Becoming ‘The People of the Qibla’
The Semantic History of an Expression of Collective Belonging Chapter 1 (“Wherever you Turn”) demonstrated that the Qurʾānic obligation to face the qibla helped to define Muslim identity during the lifetime of Muḥammad. For late antique Jews and Christians, the practice of praying in the direction of Jerusalem or east—respectively—expressed the parting of ways between those communities. Orientation for ritual is not only a religious obligation, but in the formation of Islam it served as primary marker of the boundaries between an “us” that worships towards the masjid al-ḥarām and a “them/s” that align their bodies differently. In this sense, the qibla is not unique as a ritual marker of communal boundaries. The distinctively Islamic
practices of purity, food-ways, fasting, and others would come to circumscribe the religious character of Islam by contrast to the forms in which other groups performed these acts of religious devotion.
The qibla, however,unlike any other ritual occupied a unique place as an embodied metaphor for collective identity by the end of the first Islamic centuries. For example, many Muslim heresiographers came to view a group’s qibla as a basic feature of its definition as a religion. And so, al-Bīrūnī (d. c. 442/1050) differentiates between “true” Ṣabians and Ḥarrānians by mentioning that one group faces the North Pole in prayer while the latter faces the South Pole.165 Interestingly, al-Kindī (d. c. mid-3rd/ 9th c.)—also using the qibla as a synecdoche for religion—argued that Ḥarrānians and
165 Abū al-Rayḥān Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Bīrūnī, al-Athār al-Bāqiya ʿan al-qurūn al-khālīya, ed. E.
Sachau (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1878), 206; English translation appears in Chronology of Ancient Nations, trans. E. Sachau (London: Oriental Translation Fund, 1879), 188. See also al-Athār 331,
Chronology, 329, where al-Bīrūnī repeats the distinction between Ḥarrānian and Ṣabian qiblas, but is aware of an author “from among them” who criticizes facing any specific qibla when petitioning God. Still, the inclusion of this latter voice still implies that many defined religions by qibla.
Ṣabians constituted a single group whose “practices and laws do not contradict. They have adopted a single qibla, which they have asserted is towards the North Star in its course.”166 Furthermore, several Muslim heresiographers know that Rabbanites and Karaites were both Jewish sects who shared the Jerusalem qibla, and readily point out that the Samaritan qibla differs (i.e. they face Mount Azūn/Gerizim in Nāblūs/Shekhem), a fact that became relevant for jurists who argued about whether Samaritans should be considered Jews for the purposes of collecting the jizya (non-Muslim tribute tax).167 A
final example where the qibla stands in for the whole of a religion appears in al-Azdī’s (d. 334/945) History of Mawṣil. Apparently, Abū Jaʿfar—who would become the first
ʿAbbāsid Caliph al-Manṣūr (d. 158/775)—issued an order of protection (amān) to
ʿAbdāllah b. ʿAlī (d. 146/764), which preserved the latter’s authority in his region “over the people of Islam, the contracted peoples (al-muʿāhidīn), and the people of every religion (milla) and qibla.”168 Many more examples of the qibla as a marker of religious and interreligious distinction appear in medieval polemical writing, which is the subject of Chapter 3 (“Does God’s Mind Change?”).
The current chapter, shifts our focus away from the ways in which Islamic collective identity formed by differentiation from the practices of other religious
166 The excerpted passage quoting al-Kindī is from Aḥmad b. al-Ṭayyib al-Sarakhsī, but appears in Ibn al-
Nadīm, Kitāb al-Fihrist, vol. 2, ed. A.F. Sayyid (London: Muwassasat al-Furqān, 2009), 358. A
Translation that, in this instance, mainly keeps to the original text appears in Bayard Dodge, The Fihrist of al-Nadīm: A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 746.
167SeeAbū al-Fatḥ Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Shahrastānī, Kitāb al-Milal wal-Niḥal, vol. 2, ed. ʿA.ʿA.M. Al-Wakīl (Cairo: 1968), 24; Ibn Qayyim al-Jawzīya, Aḥkām Ahl al-Dhimma, eds. Y.b.A. al-Bakrī
and Sh.b.T. al-ʿĀrūrī (al-Dammām: Ramādī lil-Nashr, 1997), 228-30;Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad al-
Qalqashandī, Ṣubḥ al-Aʿshāʾ fī Kitābat al-Inshā, vol. 13(Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣrīya, 1922), 268-70; Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad al-Maqrīzī, al-Mawāʿiẓ wal-Iʿtibār bi-Dhikr al-Khiṭaṭ wal-Āthār, vol. 2 (Cairo: Maktabat al-Thaqāfa al-Dīnīya, 1967) 476-79.
168 Abū Zakarīyā Yazīd b. Muḥammad al-Azdī, Taʾrīkh al-Mawṣīl, ed. ʿA. Ḥabīb(Cairo: 1967), 169. On
the events surrounding this declaration see Said Amir Arjomand, “ʿAbd Allah Ibn al-Muqaffaʾ and the
communities. Rather, we now explore how the qibla became a cultural resource to express andenable a common sense of belonging among Muslims, even across sectarian lines. To do so this chapter traces the semantic use of the term ‘ahl al-qibla,’ or People of the Qibla, an expression that came to signify a “big tent” Islam, one that was
expansive enough to include grave sinners as well as political and theological
adversaries.169 The term, it will be argued, likely emerged in Iraq by the late-Umayyad period (i.e. ca. late 1st/early 8th century). Its early deployment came in reaction to those
who wished to exclude other Muslims from the community, either for sinful beliefs, practices, or political affiliations.170 In response, one could point to the external action of that person or group—symbolized by ritual worship in the direction of Mecca—as a sign that they belonged to the Islamic collective, and as a way to overlook questions regarding political loyalties. Socio-religious “belonging” took concrete form through legal
communion between the so-called offenders and their Muslim peers with regard to institutions such as inheritance, ritual slaughter, burial, and other practices (to be
169 In this chapter I use singe inverted commas (quotation marks) around the phrase ‘ahl al-qibla’ and
capital letters when translating it (i.e. “People of the Qibla”) because I am tracing its semantic history as a technical term in early Islamic discourse about theology, community, and difference. Occasionally, it will be referred to as “the qibla-phrase;” my choice to use one or the other designation is purely stylistic. I am not aware of any focused academic treatment of the phrase’s history and varied usage. Josef Van Ess is aware of the term’s meaning as including diverse Muslim beliefs, and he often translates it as
“Großgemeinde;” see his “Schicksal und selbstbestimmtes Handeln aus der Sicht von Ḍirār b. ʿAmr’s K. al-Taḥrīsh,” in Kleine Schriften des Josef Van Ess, 3 Vols. ed. H. Biesterfeldt (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 2517. See also his brief discussion of ‘ahl al-qibla’ and the related term ‘ahl al-ṣalāt’ in Josef Van Ess, Der Eine und das Andere: Beobachtungen an islamischen häresiographischen Texten (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2011), 1269-70. Since the phrase appears in a wide variety of literatures and periods, it is difficult to make generalizations. This chapter aims to serve as an opening for future scholarship on the qibla-phrase that can be more sensitive to its uses in individual contexts.
170 For many early Muslim authors the social and religious were interwoven. As a result, acknowledging
the right to rule of one party or another also reflected theological outlooks with regard to the God-given authority and leadership of the community. In this writing we favor the term ‘socio-religious’ to reflect the reality of communal and political affiliations intertwined with religious outlooks in such a way that one cannot easily separate one from the other, nor may there be any benefit in doing so.
discussed below).171 Geographic orientation towards the sacred center of the Muslim oikoumene performed an external affiliation with Islam that allowed other Muslims to leave one’s internal beliefs to God. The act of naming a reprobate as among the ‘ahl al- qibla’ implied that people ought to treat him as a Muslim and a Believer, even if God knew otherwise about his true status and ultimate fate.
The expression ‘ahl al-qibla’ is just that, an expression that conveys meaning. It did not perform the feat of incorporating into the polity of believers Muslims whom an author deemed to be of questionable status.172 As such, there are not, to my knowledge, any direct treatments of the term in pre-Modern Islamic literature. Its very first usage was probably, as so many figures of speech, both oral and impossible to date. The modern discipline of semantics is the study of key words or technical terms within the whole worldview in which those terms appear. The semantic analysis of ‘ahl al-qibla,’ which is the subject of this chapter, demonstrates the idiom’s ability to communicate an existing socio-religious position regarding those whose beliefs or behaviors jeopardized their status as Muslims.
171 It is difficult to find efficient and accurate terminology to reflect the phenomenon by which an author or
group sees another individual or group as valid to participate in rituals and other social institutions, despite apparent differences. For example, stating that an individual is a legitimate partner for marriage, despite association with a different denomination. “Commesality” is a term often used to describe only the habit of eating together, and “mutuality” implies more similarity between parties than I would like to reflect here. With some hesitation, I have chosen “communion,” despite its connotations as a Christian term for an offering of Christian worship. Instead, I use its sense of groups or individuals in a relationship of mutual participation in rites and social institutions with another group. For example, “In 2012 the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church (USA) entered a pact of full communion; their members may receive the Eucharist at one another’s churches.” On this usage see "communion, n.". OED Online. June 2018. Oxford University Press. http://proxy.library.upenn.edu:2817/ view/Entry/37318?redirected From=communion& (accessed August 28, 2018).
172 It is argued in this chapter that the term ahl al-qibla is most often used by our authors in the context of
the inclusion of individuals or groups whose status is suspect in the perspective of the author or his school of thought. Historians must take great care not to label Islamic beliefs, communities, and individuals as legitimate or questionable, righteous or dubious, or any other valuation that implies an ontological status, or impute a normative/heterodox paradigm in any objective sense. In this chapter, when terms such as “of questionable status” are used, they should always be taken to imply “as deemed by the author.”
The term appears in a variety of literary genres, from the earliest theological epistles and later systematic theological writings to doctrinal creeds to tafsīrs, histories, and legal manuals. In most cases ‘ahl al-qibla’ indicates an author’s broadest definition of Islamic community, including Muslims of dubious status, and in some cases it refers specifically to the questionable sub-group. This chapter draws upon a very wide
sampling of authors and genres, and it proceeds in two parts. First, we will consider the conceptual workings of the qibla-phrase: the types of sins it applied to, the way it came to expand the theological boundaries of Islamic community, its slightly different uses in Shiʿi writings, andits practical implications for legal communion between Muslims. Most of the sources in this section come from the ninth- through twelfth-centuries, when Islamic theological writing began to flourish and take on issues systematically. Second, we will argue for the historical origins of the term in the Umayyad period, most likely in Kūfa and/or Baṣra. In this context—the civil strife of the first century, extremist
Khārijites who named Muslim adversaries as infidels, an increasingly diverse polity in the post-conquest era, and the abiding sovereignty of leaders of doubtful legitimacy—the drive to maintain religious unity became expressed with reference to all Muslims as People of the Qibla.
In the first Islamic centuries, then, the qibla became a key cultural resource for expressing an expansive and inclusive Muslim identity. As discussed in the introduction, the act of facing the qibla invoked three factors of importance to the formation of
collective identity in early Islam: interreligious boundaries, sacred geography, and ritual performance. By facing the Meccan qibla one a) demonstrated that one was a Muslim and not a Jew, Christian, or anything else; b) aligned one’s political allegiance with a
land that was neither the seat of Umayyad leadership, nor their ʿAlid-cum-ʿAbbāsid adversaries in Iraq; and c) performed fealty to Islam, bodily, which solidified one’s status as Muslim despite other causes for exclusion. The qibla did not do the work of unifying Muslims across sectarian lines. However, for those who wished to hold together the social structures of religious community amidst political and theological divides, orientation towards the qibla proved to be a potent and persistent symbol in the performance of collective identity.
Sinners Among the ‘ahl al-qibla:’ The Mechanics of the Term as used in Tafsīr
One of the earliest theological divisions to arise in Islamic history concerned whether a grave sinner (murtakib al-kabīra) could be considered a Muslim. As we will demonstrate, most Islamic schools of thought in the ʿAbbāsid period would find a way to accept sinners as a part of the ‘People of the Qibla.’ However, the origin of the question lies much earlier, in the Khārijite movement’s response to the civil wars over caliphal succession.173 Discussed in greater detail in the following section, the Khārijites originated the notion of takfīr, or labeling fellow Muslims as unbelievers (kāfir/kuffār), whom they were obligated to fight and whose lands they must abandon (khārijī meaning literally “one who leaves”). After the Battle of Ṣiffīn—in the wake of the murder of the third Caliph, ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān—the Khārijites identified both contenders for the caliphate, ʿAlī ibn AbīṬālib and Muʾāwiya, as kāfirs who favored human judgment over
173 The Khārijites, or Khawārij, will be discussed in greater detail below. For general background on the
movement, its history, theology, and sub-groups see Patricia Crone and Fritz Zimmerman, The Epistle of Sālim Ibn Dhakwān, trans. and eds. P. Crone and F. Zimmerman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) “The Khārijites,” 195-217; Patricia Crone, God’s Rule: Government and Islam (Columbia University Press, 2004), 54-64; Toshihiko Izutsu, The Concept of Belief in Islamic Theology (Lahore: Suhail Academy, 2005), 1-16;Gerald Hawting,“The Significance of the Slogan lāḥukm illā lillāh and the References to the Ḥudūd in the Traditions about the Fitna and the Murder of ʿUthmān,” BSOAS,41 (1978): 453–463; Van Ess, Theology and Society, 473-88 (2.1.4).
judgment by the Book of God (i.e. the Qurʾān). Furthermore, those who supported these wrongful leaders were also kāfirs for committing the grave sin of supporting them. The extremists among the Khārijites lived in isolation and took every opportunity to
implement their beliefs, ultimately leading to the assassination of ʿAlī and regular violent rebellions against the Umayyads.174
In the post-conquest empire, diverse peoples joined the community and the conflicting loyalties and identities required justification in Islamic terms; the non-Muslim kāfirs could no longer shake the stability of the imperial polity from without, but internal dissent threatened to tear it apart. The rise of the Khārijites was a manifestation of this uneasiness.175 Many groups rebelled against the Umayyads, but the norm appears to be a theology of quietism towards the authorities and inclusive communion with rival Muslim groups. The movement most recognized in this regard was the Murjiʾa, who professed the postponement of judgment (irjāʾ) regarding the political leadership and their supporters.176 As we will see, though, a quietist doctrine similar to irjāʾ existed among moderate Khārijites, and became a part of mainstream Sunni theology, as well.177 Reactions to the Khārijite rupture led to sharper definitions of what constituted “faith” (imān), whether “works” (ʿamal) were a part of faith, and whether there were sins which could consign to the category of unbeliever someone practicing Islam and professing
174 See references to various Khārijite disturbances in Gerald Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661-750, Second Edition (London: Routledge, 2000), 66, 82, 84, 100; M.A. Shaban, Islamic History: A New Interpretation vol. 1 A.D. 600-750 (A.H. 132), (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 95-7ff; 106-7; K.V. Zetterstéen & C.F. Robinson, “Shabīb b. Yazīd” EI2.
175Crone and Zimmerman, Sālim, 215-17, attribute the failure of Khārijism as a movement to its inability
to move beyond tribal homogeneity and react to the diversity of the expanding Islamic polity. See also Izutsu, Belief, 9-10, who makes a similar insight.
176 For more on early Murjiʾism see Wilfred Madelung, “Murdjia,” EI2; and idem.,“The Early Murjiʾa in
Khurāsān and Transoxania and the Spread of Ḥanifīsm,” Der Islam 59:1 (1982): 32-39;Crone & Zimmerman, Sālim 219-50, Van Ess, Theology and Society, 173-210; Michael Cook, Early Muslim Dogma: A Source Critical Study, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 23-47.