Fortunately for them, just across the mudflats from Kufa—where the yearning to forge a new understanding of Islam was at its most turbulent and intense—the perfect role models were ready to hand. The rabbis of Sura, after all, had been labouring for many centuries to solve precisely the sort of problem that now confronted the ulama. The secret Torah, so it was recorded in the Talmud, “had been received at Sinai by Moses, who communicated it to Joshua, who communicated it to the elders, who communicated it to the prophets”64—who, in turn, had communicated it to a long line of rabbis, right down to the present. Nowhere in the world, in consequence, were there scholars better qualified to trace the chains of transmission that might link a lawyer and the sayings of a prophet than in the yeshivas of Iraq. Was it merely coincidence, then, that the earliest and most influential school of Islamic law should have been founded barely thirty miles from Sura? It was in Kufa, at around the same time as Walid, far distant in Damascus, was building his great mosque, that Muslim scholars first began to explore a momentous proposition: that there existed, alongside the Prophet’s written revelations, other, equally binding revelations that had never before been written down. Initially, in the manner of rabbis citing their own masters, members of the ulama were content to attribute these hitherto unrecorded doctrines to prominent local experts; then, as time went by, they began to link them to the Prophet’s companions; finally, as the ultimate in authorities, they fell to quoting the Prophet himself directly. Always, however, by bringing these previously unrecorded snatches of the past—these hadiths—to light, Muslim scholars were following a trail that had been blazed long before. Islamic though the isnads were, they were also more than a little Jewish.
The rabbis of Sura and Pumpedita, immured within their famous yeshivas, had spoken of their ambition to “build a fence around the Torah.”65 And so they had done—a thoroughly impregnable one. Yet some of them, hearing as a faint roar the tumult of debate and enquiry that was filling the streets of nearby Kufa, might just have felt a touch of claustrophobia—and even envy. The mosques of Iraq were coming to offer what no synagogue, or church, or fire temple had done for centuries: a venue for enquiry into the nature of God where the terms of debate had not already long since been set in stone. More than that—in the teeming warrens of Kufa and Basra, people from various religious backgrounds were free to meet, and collaborate, and merge their perspectives in a way that had never previously been possible. There were the conquerors: the Arab elite, with their language, their venerable traditions and their burnished memories of the age of Muhammad. Then there were the slaves and the descendants of slaves: all impatient to apply to the wrongs of an unjust society the austere and chilling message of the Prophet. Finally, there were ever-increasing numbers of converts. “Part of their original religion still remains within them.” So Rav Yehudai, the rabbi of Sura, had observed of those mowbeds who turned to Islam. But what of those Muslims who had once been rabbis—was the same to be observed of them? If so, that would certainly help to explain why the Sunna—just like the Torah—aimed to regulate every dimension and aspect of human existence; why it should have forged for itself chains of transmission such as rabbis, and only rabbis, had ever previously deployed; and why, in direct contradiction of the Qur’an, it prescribed death as the punishment for adultery rather than whipping. As it had been written in the Torah by Moses himself: “They shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has wrought folly in Israel by playing the harlot in her father’s house.”f
Such a ruling, once it had been reworked by Muslim lawyers, was no less authoritative for having been garnered from another—and infinitely more ancient—source. Rather, like Walid’s great mosque, the Sunna was a monument to just what could be achieved by fashioning old fragments into something new and extraordinary. Shards gleaned from the Torah, and from Zoroastrian ritual, and from Persian custom: all featured in the edifice pieced together by the ulama. The consequence of their labours, taking on an ever more clearly delineated form as the decades of Umayyad rule slipped by, was a guide to the wishes of God of quite astounding potency: one that even the most chauvinistic governor might learn to ignore at his peril.
Indeed, as a check upon the appetites and arrogance of an imperial elite, it was perhaps the most remarkable that a defeated people has ever devised. The ulama, whether descended from prisoners-of-war, or Zoroastrians, or Jews, were overwhelmingly comprised of the victims of the conquest. Yet they had won for themselves, by their collective efforts, a rare and impregnable dignity. It was they, not their ostensible masters, who had become the arbiters of the will of God. The jumble of beliefs and doctrines carried by bands of overwhelmingly illiterate warriors from the desert had been transformed, over the course of barely a century, into a religion of lawyers. Such an achievement, secured in the face of such odds, was a truly astounding one.
Yet it was an achievement as well, by its very nature, that could never be acknowledged. Although the Sunna was recognisably a product of its place of birth—a world where legally minded intellectuals, of whatever faith, had long endeavoured to frame God’s purposes—it could only ever hope to flourish by denying its roots in such a seedbed. Not a hadith, but there was a pressing obligation to derive it from the innermost bowels of Arabia. As a result, there could be no question of doing as the rabbis of the yeshivas had done, or the jurists at the court of Justinian, and revelling in the antiquity of the laws that it was their ambition to marshal. Quite the contrary: no matter how venerable a snatch of legal opinion might be, it could never have the force of law unless it had first been demonstrated to have emerged from the lifetime of Muhammad. Consequently, the Sunna was founded upon a paradox: the more the ulama of Iraq, in their eagerness to fashion a just society, drew upon the incomparable legacy of those who had laboured in a similar cause for millennia, the more did they identify the source of that wisdom with a barren and peripheral desert. Experience of the perfect society, so they taught, had been granted to one single place, and to one single period of history: Medina, in the lifetime of the Prophet. The role of the Sunna, and its supreme glory, was to serve the Muslim people as a signpost: one that could point them the way—the shariah—back to paradise lost.