The Guarded Book

A reform that is forced on people confirms the thing it tried to change, and its victims become saints. A reform that is merely one opinion among many dies with the reformer. To change what a faith requires, you must change it in the place where the faith decides what it requires, and you must do it with the faith's own instruments.

The Flogging of Ibn Hanbal

In the year 834, in a palace in Baghdad, a caliph sat down to watch a scholar being whipped.

The scholar was Ahmad ibn Hanbal, a man of about fifty-five who had spent his life collecting the sayings of the Prophet and lived in poverty by choice. The caliph was al-Mutasim, ruler of an empire that stretched from Tunisia to Central Asia. The point at issue between them would strike most modern people as impossibly abstract. Was the Quran created by God at a moment in time, or had it existed with Him from all eternity?

The caliph's court held that it was created. This was the teaching of the Mutazila, a school of theologians who believed that God's justice and unity could be defended by reason, and who had won the favor of the palace. Their doctrine had consequences. A book that was created was addressed to a time and a place, and might be read in the light of both. A book that was eternal stood outside history altogether and could only be obeyed.

It was the most promising opening for rational religion that Islam had yet seen, and the men who held it then destroyed it with their own hands. They were not content to argue for their view, and they persuaded the caliph to impose it. Judges and scholars across the empire were summoned and questioned. Those who would not affirm that the Quran was created were dismissed, imprisoned, or beaten.

Ibn Hanbal would not affirm it. Brought before the caliph in chains, he gave the same answer to every argument: Give me something from the Book of God or the practice of His Messenger, and I will say it. They flogged him until he lost consciousness. He still would not say it.

The crowds outside the palace grew so large and so angry that the caliph let him go. The inquisition dragged on for some fifteen years and was then quietly abandoned. When Ibn Hanbal died, an old man, his funeral was said to be the largest Baghdad had ever seen. The doctrine he had bled for, the uncreated and eternal Quran, became the badge of orthodoxy and has remained so ever since. The Mutazila were remembered as the men with the whip.