Doubt, Alienation and Heresiology

I mentioned in a previous blog that I would be posting upon the following book. I found it germane to post this in reply to someone else's blog, but I shall take the liberty to repost in my own blog, so that I may more conveniently continue this important topic.



If we stand back and consider the phenomenon of alienation in its broadest possible abstraction, whether it be on the basis of religion, ethnicity, gender, or some other basis, then our inquiry leads naturally to the construction of orthodoxy and heresy, which is dealt with in great depth by John B. Henderson:



[By the way, with regard to ostracism on the basis of doubted virtue, someone has written regarding the similar accounts of a virtuous woman slandered in Hinduism (Sita), Christianity (Mary), and Islam (Ayeshia). ]



JB Henderson- Constructing Orthodoxy&Heresy
The Construction of Orthodoxy and Heresy

By John B. Henderson - SUNY press

ISBN 0-7914-3759-0

I stumbled across this slim volume by accident in a used book store.

I am certain it is still in print, but will have to check.

This book is very helpful in discussing Elaine Pagels books on the Gnostics and the Nag Hammadi manuscripts.

This book is a real eye-opener, for it takes as its topic the fundamental and ubiquitous process of heresiography in four very different religions; neo-Confuscian Taoism, Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

Here are two excerpts which demonstrate how valuable this book can be in understanding current events.

From Ch. 1, Preliminary Overview of Heresy and Heresiography, Page 10



Despite its undeserved reputation for monolithicity and conformity, Islam is among the most fractious of the world's great religions. According to the great Islamic heresiographer, al-Baghdadi (d. 1037), the Kharijite sect alone split into twenty different sub-groups. Nor were the various Islamic sects reluctant to enter into theological conflict with one another. Thus polemic is one of the most widely represented genres in the history of Islamic religious literature, to the extent that “Theology in Islam, more perhaps than in other religions, is a contentious science."

Not only was Islamic theology often quite contentious, but much of it was formulated in the first place in the process of refuting or rejecting heresies. (i.e. it is the HERESY which appears first, and THEN the ORTHODOX view is formulated to combat the heresy.) According to al-Ghazali (d. 1111) account of the origin of theology in Islam, God brought into being the class of theologians and moved them to support traditional orthodoxy with the weapon of systematic argument, by laying bare the confused doctrines invented by the heretics, at variance with traditional orthodoxy. But theologians were not the only heresiographers in Islam. As the great modern student of Islamic heresiography, Henri Laoust, has remarked, “All Muslim thinkers, whether they belong to the category of canon lawyer, dogmatic theologian, traditionist, or philosopher, are also in their own way and to some degree heresiographers."

By Islamic lights, the heresiographical roles was by no means a mean one unworthy of a great philosopher or theologian. For the heresiographer was the heir of the holy warrior of yore, though he might conduct jihad “more against heresy inside the world of Islam than against the infidels outside its territories. In Ghazali's words, heresiographers were the protectors of religion through proof and demonstration, just as warriors were through sword and lance. In medieval Islam, where sectarian identification, as opposed to ethnic, cultural, or even political associations, provided the chief means of understanding human differences, the heresiographers who determined and explained these differences played a vital social role. Their presence in each region and locale was so important that if such a person comes to be lacking in a region, the inhabitants ought to all clamor for one just as they would if they lacked a doctor or a lawyer.

Dogma in Islam, as enshrined in creeds and doctrines, did not occupy such a central place as it did in Christianity. Nor in Islam did there exist any time-honored central ecclesiastical authority for determining and enforcing such dogmatic orthodoxy. In comparison with early Christianity, Islam was more a religion of practice than belief, of law more than theology, of orthopraxy more than orthodoxy, as illustrated by the fact that only one of the five pillars of Islam focuses on matters of belief.



As in early Christianity, the most general and abstract Islamic heresiographical schematizations were numerological. In fact, the leit-motif of the heresiographical genre as a whole is the famous Tradition (or hadith) in which the Prophet predicts a division of the Islamic community into seventy-three sects, seventy-two of which are destined for Hell and only one for salvation. As the pioneering Western Islamicist, Ignaz Goldziher, remarked, this hadith "formed the basis for the history of religion and of sects in Muhammadan literature." Most of the Sunni heresiographers, including al-Shahrastani (1086-1153) and al-Baghdadi (d. 1037), deployed the seventy-three-sect schema in their heresiographical works. The Ash'arite theologian Adud al-Din al-Iji (c. 1281-1355) went so far as to identify the one "salvation-giving sect" as the Ash'arite. This schema, however, appears not only in Ash'arite literature, but also in Hanbalite creeds and professions of faith, such as that if Ibn Batta (d.997).

Having declared their allegiance to the seventy-three-sect enumeration revealed by the Prophet, the heresiographers were left with the daunting task of dividing the world of Islamic heresy into precisely seventy-two units. In some cases, they made "convulsive endeavors to squeeze ouf the required number," particularly by "cutting, inserting, and combining, till they reach the number of 73." Among the more curious devices used by Baghdadi for arriving at the canonical number is "regarding each of the more important Mu'tazilites as head of a sect and, when he had too many sects, stating that some were so heretical that they had ceased to be Muslims. The procedure of ash-Shahrastani is somewhat similar." The noted Hanbalite traditionist and theologian, al_Jili (d. 1166), adopted the more economical strategy of simply counting some sects twice, under two different rubrics, in order to produce the canonical seventy-two. Such heresiographical manipulations were facilitated, and even perhaps partly justified, by the fact that some Islamic sects were neither very discrete nor stable. In fact, the Arabic term "firqa" is used to refer not only to a sect proper, but to doctrinal tendencies within sects and even to lone individuals."