A Little Learning

I thought I knew a bit about the history of Islamic thought and that's true, but not quite in the way I thought. You see I assumed the bit I knew was a reasonably big bit, but having embarked on a reading of Jonathan Brown's Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy I've come to realise how much of a tiny bit the bit was. I could manage a broad summary of the Islamic scholarly tradition, certainly, but I was profoundly ignorant as to the details within that tradition. I could, at a pinch, tell you there are four major schools of law - madhhabs - in the Islamic world and name a couple, but I had no idea at all as to how they came into being and why Muslims could and can so easily (and sometimes, sadly, not so easily) agree to disagree on individual points of law. Now, some 50 pages in, I'm starting to grasp something of what took place in the formative centuries that shaped so much of the rich system of belief I inhabit.

I'm also coming to realise that, for all my appreciation of Islamic learning, I've always, somewhere in the back of my mind, assumed that the majority of scholars of the period in question were not terribly sophisticated thinkers. Prof Brown has a gift for making you realise otherwise.

It's a salutary thought that maybe most of those thinkers we sort of vaguely dismiss as mediaeval and, therefore, sort of backward, thinkers in all sorts of traditions - Christian, Judaic, Buddhist, to name just three - were a good deal more sophisticated than we give them credit for. Indeed, a good more sophisticated, more radically knowing, than ourselves.