Thirteen Points of Difference

Another thing about the two schools is that there are no core, fundamental differences between them that lead one to call the other kāfir, or completely deviant, off track. Al-Subkī, who was a Shāfiʿī and an Ashʿarī, said that he had studied, looked through, the works of Abū Ḥanīfah (may Allah have mercy on him), the Ḥanafī scholars and al-Ṭaḥāwī, and had found only 13 points of difference, of which six can be considered more real differences; all the other differences are merely semantic. They are just different ways of saying the same thing.

For example, ask one group to define īmān, what īmān is, and they will say that īmān is conviction in the heart, confession with the tongue, and actions with the limbs. Ask the other group to define īmān, and they say: conviction in the heart and confession with the tongue. They do not bring in actions. That looks like a big difference: defining īmān, what makes a person a believer. Is that a big difference of opinion? Is it serious? One is excluding actions; the other is including actions.

It is a semantic difference. There is no real difference there. Why? The one group, when they say that actions are part of īmān, are only saying it to emphasise it, not to make it crucially part of īmān. Ask them: if somebody has conviction, true conviction in the heart, and confession with the tongue, but does not do good actions, is he still a believer? Does he still have īmān? They will say: of course he does. Then why put actions in the definition of īmān? They answer: “We do that because there was a group of people who relegated actions completely to the back.” These were the Murjiʾah, described in the previous chapter. They relegated actions completely to the back, and did not give them much significance. So the definition was meant to encourage people, as if to say: look, this is part of īmān. It was a response to the Murjiʾah.

Ask the other group why they did not include actions in their definition of īmān, and they say: “We were dealing with the Khawārij, who said that actions were part of īmān, and that if you did not act and fulfil the obligations, then you were a kāfir. So we made sure that the definition was correctly understood, according to the challenges that we had.” Take one person who is a sinner but still a believer: both of them will call him a muʾmin. So that is a semantic difference. It is just two ways of saying the same thing, based on different circumstances.

The majority of the ikhtilāf is like that. Six are more serious, in the sense that they are more real; but they are not so critical and serious that they lead one to call the other kāfir. Some of those will be covered later, inshāʾAllāh. Again, there is a difference of opinion about some of them: whether they are actually semantic, and about some of them, whether they are even semantic or maʿnawī. But there is respect between the two groups. Both are the Ahl al-Sunnah wa al-Jamāʿah.

A short breakdown helps here. The Mālikīs are predominantly, almost always, Ashʿarī; there are hardly any problems on that side. The Shāfiʿīs are primarily Ashʿarī; some became Māturīdī, and some others had other sectarian ideas, but the majority were Ashʿarī. And some of the main scholars were Ashʿarīs, such as Imam al-Ḥaramayn, Imam al-Ghazālī and others.

Then there are the Ḥanafīs, who are primarily Māturīdī. There is a small minority that is Muʿtazilī. The author of al-Kashshāf, al-Zamakhsharī, for example, was a Muʿtazilī by ʿaqīdah, but Ḥanafī in furūʿ. There are quite a few like that: good fuqahāʾ, but when it comes to ʿaqīdah, Muʿtazilī. In fact, one of them starts his book with al-ḥamdu li-llāhi alladhī khalaqa al-Qurʾān, all praises to Allah, who created the Qur'an, writing that there just to emphasise the createdness of the Qur'an, according to the Muʿtazilah.

As for the Ḥanbalīs, the early leaders and the great Ḥanbalī scholars, Imam Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal and the other great ones, were all on the mainstream. Unfortunately, a lot of the others went into either tajsīm, clear tajsīm, clear anthropomorphism, or, later on, crypto-anthropomorphism, or deviant ideas that were different from the majority. Unfortunately, the Ḥanbalīs have suffered quite a bit in that regard. Al-Taftāzānī, for example, says kamā qāla baʿḍ al-Ḥanābilah about a particular issue in his commentary on al-Nasafī.