellent point he makes is regarding the need to ritually cleanse anything a dog has licked, i.e. its saliva being dirty. The hadith itself says that if a dog licks a bowl you wish to eat from, then to purify it. Most Muslims due to this hadith, and the rulings from the madhabs based on this hadith, conclude that if a dog licks literally anything then you have to scrub it 7 times including once with earth. Philips makes a simple point that this hadith only relates to something you eat from - it has nothing to do with a dog licking your foot, your clothing or anything else! So why and how did the Imams of the madhabs not see this?
The reason is that the madhabs have to refer to hadith for law - not logic, reason, custom, common sense, science or anything else. If you are stuck with a load of nonsense from which you have to interpret laws, it's no wonder the laws will also be nonsense.
My view on Salafis has completely changed - I still think they are dangerous crazies, but I respect the fact they have looked at some of these schools of law and some of their teachings and called bullshit on them. However, they don't offer anything better as all they advocate is allowing the layman to use hadith themselves to make up laws, which is what results in Al-Qaeda and its offshoots.
One final point, why the hell would God send mankind a religion that needed mankind to turn to scholars in order to understand it and practice it? It's makes no sense - I find this very idea blasphemous. Everyone can access God directly - there is no intercession needed. Islam, if it is a religion, should be simple - it's been turned into Frankenstein on steroids with a turban on top.
If you follow a madhab, you are the blind following the blind. Seriously, go do some research and listen to some difficult questions. Following a madhab is killing any connection to God.
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