Why was the Hanafite madhab suited to the non-Arab world?

 

Hanifa was another person of Persian ancestry. His rulings were given in an environment where non-Arabs with their urban customs abounded; indeed in the cities where Muslims lived there were many non-Muslims. Thus his school develops law and interpretation to make allowance for the mentality of the people who will practice these rulings, and not for a Muslim-only tribal or desert society where behaviors are much more conformist and stricter. To this day, the Hanifite school is practiced in areas where the ethnicity is non-Arab: Turkey, India, Central Asia and the Russian Volga region. Again, this shows that Islamic law was adaptive and pluralistic.

To what extent are al-Biruni and Ibn Khaldun modern thinkers, in your opinion?

Al-Biruni knew Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek; he had read Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Christian and Zoroastrian scriptures in the original and given objective, factual descriptions of the main sects, trends and theologies of all these religions without prejudice. This sort of objective cultural analysis would not be achieved by European scholars until perhaps the 19 century. Ibn Khaldun (1400) has been called by the great British historian Arnold Toynbee the 'founder of sociology'; he referred to his new work in Arabic as ilm al-umran, 'the science of society'. Like Francis Bacon (1600) two centuries later, who referred to idols of the cave, the market etc, Ibn Khaldun gave an analysis of factors that prevent historians from truly understanding the past: ignorance of social laws, overconfidence in sources, ignoring the context of an event, exaggeration, flattering high-ranking patrons and so on. He believed that the laws that govern society are as strict as those that govern nature and as amenable to discovery. He argued that material conditions, not blood or fate, determine the pattern of social evolution. For example, the achievements of nations like the Persians or Jews is attributable to urbanization and oppression; the features of the Beduins arise from their nomadic lifestyle, and an analysis of the Beduins is transferable to other nomads like the Turkic tribes (who had taken over the Islamic world in Ibn Khaldun's time). Perhaps his most famous analysis is his description of social cycles based on the social commodity of asabiyya, or group cohesion/solidarity. This feeling of group solidarity is strongest among nomads, and then when they conquer settled territories, it slowly disintegrates: the original group distributes its power to clients, the link between rulers and ruled, both from the same group originally, becomes weaker.

 

 

MODERN RUSSIA

What similarities are there between Russian modern thought and modern Indian, Chinese thought?

Russian modernity starts rather quickly: modern literary Russian and a world-class Russian literature really dates back to the start of the 19^th century (Karamzin, Pushkin are key here). In some ways, this quickly emerging Russian modern identity is engaged in a permanent reaction to the West's domination of modernity – as we saw with India and China. Thus, although Russia is an empire in its own right, in some respects it also has the features of a colonized nation, or a nation that is peripheral to modernity. One historian, Dominic Lieven, has called Russia a "self-colonizing" nation: he compares the Russian aristocracy, who were French-speaking and oriented towards the West, with the British colonizers of India. The Russian peasants, in this scenario, are the Indian "natives", who speak Russian and preserve forms of life that predate modernity and very often resist the efforts of the aristocrats (land reforms, agricultural technology) to change their ways.

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