Iran in World History

‘ulema’,
literally, “knowledgeable 
ones”) would turn. But since the Qur’an is silent on so many matters, 
they required additional bases on which to form legal opinions (
fatwa
s). 
Relying on the Qur’anic verse which states “You have a beautiful model 
in the Messenger of God,”
5
many sought to support their positions by 
citing hadiths about the views or behavior of Muhammad during his 
lifetime. An additional source was reasoning by analogy (
qiyas
), based 
on examples from the Qur’an and hadiths.
Various Muslim jurists, each with his personal following of students 
and paying clients, had their own specific approaches. Some of these 
coalesced into recognized schools, while others faded into obsolescence. 
Representing the majority of Muslims, the Sunnis (literally, “tradition-
ists”) came to accept four schools of jurisprudence, each employing its 
own particular mix of methods for deriving the Sharia. The Shi‘as devel-
oped a school of their own, emphasizing the teachings of the Shi‘ite 
Imams. Of the five schools of law, the one founded by the Sunni Iranian 
jurist Abu Hanifa is the most flexible, relying more on analogical rea-
soning than the other schools. It is the most widespread school of law 
throughout the Muslim world today, though ironically not in Iran, 
where Shi‘ism was imposed by force during the sixteenth century.
The two most important collections of Sunni hadiths, the 
Sahih 
Bukhari
and the 
Sahih Muslim
, were compiled during the ninth cen-
tury by Iranian scholars. The need to justify positions not spelled out 
in the Qur’an was more pressing where Arab settlers were but a tiny 
minority. Among ethnic Iranians, Muslims did not become the major-
ity in urban areas until at least the tenth century, and in the country-
side this transformation took even longer. Meanwhile other religious 
communities—Zoroastrian, Christian, and Jewish—kept their own 
legal systems and ran their own affairs.
A major challenge facing Islamic jurists in the early period was 
the rampant circulation of unverified hadiths. Since anecdotes traced 
back to the Prophet were the principal means of resolving differences of 
belief or practice among Muslims, many hadiths were clearly fabricated 
merely to support one view or another. For Iranians, some hadiths seem 
to have aimed mainly at defending Iranian customs—like 
Noruz
cel-
ebrations, supposedly approved by the Caliph Ali—or asserting that 
many of Islam’s Arab founders had married Sasanian princesses.
At the imperial, provincial, and local levels, Muslim governments 
relied on the support of the Ulama to legitimize their rule (which was not 
always easy to do in light of the politicians’ often un-Islamic behavior). 

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Th e I r a n i z a t i o n o f I s l a m
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In turn, rival groups of scholars had to compete for official favor. As 
with the merchant class, alliances between the families of government 
officials and religious clergy were often cemented through marriages 
and joint business ventures. In this way, the temporal and spiritual 
powers of Muslim society established a symbiotic relationship—a phe-
nomenon still perceptible in Iran today.
Disagreements among scholars were not limited to questions of 
establishing a legal code. They hotly debated basic theological problems, 
such as free will versus predetermination, and the use of reason versus 
revelation. Since many scholars were trained in the peripatetic tradition 
of ancient Greek philosophy they were sometimes suspected of being 
insincere Muslims. The physician Rhazes (Mohammad ibn Zakariyya 
of Rayy), a pioneer in experimental medicine who is credited with the 
discovery of alcohol in its pure form (ethanol), made no secret that he 
had no time or use for Islam. The Bukharan philosopher and physician 
Avicenna (Abu Ali ibn Sina), whose