The Problem of Non-Muslims Who Insult The Prophet Mu Ammad

The Problem of Non-Muslims Who Insult the Prophet Muḥammad
Author(s): Mark S. Wagner

Source: Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 135, No. 3 (July–September 2015), pp.
529-540
Published by: American Oriental Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7817/jameroriesoci.135.3.529
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The Problem of Non-Muslims Who Insult
the Prophet Muḥammad
Mark S. Wagner
Louisiana State University
Questions of whether, how, and why non-Muslims, whose infidel religious practice
necessitates ongoing disregard for the Prophet Muḥammad, should be punished for
the crime of insulting the Prophet (sabb al-rasūl or shatm al-rasūl) prompted live-
ly debate among Muslims in the eleventh century, especially Shāfiʿīs. This article
presents the history and development of the law, and demonstrates that while
two of its most draconian interpretations, that of Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ and Ibn Taymiyya,
eclipsed more nuanced discussions that took place among Shāfiʿīs and Ḥanafīs,
some late Ḥanafī ulama viewed this as a bad development and sought to mine the
tradition to reclaim and render normative a more lenient interpretation of the law.
Both laypeople and Middle East specialists interviewed by the news media have generally
identified iconoclasm as the relevant Islamic taboo that was contravened in the Jyllands-
Posten cartoon controversy and subsequent ones such as Charlie Hebdo. 1 Yet Islamists rou-
tinely identified the irreverent or mocking treatment of the Prophet Muḥammad, and not the
visual representation of him, as the crime that had been committed.
The lion’s share of scholarly—and non-scholarly—attention given to the act of insult-
ing the Prophet has centered on al-Ṣārim al-maslūl ʿalā shātim al-rasūl, a treatise by the
thirteenth-century Ḥanbalī jurist Ibn Taymiyya. 2 In this work, in which Ibn Taymiyya main-
tained that one who insulted Muḥammad, Muslim or non-Muslim, had committed a capital
ḥadd crime and could not avoid the death penalty through repentance or conversion, 3 short
shrift is given to precedents that do not accord with his strict interpretation of the law. What
follows is a tentative history of the law against insulting the Prophet in Islam, with particular
focus on the differences between Shāfiʿīs in eleventh-century Baghdad and Khurasan on this
issue and on the case of non-Muslims who insult Muḥammad.
i
The ostensibly late emergence of the law against insulting the Prophet (sabb or shatm
al-rasūl) poses a number of problems. No scriptural evidence justifies its addition to the list
of Quranic or ḥadd crimes. The only verse in the Quran that adjures against sabb (insults)
instructs Muslims not to insult the infidels’ gods “lest they, in retaliation, insult God in their
I would like to thank Peri Bearman for her help with this research, as well as those who offered helpful suggestions
after my presentation on this topic at the meeting of the American Oriental Society in St. Louis in 2010, particularly
Ahmed El Shamsy.
1. For example, see the comments of Marcia Inhorn, “A Major Form of Blasphemy,” accessible online at
http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/2009_11/yup_inhorn057.html (accessed December 11, 2012). Cf.
Saba Mahmood, “Religious Reason or Secular Affect? An Incommensurable Divide?” in Talal Asad et al., Is Cri-
tique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities, Univ. of Cali-
fornia, Berkeley, 2009), 74–78.
2. Ed. Muḥammad Muḥyī al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd (Beirut: al-Maktaba al-ʿAṣriyya), 1990.
3. “If the ḥadd penalty must be imposed, it is not annulled by conversion to Islam, as is the case with the
remaining ḥadd crimes.” Ibid., 307.
Journal of the American Oriental Society 135.3 (2015) 529
530 Journal of the American Oriental Society 135.3 (2015)
ignorance” (6:108), and no variants of the word shatm appear. While some early hadiths call
for the execution of those who insult the Prophet, 4 others provide means to lighten the sen-
tence, ordinarily repentance for a Muslim or conversion to Islam for a non-Muslim.
Once fiqh works are taken into account the picture becomes more complicated. Yohanan
Friedmann has demonstrated that on the crucial issue of whether or not the Muslim insulter
of the Prophet may repent of his crime, support may be found in each of the four Sunni
madhāhib for either repentance or the impossibility of repentance. 5 As for non-Muslims, the
opinions are equally varied. Abū Ḥanīfa is said to have held that non-Muslims who insult the
Prophet “are not to be killed, because their [overall] unbelief is worse (lā yuqtalu yaʿnī lladhī
hum ʿalayhi min al-shirki aʿẓamu).” 6 He is also said to have held that non-Muslim insults to
the Prophet do not violate the Pact with the Islamic state. 7 Other Ḥanafī jurists concur—for
example, al-Taḥāwī (d. 933), who specified that the non-Muslim who does this “is given a
discretionary punishment but is not killed (ʿuzira wa-lam yuqtal); 8 and al-Qudūrī (d. 1037),
al-Marghīnānī (d. 1197), and Ibn al-Humām (d. 1457), who argued that the act did not break
the Pact and they did not specify a particular punishment for it. 9 A harsher interpretation
gained traction, however—in Badr al-Dīn al-ʿAynī’s (d. 1451) commentary on the Hidāya
of al-Marghīnānī, he notes that al-Atrāzī (d. 1357) ruled that a non-Muslim insulter of the
Prophet be killed 10—and this would become the norm among Ḥanafīs in the Ottoman period.
Within the generally uncompromising Ḥanbalī school, at least one qāḍī supported the idea
that it made sense for non-Muslims to be able to say things about the Prophet that Muslims
would find offensive. 11
In short, the law against insulting the Prophet, by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, sup-
ports multiple contradictory interpretations. Given the complex picture posed by the broader
context of intrascholastic and interscholastic disagreement and chronological change, the
temptation by scholars of Islam to characterize a specific reading of the law as normative
plagues some studies. For example, Lutz Wiederhold’s statement that “there is no essential
ikhtilāf [disagreement] among the schools of law on the issue of sabb” 12 is correct in a very
general way, but overlooks such important issues as whether or not one can repent of it,
4. Yohanan Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in the Muslim Tradition (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), 149 n. 1.
5. Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion, 128–31, 151; Hanaa H. Kilany Omar, “Apostasy in the Mamluk
Period: The Politics of Accusations of Unbelief” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Pennsylvania, 2001), 100, 103, 143–44.
David Powers (Law, Society, and Culture in the Maghrib, 1300–1500 [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002],
176) points out that in the Mālikī school, which was known as the toughest on insulting the Prophet, a minority of
qāḍīs offered insulters of the Prophet the opportunity to repent. Cf. Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī, al-Sayf al-maslūl ʿalā man
sabba l-rasūl, ed. Iyād al-Ghūj (Amman: Dār al-Fatḥ, 2000), 562, 567.
6. Ibn Taymiyya, al-Ṣārim al-maslūl, 3.
7. Subkī, al-Sayf al-maslūl, 251–52, 262, 265, 270.
8. Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. Salāma al-Taḥāwī, Mukhtaṣar Ikhtilāf al-ʿulamāʾ, ed. ʿAbdallāh Nadhīr Aḥmad
(Beirut: Dār al-Bashāʾir al-Islāmiyya, 1995), 3: 504–6; Abū Bakr al-Rāzī al-Jaṣṣāṣ, Sharḥ Mukhtaṣar al-Taḥāwī, ed.
Muḥammad ʿUbayd Allāh Khān (Beirut: Dār al-Sirāj/Dār al-Bashāʾir al-Islāmiyya, 2010), 6: 142.
9. Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Qudūrī, al-Mawsūʿa al-fiqhiyya al-muqārana: al-Tajrīd, ed. Muḥammad Aḥmad
Sarrāj and ʿAlī Jumʿa Muḥammad (Cairo: Dār al-Salām, 2004), 12: 6266–67; Ibn al-Humām, Sharḥ Fatḥ al-qadīr
(Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2003), 6: 58–59.
10. Badr al-Dīn al-ʿAynī, al-Bināya fī sharḥ al-Hidāya (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1990), 6: 689.
11. This qāḍī, Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Ḥulwānī (or al-Ḥalwānī) (1097–
1151), is excoriated by Ibn Taymiyya, al-Ṣārim al-maslūl, 6, for having said: “It makes sense that one who insults
God and His messenger not be killed if he is a dhimmi” (yuḥtamalu an lā yuqtala man sabba llāha wa-rasūlahu idhā
kāna dhimmiyyan). Cf. Subkī, al-Sayf al-maslūl, 239.
12. Lutz Wiederhold, “Blasphemy against the Prophet Muḥammad and His Companions (sabb al-rasūl, sabb
al-ṣaḥābah): The Introduction of the Topic into Shāfiʿī Legal Literature and Its Relevance for Legal Practice Under
Mamlūk Rule,” Journal of Semitic Studies 42,1 (1997): 39–70, at 58.
Wagner: The Problem of Non-Muslims Who Insult the Prophet Muḥammad 531
which differs within each school. Debate also surrounds the question of the relative continu-
ity of the law with early Islamic norms or their novelty. Carl Ernst describes the elaboration
of the law against insulting the Prophet as “building upon the descriptions of and pronounce-
ments on blasphemy found in the Qurʾan and the example (sunnah) of the Prophet.” 13 If one
accepts that the death sentence can be lifted through repentance or conversion—positions
that could be claimed to be rooted in early Islam—this statement becomes meaningless,
however.
This difficulty in isolating a normative law against insulting the Prophet bedevils argu-
ments by contemporary Muslim writers as well. The modernist Muslim writer Muhammad
Kamali, for instance, argues that the normative position in Sunni Islam is for sabb to be a
subcategory of apostasy from Islam (ridda), 14 yet he acknowledges that insulting the Prophet
by a non-Muslim cannot logically fall under the category of ridda.
Islamist writers have fewer concerns; for them, the most severe iterations of the law
against insulting the Prophet are normative. At the outbreak of the Danish cartoon contro-
versy a Saudi website reprinted a fatwa by chief mufti ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Bin Bāz (d. 1999) in
which he had pronounced a death sentence upon a cartoonist who had drawn a cartoon for an
Egyptian newspaper that made humorous reference to the Prophet’s large number of wives.
Citing the twelfth-century Mālikī Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ’s al-Shifāʾ bi-taʿrīf ḥuqūq al-muṣṭafā and Ibn
Taymiyya’s al-Ṣārim al-maslūl, Bin Bāz concluded that the cartoonist “is an unbelieving
heretic whose blood and wealth may be taken legally.” 15
Whatever the relationship between early Islamic sources and the elaboration of the law,
we are left with the difficulty of explaining a problem identified by Wiederhold, namely,
the “comparatively late date” in which insulting the Prophet was incorporated into the legal
manuals. 16 He finds the first awareness of sabb as an offense in the work of the late ninth-,
early tenth-century Shāfiʿī Ibn Mundhir (d. 930). 17 According to Janina Safran, the provoca-
tions of Spanish Christians who sought martyrdom by loudly insulting the Prophet in the
presence of witnesses “must have stimulated the elaboration of the problem in the Mālikī
tradition of Islamic law.” 18 Following her line of reasoning, it was no accident that the doc-
trine first reached its mature exposition in the Mālikī school; the above-mentioned handbook
by Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ, al-Shifāʾ is ordinarily considered the first major elaboration of the doctrine.
Arguing against a claim of “blowback” from Christian provocations, Tilman Nagel
pointed out that while Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ’s Shifāʾ was innovative in its detailed catalogue of insults,
he mainly provided examples of Muslims who insulted Muḥammad, most of whom lived out-
side of al-Andalus. He seldom mentioned non-Muslims. 19 If the problem of militant Spanish
Christians had troubled him, he certainly would not have minced his words. Thus, Nagel
judges the development of the law against insulting the Prophet to be a natural c onsequence
13. “Blasphemy: Islamic Concept,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan,
1987), 2: 243.
14. Muhammad Hashim Kamali, Freedom of Expression in Islam (Kuala Lumpur: Berita Publishing, 1994),
208 (“. . .prominent scholars like Ibn Taymiyya and others have attempted to distinguish blasphemy from apostasy
but the majority of jurists [. . .] subsume blasphemy under apostasy”).
15. “Ḥukm man istahzaʾa bi-l-rasūl al-ʿaẓīm ʿalayhi al-ṣalātu wa-l-salāmu aw sabbahu aw tanaqqaṣahu aw
istaḥalla shayʾan mimmā ḥarramahu,” http://www.binbaz.org.sa/mat/8316 (accessed December 11, 2012). As Bin
Bāz was blind, he must have had to rely on a description of the cartoon.
16. Wiederhold, “Blasphemy against the Prophet Muḥammad and His Companions,” 49.
17. Ibid., 44.
18. Janina Safran, “Identity and Differentiation in Ninth-Century al-Andalus,” Speculum 76,3 (2001): 590.
19. Tilman Nagel, “Die Tabuisierung der Person des Propheten Muḥammad,” in Gnosisforschung und Religions
geschichte: Festschrift für Kurt Rudolph zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. H. Preissler and H. Seiwert (Marburg: Diagonal
Verlag, 1994), 479–88, at 482, 487.
of a transformation of “Sunna-piety” into “Muḥammad-spirituality” that occurred in Sunni

Islam of the twelfth century. 20
Finally, Hanaa Kilany Omar argues that the triumph of a uniformly harsh law against insult-
ing the Prophet over more lenient interpretations dates to the Mamluk period (1250–1517).
For her, the Sunni ulema closed ranks around capital punishment due to several intercon-
nected reasons. The frequency of the crime had reached “almost epidemic proportions” 21—
Omar lists nine cases of sabb in the fourteenth century. 22 Thus, a foreign ruling elite used
the law as a pretext to eliminate rivals, 23 to scapegoat local non-Muslims who were already
unpopular with the ulema, thereby appearing to be defenders of the faith, 24 and to suppress
the increasingly audacious challenges of Shiʿis in the Levant. 25
Nine cases of insulting the Prophet may or may not represent a rash of such activity. In
addition, a situation whereby the learned class felt the need to make do with nominally Mus-
lim slave soldiers and guard against insolent non-Muslims and Muslim schismatics seems
to have been the rule rather than the exception for much of Islamic history. Nevertheless,
Omar’s point that the Sunni consensus on insulting the Prophet as a capital crime emerges
from a collaboration between the military elite and the ulema is compelling. If Mālikī and
Ḥanbalī judges were willing to sentence insulters of the Prophet to death, Ḥanafīs and Shāfiʿīs
may have risked alienation from those in power through leniency.
ii
As was mentioned, if one considers the law against insulting the Prophet as a subcategory
of apostasy from Islam, the paradigmatic insulter of the Prophet must be a Muslim. But what
of the non-Muslim insulter of the Prophet? Such a case is problematic in that it seems to
represent a loophole. If the Islamic state allows non-Muslims to practice their religion, which
presumably involves making objectionable religious statements, how can they be punished
for this? Shāfiʿī jurists were not the only Sunnis who wrestled with this issue, yet from the
eleventh century onward their discussions of this question show an unparalleled depth and
sophistication.
At the outset of al-Ṣārim al-maslūl, Ibn Taymiyya provides a brief and unsatisfying
account of the views of the Shāfiʿī school on the non-Muslim insulter of the Prophet. There
he mentions a disagreement between the ʿIrāqī Shāfiʿīs and the Khurasānī Shāfiʿīs on the
question of whether or not a non-Muslim insulting the Prophet constituted a violation of
the Pact with the Islamic state. 26 The dispute between the two groups revolved around the
interpretation of a number of contradictory passages in al-Shāfiʿī’s Kitāb al-Umm and in
al-Muzanī’s Mukhtaṣar.
There are five relevant passages on the issue of the putative non-Muslim insulter of the
Prophet in al-Umm and they contradict one another. (1) says that dhimmi criminals “should
receive a mandatory punishment (ḥudda) for that which mandates such punishment but this
does not break their Pact (ʿahd), which would render killing them licit. That only occurs by
refusal to pay the jizya (illā bi-manʿ al-jizya).” 27 That is to say, the Pact is not broken in any
20. Ibid.
21. Omar, “Apostasy in the Mamluk Period,” 144.
22. Ibid., 208–14.
23. Ibid., 157.
24. Ibid., 189–94.
25. Ibid., 251–69.
26. Ibn Taymiyya, al-Ṣārim al-maslūl, 8–10.
27. Al-Umm (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1990), 4: 198; Subkī, al-Sayf al-maslūl, 271.
other way. (2) reads, “if one of you [dhimmis] say of Muḥammad, of Almighty God’s book,
or of His religion something that is not appropriate to say (bi-mā lā yanbaghī an yudhkara
bihi), the Pact of God (dhimmatu llāhi), the caliph, and the Muslims no longer applies to
him. . . .” 28 (3) says of a crime that breaks the Pact, “if it occurred [the perpetrator] is not to
be killed unless one who does that thing in the Muslim religion would be killed as a ḥadd
punishment or as qiṣāṣ (retribution).” 29 The same discussion says that if such a non-Muslim
does not convert to Islam but says “I repent and I will pay the jizya as I used to pay it . . . ,”
he is to be punished (ʿūqiba) but not killed. In the same vein, (4) reads, “if [a dhimmi] says
or does what we have described and it has been stipulated that it would make his blood licit
(yaḥillu damahu), we gain custody of him (ẓafirnā bihi), and [then] he refuses to say, ‘I will
convert to Islam or pay the jizya,’ he is to be killed. . . .” 30 The fourth passage also offers
payment of the jizya as repentance for breaking the Pact. (5) emphasizes as well the impor-
tance of articulating the rules as to what the Muslims will give to the non-Muslims and what
they expect in return and the centrality of jizya payment to the Pact. It specifies that insulting
the Prophet or Islam breaks the Pact but argues that the punishment for such crime “does not
reach the level of a Quranically mandated (ḥadd) crime.” 31 Al-Muzanī’s Mukhtaṣar is not
much clearer than Kitāb al-Umm on this issue. 32
Ibn Taymiyya gives us very little information on the ʿIrāqī Shāfiʿīs, saying only that for
them the Pact specifies actions not to commit (al-murād sharṭ tarkihi) and does not specify
acts that, when committed, violate the Pact. He also says that they are wrong. He character-
izes the position of the Khurasānīs as follows: “The meaning of specification here is specify-
ing that which violates the Pact by doing it, not [an exhaustive] listing of misdeeds. They say:
not doing it is implied by the selfsame Pact (al-tark mūjabun li-nafs al-ʿaqd).” 33
Ibn Taymiyya did not look to Kitāb al-Umm for Shāfiʿī precedents for the harsh treatment
of the insulter of the Prophet; he found them in works by the Shāfiʿī jurists Ibn Mundhir and
Abū Sulaymān al-Khaṭṭābī (d. 996 or 998). “All of the men of learning agree that one who
insults the Prophet is [to be] killed,” writes Ibn Mundhir, 34 who also describes Kaʿb b. al-
Ashraf, a Jewish poet of seventh-century Arabia, as the first person to be executed for the
crime of insulting the Prophet, for he “irritated God and His messenger. A group volunteered
to kill him with the permission of the Prophet and they killed him.” 35 With this evidence in
hand, Ibn Taymiyya spends little time discussing the difference of opinion (khilāf) between
the ʿIrāqīs and Khurasānīs on the issue. 36
Roughly fifty years after Ibn Taymiyya’s treatise, the Shāfiʿī Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī wrote
one with a nearly identical title, al-Sayf al-maslūl ʿalā man sabba l-rasūl, 37 which set out
to prove that the Shāfiʿī school was tough on punishing the crime of insulting the Prophet
and that the putative khilāf in the school was nothing but a pointless debate (al-mujādalatu
28. Al-Umm, 4: 209; Subkī, al-Sayf al-maslūl, 273.

29. Al-Umm, 4: 210–11; Subkī, al-Sayf al-maslūl, 272.
30. Al-Umm, 4: 211; Subkī, al-Sayf al-maslūl, 273.
31. Al-Umm, 4: 218; Subkī, al-Sayf al-maslūl, 270–71.
32. Mukhtaṣar al-Muzanī (printed with al-Umm), 8: 375; Subkī, al-Sayf al-maslūl, 273–74.
33. Ibn Taymiyya, al-Ṣārim al-maslūl, 10; Abdelmagid Turki, “Situation du ‘Tributaire’ qui insulte l’Islam, au
regard de la doctrine et de la jurisprudence musulmanes,” Studia Islamica 30 (1969): 39–72, at 60.
34. Subkī, al-Sayf al-maslūl, 233.
35. Ibid., 234.
36. In his article on al-Ṣārim al-maslūl, Abdelmagid Turki writes, “notre auteur ḥanbalite préfère ne pas retenir
ces subtilités qu’il attribue à l’erreur.” Turki, “Situation du ‘Tributaire’,” 60.
37. The 2000 critical edition edited by the Jordanian Iyād al-Ghūj has cross-references to published and then-
unpublished Shāfiʿī works.
bi-l-bāṭili). 38 He was driven to write his book by an incident in which a Christian insulted
the Prophet and was allowed to go free, without having to convert to Islam so as to repent
of his crime. Al-Subkī and a group of unnamed Mālikīs and Shāfiʿīs protested this decision,
referring to the story of Kaʿb b. al-Ashraf, but they were refuted by other Shāfiʿīs, who relied
upon the opinions of al-Nawawī and al-Rāfiʿī. Because the matter at hand concerned an intra-
Shāfiʿī argument, al-Subkī described the khilāf in great detail.
To recapitulate, Kitāb al-Umm contradicts itself on three interrelated questions: Are both
Muslims and non-Muslims prohibited from insulting the Prophet? Can a non-Muslim violate
the Pact only through non-payment of the jizya or also by committing a prohibited act such
as insulting the Prophet? If the latter, how does one know which acts break the Pact and
which do not?
The ʿIrāqīs agreed that insulting the Prophet had not been specified (yushraṭ) in the dhimma
Pact. For Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfarāyīnī, whom al-Subkī describes as “the shaykh of the ʿIrāqīs,”
Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Maḥāmilī, Ḥasan b. ʿAbdallāh al-Bandanījī, Sulaym al-Rāzī, and
Naṣr al-Maqdisī (all died in the eleventh century), however, 39 the question of whether or not
a non-Muslim insulting the Prophet violated the Pact was a moot point because insulting the
Prophet was a ḥadd crime for Muslims and however expansive the protections offered to
non-Muslims, they did not cover ḥadd crimes. This position is usually attributed to Abū Bakr
al-Fārisī (d. 917), whose severe position can be mitigated by arguing, as Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī
(d. ca. 1520) did in a fatwa on the subject, that even if insulting the Prophet was a ḥadd
crime it could still be repented. 40 For this group within the ʿIrāqīs, therefore, in the context
of insulting the Prophet (or any other ḥadd crime) only the first clause is probative in pas-
sage (1) of Kitāb al-Umm, that dhimmi criminals “should receive a mandatory punishment
for that which mandates such punishment, but this does not break their Pact, which would
render killing them licit. That only occurs by refusing to pay the jizya. . . .”
Insofar as capital punishment can only be exacted once, al-Subkī seems to find satisfac-
tory these scholars’ lack of clarity on the issue of whether or not the crime also constituted
a violation of the Pact.
Al-Maḥāmilī and al-Rāzī acknowledged that their conclusion was devised in response to
a broader argument among their ʿIrāqī and Khurasānī colleagues over whether the fact that
the crime was not specified meant that it was allowed or whether it was implicitly prohibited
as a form of harm to Muslims. 41 As for the emphasis on the payment of the jizya in Kitāb
al-Umm, those affiliated with the ʿIrāqī school who took this position implied that the admo-
nition to pay the jizya constituted a general ban on rebellious behavior that included insulting
the Prophet. 42
Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfarāyīnī’s successor as head of the ʿIrāqīs, Abū l-Ṭayyib al-Ṭabarī (d.
1058), seems to have been troubled by the idea that the crime of violating the Pact could
potentially encompass all of the laws relating to the dhimmis, which vary in gravity. He said
38. Subkī, al-Sayf al-maslūl, 113–14.

39. It should be borne in mind that many of the so-called ʿIrāqīs had roots in Khurasān, which explains why
some scholars with Khurasānī names like Rāzī and Marwazī are included. Scholars affiliated with each of the
two Shāfiʿī intellectual centers of Baghdad and Merv represent the two sides in the dispute between ʿIrāqīs and
Khurasānīs.
40. Al-Iʿlām wa-l-ihtimām bi-jamʿ fatāwā shaykhi l-islām Abī Yaḥyā Zakariyyā ibn Muḥammad al-Anṣārī,
ed. Aḥmad ʿUbayd and ʿAbd al-‘Azīz al-Sayrawān (Beirut: ʿĀlam al-Kutub, 1984), 277; Subkī, al-Sayf al-maslūl,
535–36.
41. Subkī, al-Sayf al-maslūl, 240–44.
42. Ibid., 253. At least one scholar mentions the humble attitude that jizya collection required of dhimmis
(p. 279).
that the rules that were specified for the People of the Book in the dhimma contract belonged
to five types: (1) a kind that cannot not be specified (paying the jizya and following the
laws of Islam); 43 (2) a kind that does not need to be specified but contravening it violates
the Pact (e.g., making war against the Muslims); (3) a kind that is specified that involves
harming Muslims (such as giving intelligence to the enemies of the Muslims); (4) belittling
religion; and (5) displaying a forbidden thing in the lands of Islam (like wine, pork, and new
churches).
Thus, in Abū l-Ṭayyib’s hierarchy of harm, insulting the Prophet fell into a gray area
between (3), genuine dangers to Muslim life and limb, and (5), the merely obnoxious. He
acknowledged that most of his colleagues considered insulting the Prophet to be on par with
that which harms life and limb, but insisted that the sine qua non of the dhimma Pact was
the payment of the jizya. 44 Abū Isḥāq al-Shīrāzī (d. 1083), who himself held that the fourth
category, which includes insulting the Prophet, must be mentioned in the Pact and that those
who violated it violated the Pact, 45 confirmed that Abū l-Ṭayyib’s was the minority view. 46
Other scholars in Abū l-Ṭayyib’s camp who also argued that insulting the Prophet was not a
ḥadd crime were Ibn al-Ṣabbāgh (d. 1094); 47 Ḥusayn b. Masʿūd al-Baghawī (d. 1122), who
took Abū l-Ṭayyib’s line of thought a step further and argued that even if it was specified in
the contract, the best option was to conclude that the Pact was not violated by this offense; 48
and Yaʿqūb b. Abī ʿAṣrūn (d. 1267), who stated: “Refraining from [belittling religion] is not
specified in the contract, the Pact is not violated [by it], and [the offender] receives what is
due him, and this is a discretionary punishment.” 49
In the end, the ʿIrāqī Shāfiʿīs reached consensus on the idea that insulting the Prophet had
not been specified in the Pact and therefore could not be the cause of a violation of its terms.
For them, with the exception of the payment of the jizya, which was definitely specified, all
of the Pact’s clauses were contained in a rider (iḍāfa) to the contract, a fact for which they
found confirmation in both al-Umm and al-Muzanī’s Mukhtaṣar. 50 Most judged the offense
of refusing to pay the jizya as analogous to the crime of insulting the Prophet. 51
The minority, represented by Abū l-Ṭayyib, seems to have viewed existing criminal laws
as dealing sufficiently with the most serious of the clauses. This group also seems to have
been concerned with the arbitrariness of extending the severe charge of not paying the jizya
to lesser offenses that they did not consider part of the Pact proper. Al-Subkī explains their
position with reference to displaying wine: “What does not violate the Pact when not speci-
fied does not violate it when specified” (mā lam yuntaqaḍ al-ʿahdu idhā lam yushraṭ lam
yuntaqaḍ maʿa al-sharṭ). In other words, one who commits this offense would not be guilty
of violating the Pact whether or not it was part of the contract. The same logic applies to
43. Ibid., 246.

44. Ibid., 247–49.
45. Muḥammad al-Ḥusayn b. Masʿūd al-Baghawī, al-Tahdhīb fī fiqh al-imām al-Shāfiʿī, ed. ʿĀdil Aḥmad ʿAbd
al-Mawjūd and ʿAlī Muḥammad Muʿawwaḍ (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1997), 7: 505; Muḥammad Najīb
al-Ḥuṭayʿī, Kitāb al-Majmūʿ sharḥ al-Muhadhdhab li-l-Shīrāzī (Jedda: Maktabat al-Irshād, n.d.), 21: 352. The mod-
ern editors of al-Baghawī’s Tahdhīb acknowledge the disagreement among earlier Shāfiʿīs on this point but dismiss
the lenient position (7: 506–7 n. 3).
46. Subkī, al-Sayf al-maslūl, 253.
47. Ibid., 253.
48. Ibid., 277.
49. Ibid., 256.
50. Ibid., 274.
51. Ibid., 266–67.
insulting the Prophet. Even if it were accepted for argument’s sake that it was specified in
the contract, engaging in it would not break the Pact. 52
On the other side, the scholars of Merv (those Ibn Taymiyya designated as Khurasānīs)—
and Abū Isḥāq al-Marwazī (d. 951), who, despite his name, belonged to the Baghdad or ʿIrāqī
school—argued that the fact that al-Shāfiʿī mentioned insulting the Prophet in conjunction
with the violation of the Pact was enough to conclude that it was specified as a punishable
offense, despite its not appearing in any list of forbidden activities. 53 Although they consid-
ered insulting the Prophet a punishable offense for dhimmis, they exempted them from pun-
ishment for saying things that they believed, even if such statements offended Muslims. This
same position was held by al-Māwardī (d. 1058), al-Juwaynī (d. 1085), and al-Ghazālī (d.
1111). 54 In his Taʿlīqa, the qāḍī Ḥusayn b. Muḥammad al-Marwurrūdhī (d. 1069) maintained
that impugning the Prophet’s genealogy or saying that he committed zinā, which dhimmis
do not believe, i.e., it is not a tenet of their religion, was a violation of the Pact whether or
not it is specified, 55 with which ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Muḥammad al-Fūrānī (d. 1069) agreed:
“Saying something bad about our Prophet that they do not believe” constitutes a violation
of the Pact whether or not it is specified in it. 56 Unpleasant things that non-Muslims believe
(such as the Prophet’s having lied or the idea that he killed Jews without justification) are not
violations as long as they are not specified in the Pact. 57
In his discussion of what breaks the Pact, al-Māwardī designated general principles that
underlie the specific clauses of the contract. For him, the clauses of the contract obligated
dhimmis to three types of behavior: “outward meekness” (muwādaʿa fī l-ẓāhir), “avoiding
secret treachery” (tark al-khiyāna fī l-bāṭin), and “politeness in words and deeds” (mujāmala
fī l-aqwāl wa-l-af ʿāl). 58 For a later Khurasānī writer, ʿAbd al-Wāḥid b. Ismāʿīl al-Rūyānī (d.
1108), the first category, which insulting the Prophet transgresses, always violates the Pact.
The other two are left to the ruler’s discretion. 59
The Khurasānī side benefited from having particularly influential partisans. Such famous
Shāfiʿīs as al-Juwaynī and his two best students, al-Ghazālī and Ilkiyā al-Harrāsī (d. 1110),
sided with the Khurasānīs. 60 In his Khulāṣa, al-Ghazālī concludes that insulting the Prophet
“is specified for the dhimmis” and is the same as not paying the jizya, indeed, “the opinion
[to follow] (madhhab) is that for this [crime] their repentance is not accepted and they are
killed on the spot (yuqtalū ʿalā makānihim).” 61
52. Ibid., 268.

53. Ibid., 271.
54. ʿAlī b. Muḥammad b. Ḥabīb al-Māwardī, al-Ḥāwī al-kabīr, ed. ʿAlī Muʿawwaḍ and ʿĀdil ʿAbd al-Mawjūd
(Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1994), 14: 317, 383–84; ʿAbd al-Malik b. ʿAbdallāh al-Juwaynī, Nihāyat al-maṭlab
fī dirāyat al-madhhab, ed. ʿAbd al-ʿAẓīm Mahmūd al-Dīb (Jedda: Dār al-Minhāj, 2007), 18: 43–44; al-Ghazālī,
al-Wasīṭ fī l-madhhab, ed. Muḥammad Muḥammad Tāmir ([Cairo]: Dār al-Salām li-l-Ṭibāʿa wa-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawzīʿ,
1997), 7: 86–87; al-Ghazālī, al-Wajīz fī fiqh al-imām al-Shāfiʿī, ed. ʿAlī Muʿawwaḍ and ʿĀdil ʿAbd al-Mawjūd (Bei-
rut: Dār al-Arqam, 1997), 2: 203.
55. This is al-Rāfiʿī’s characterization of the contents of Qāḍī Ḥusayn’s Taʿlīqa. I was unable to locate this
discussion in the printed edition. ʿAbd al-Karīm b. Muḥammad al-Rāfiʿī, al-ʿAzīz sharḥ al-Wajīz al-maʿrūf bi-l-sharḥ
al-kabīr, ed. ʿAlī Muʿawwaḍ and ʿĀdil ʿAbd al-Mawjūd (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1997), 11: 549–50. Cf.
al-Subkī, al-Sayf al-maslūl, 259.
56. al-Subkī, al-Sayf al-maslūl, 260.
57. Ibid., 259.
58. al-Māwardī, al-Ḥāwī, 14: 382; al-Subkī, al-Sayf al-maslūl, 263.
59. al-Subki, al-Sayf al-maslūl, 263.
60. Ibid., 261.
61. Ibid., 260–61.
Was the khilāf between the two groups resolved? (The two Shāfiʿī factions were similarly
split on Muslim insulters of the Prophet, with al-Rāfiʿī allowing repentance for the capital
crime and al-Juwaynī and most of the Khurasānī school rejecting it. 62) It was still alive in
the mid-fourteenth century (al-Subkī’s time), with one side invoking al-Rāfiʿī, some of the
ʿIrāqīs, and al-Nawawī to justify a non-Muslim insulter of the Prophet going free, 63 but one
century later Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (d. 1505), who took a firm stance in favor of reliance
upon the Mālikī Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ’s harsh position, seems unaware of the Shāfiʿī khilāf on this
issue in his treatise on insulting prophets, Tanzīh al-anbiyāʾ ʿan tasfīh al-aghbiyāʾ. 64 Ibn
Ḥajar al-Haytamī (d. 1597), who strongly criticized al-Subkī’s stance on blasphemy, also did
not mention it in his al-Iʿlām bi-qawāṭiʿ al-islām. 65 The nineteenth-century Shāfiʿī-turned-
Ḥanafī Ibn ʿĀbidīn, who discussed al-Subkī’s Sayf al-maslūl in his revisionist treatise on the
law against insulting the Prophet, Tanbīh al-wulāt wa-l-ḥukkām ʿalā shātim khayr al-ānām,
and who sought to marshal evidence for a more lenient approach to the law of insulting the
Prophet, seemed only aware of the Khurasānī position in the Shāfiʿī school. 66
Pending a thorough examination of Abū l-Ṭayyib al-Ṭabarī’s Taʿlīqa, this khilāf in the
Shāfiʿī school suggests that this otherwise obscure figure advanced a principled, orthodox,
and early opposition to capital punishment for blasphemy; given Ibn ʿĀbidīn’s stance and
his drawing attention to the Shāfiʿī khilāf, while not mentioning al-Ṭabarī by name, as one
piece of evidence in his broader case that careless commentators had allowed the harsh law
of insulting the Prophet articulated by Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ and Ibn Taymiyya to contaminate the legal
tradition, 67 also suggests that his position continued to influence the development of doctrine
in the school long after his death. Perhaps not coincidentally, al-Ṭabarī was known for hav-
ing a good sense of humor, as well as having exchanged poems with Abū l-ʿAlā al-Maʿarrī,
perhaps the greatest blasphemer in Arabic letters, 68 who said to him: “The earth is proud to
bear you on its surface.” 69
iii
Ibn Taymiyya’s baffling differentiation between ʿIrāqī Shāfiʿīs and Khurasānī Shāfiʿīs on
this issue can now be explained. He stated that the ʿIrāqīs agreed that the Pact specified
actions not to commit rather than acts that, when committed, violated the Pact. In other
words, for them, the contract was intended to make sure that dhimmis knew that they should
not stop payment of the jizya. The various clauses listed in the rider may have derived some
hortatory function from the jizya or they may not have, but contravening them was not the
same as violating the contract. (It was, of course, assumed that crimes to which Muslims
were liable would be punished and some ʿIrāqīs included insulting the Prophet among these.)
The Khurasānīs, according to Ibn Taymiyya, stated that the Pact specified actions that, when
62. Ibid., 153, 157, 167–70, 175, 534–37.

63. Minhaj et Talibin: A Manual of Muhammadan Law according to the School of Shafii, tr. E. C. Howard (Lon-
don: W. Thacker and Co., 1914), 469. The modern editor of al-Nawawī’s Majmūʿ (Ḥuṭayʿī, 21: 353) cites approv-
ingly Abū Bakr al-Fārisī’s position that dhimmi insulters of the Prophet should be executed as a ḥadd punishment.
64. Ed. Ḥammād Salāma and Muḥammad ʿUwayḍa (Zarqāʾ, Jordan: Maktabat al-Manār, 1989), 45–51.
65. Cairo: Maṭābiʿ Dār al-Shaʿb, 1980.
66. Ibn ʿĀbidīn, Majmūʿat rasāʾil Ibn ʿĀbidīn (Beirut: Dār Iḥyā’ al-Turāth al-‘Arabī, 1978), 1: 354.
67. Ibid., 315, 353–54.
68. Jeanette Wakin, “Abu’l Ṭayyeb Ṭabarī,” Encyclopaedia Iranica 1: 390.
69. Aḥmad b. Muḥammad Ibn Khallikān, Wafayāt al-aʿyān wa-anbāʾ abnāʾ al-zamān, ed. Iḥsān ʿAbbās (Bei-
rut: Dār Ṣādir, n.d.), 2: 514; Daphna Ephrat, A Learned Society in a Period of Transition: The Sunni ʿUlamaʾ of
Eleventh-Century Baghdad (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 53.
committed, violated the Pact. In other words, they considered the most serious of the rules
that occur subsequent to the stipulation of jizya payment to have violated the Pact when
contravened.
In al-Ṣārim al-maslūl ʿalā shātim al-rasūl, Ibn Taymiyya contended that insulting the
Prophet Muḥammad was a capital ḥadd crime, without recourse to being lifted through any
means. He allegedly wrote this book while under house arrest for inciting a mob to kill a
priest who had insulted the Prophet and then converted to Islam in 1293, thereby avoiding
punishment. 70 Ibn Taymiyya used a wide variety of sources to build his case, the most impor-
tant of these consisting of episodes from sīra literature that demonstrate that the Prophet dealt
harshly with those who insulted him, as well as of statements by early figures in the Ḥanbalī,
Mālikī, and Shāfiʿī schools that affirm his militant stance—Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ’s Shifāʾ serves as an
important building block for Ibn Taymiyya.
The book seems to be aimed primarily at contemporary Ḥanafīs and Shāfiʿīs who allowed
themselves considerable latitude in defining the crime of insulting the Prophet and its proper
punishment. There were other Ḥanafīs, however, who wanted to circumvent such leniency
but remain Ḥanafīs; they argued that a discretionary punishment for insulting the Prophet
could extend to the imposition of the death penalty. In a fatwa on the case of a Christian who
had insulted the Prophet, for example, the Ḥanafī Khayr al-Dīn al-Ramlī (d. 1671) wrote
that “our scholars have stated clearly that increasing a discretionary punishment to death
(al-taraqqiya fī l-taʿzīr ilā l-qatli) is permissible if the motivating factor for it (mūjibuhu) is
great, and what motivating factor for discretionary punishment could be greater than insult-
ing the Prophet.” 71
Ibn Taymiyya’s draconian version of the law against insulting the Prophet enjoyed great
success. In a commentary on Ḥanafī fiqh, a jurist from the Crimea named Ibn al-Bazzāz (d.
1424) elevated the status of Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Ṣārim al-maslūl among Ḥanafī jurists by cit-
ing it as the authoritative work on the subject. 72 Al-Bazzāz argued that “[the insulter of the
Prophet] be killed as a ḥadd without any possibility for repentance.” This created an intel-
lectual framework that would justify the Ottoman persecution of Shiʿis and other Muslim
schismatics a century later. 73 Soon after al-Bazzāz’s death, the Ottoman jurist Mullā Khüsrev
(d. 1480) cited his work approvingly for the position that the Ḥanafī school calls for both
Muslim and non-Muslim insulters of the Prophet to be killed and that repentance for the
crime is impossible. 74
Successive Ottoman shuyūkh al-islām judged the Shiʿis to be heretics and apostates for,
among other things, their insults to Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿUthmān, and ʿĀʾisha (and, by exten-
sion, the Prophet himself), and made waging jihād against them a duty for every Muslim.
(Among Shiʿis in Ṣafavid Iran, insulting these figures was obligatory. 75 Insulting Fāṭima or
70. Thomas Michel, A Muslim Theologian’s Response to Christianity (Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1984),
70–71.
71. Khayr al-Dīn b. Aḥmad al-Ramlī, Kitāb al-Fatāwā al-khayriyya li-naf ʿ al-bariyya (Cairo: Bulāq, 1882–83),
1: 103; Subkī, al-Sayf al-maslūl, 550.
72. GAL, Supp. II: 316; Taşköprülüzade Aḥmad Effendi, al-Shaqāʾiq al-nuʿmāniyya fī ʿulamāʾ al-dawla
al-ʿuthmāniyya (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī, 1975), 21; Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Ḥayy al-Laknawī, Kitāb al-Fawāʾid
al-bahiyya fī tarājim al-ḥanafiyya (Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa, 1950), 172, 187–88.
73. Al-Fatāwā al-bazzāziyya or al-Jāmiʿ al-wajīz, printed in the margins of al-Fatāwā al-hindiyya (Beirut: Dār
al-Maʿrifa, n.d., reprint of Bulāq 1892 edition), 6: 321–22.
74. Molla Ḥüsrev, Kitāb Durar al-ḥukkām fī sharḥ Ghurar al-aḥkām (Egypt: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Wahabiyya, 1877),
1: 273.
75. In Nafaḥāt al-lāhūt fī laʿn al-jibt wa-l-ṭāghūt (ed. Muḥammad al-Ḥassūn [Qumm: Manshūrāt al-Iḥtijāj,
n.d.], 17–18), a 1511 treatise on the ritual cursing, ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn al-Karakī called upon the Shiʿis of the frontier
the Imams, in contrast, fell under the rubric of the ḥadd crime of sabb, with no repentance
allowed. 76) Ibn al-Bazzāz was again cited approvingly by shaykh al-islām Kemalpaşazade
(d. 1534) in a fatwa aimed at mobilizing Sunnis. 77
Two Ḥanafī scholars, Ḥusām Chelebī (d. 1520) and the afore-mentioned Ibn ʿĀbidīn
(d. 1836), struggled to discredit Ibn al-Bazzāz (and, by extension, the harsh law against
insulting the Prophet that he had introduced into Ḥanafism). Chelebī, a qāḍī and profes-
sor of Islamic law in Anatolia who lived at the height of Ottoman–Ṣafavid tension, argued
that the Ḥanafī school had historically been loath to impose the death penalty for insulting
the Prophet and he identified the source of the contagion as Ibn al-Bazzāz. 78 Ibn ʿĀbidīn
remarked in al-ʿUqūd al-durriyya fī tanqīḥ al-fatāwā al-ḥāmidiyya, a legal commentary, on
how the dehumanization of Shiʿis had become a virtual cottage industry among Ottoman
scholars; 79 and in another work, Tanbīh al-wulāt wa-l-ḥukkām ʿalā shātim khayr al-ānām,
he greatly expanded upon Chelebī’s argument concerning the destructive influence of Ibn
al-Bazzāz, later publicizing his revisionist view within the context of a commentary on the
whole of Ḥanafī law. 80 “On the issue [of insulting the Prophet] [Ibn al-Bazzāz] approached
his sources in the sloppiest possible manner (qad tasāhala ghāyata al-tasāhhuli),” wrote Ibn
ʿĀbidīn. Worse still, subsequent Ḥanafī commentators perpetuated his mistaken view.
to overcome both their fears of Sunni power and their reluctance to inadvertently commit a crime through insults.
According to al-Karakī, everybody did it, including Sunnis and non-Muslims, and instead of the overly emotional
term “cursing,” one ought to consider it a form of distancing oneself from something objectionable or expelling an
objectionable thing. Cursing can be one of the best forms of prayer, he claimed (pp. 19–21). The activities of the
militia of sorts responsible for promoting ritual cursing in Ṣafavid Iran, the tabarrāʾiyān, is discussed by Rosemary
Stanfield-Johnson, “The Tabarraʾiyan and the Early Safavids,” Iranian Studies 37,1 (2004): 47–71; eadem, “Sunni
Survival in Safavid Iran: Anti-Sunni Activities during the Reign of Tahmasp I,” Iranian Studies 27 (1994): 123–33.
76. Ibn Bābawayhi, al-Hidāya (Qumm: Muʾassasat al-Imām al-Hādī, 1997), 295; al-Tūsī, al-Nihāya (Qumm:
Intishārāt Quds Muḥammadī, n.d.), 730; al-Sharīf al-Murtadā, al-Intiṣār (Qumm: Muʾassasat al-Nashr al-Islāmī
al-Ṭābiʿ li-Jamāʿat al-Muddarisīn bi-Qumm al-Musharrafa, 1995), 480–81; Ḥamza b. ʿAlī b. Zuhra al-Ḥalabī,
Ghunyat al-nuzūʿ ilā ʿilmay al-uṣūl wa-l-furūʿ, ed. Ibrāhīm al-Bahādirī (Qumm: Maktabat al-Tawḥīd, n.d.), 1:
428; Muḥammad b. Ḥasan al-Fāḍil al-Hindī, Kashf al-lithām (Qumm: Maktabat Āyat Allāh al-ʿUẓmā al-Marʿashī
al-Najafī, 1984–85), 2: 415–16. Aside from differences in the figures who are covered under the rubric of sabb
al-rasūl, Twelver discussions of insulting the Prophet are distinguished by a concern with those who perform the
execution and the dangers to which they might be exposed in doing so. Bernard Lewis, “Behind the Rushdie Affair,”
The American Scholar 60,2 (1991): 193–94.
77. Adel Allouche, The Origins and Development of the Ottoman-Ṣafavid Conflict (906–962/1500–1555) (Ber-
lin: Klaus Schwarz, 1983), 171–73; M. Ertugrul Düzdağ, Seyhülislām Ebussuūd efendi fetvalari isiginda 16. asir
Türk hayati (Istanbul: Enderun Kitabevi, 1972), 110; Colin Imber, “The Persecution of the Ottoman Shiʿites accord-
ing to the mühimme defterleri, 1565–1585,” Der Islam 56 (1979): 271.
78. In Nūr al-ʿayn fī iṣlāḥ jāmiʿ al-fuṣūlayn li-Ibn Qāḍī Samāwna, Aḥmad b. Muḥammad Nashānjīzade
(d. 1621-2) describes Chelebī as “one of the great ulema of Sultan Selīm Khān b. Bāyezīd Khān” who wrote “a trea-
tise on questions pertaining to insulting the Prophet. . . .” King Saud University, MS 3777, http://makhtota.ksu.edu.
sa/makhtota/4061/281 (accessed December 11, 2012). See also Taşköprülüzade, al-Shaqāʾiq al-nuʿmāniyya, 231.
79. Ed. Muḥammad ʿUthmān (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2008), 1: 202–6.
80. Tilman Nagel addressed Ibn ʿĀbidīn’s attempt at revising the law of insulting the Prophet in The His-
tory of Islamic Theology from Muhammad to the Present (Princeton: Markus Weiner Publishers, 2000), 256–57,
and in his “Autochthone Wurzeln des islamischen Modernismus: Bemerkungen zum Werk des Damaszeners Ibn
ʿĀbidīn (1784–1836),” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 146 (1996): 98–103. For other
perspectives on Ibn ʿĀbidīn’s willingness to challenge the Ottoman authorities, viz., his strong criticism of the
legal justifications for Ottoman land policies, see Kenneth M. Cuno, “Was the Land of Ottoman Syria miri or milk?
An Examination of Juridical Differences within the Ḥanafī School,” Studia Islamica 81,1 (1995): 121–52; Sabrina
Joseph, Islamic Law on Peasant Usufruct in Ottoman Syria: 17th to Early 19th Century (Leiden: Brill, 2012),
120–22, 138–39, 165–67.
While South Asian Ḥanafī scholars revered Ibn ʿĀbidīn as “the Syrian shaykh,” they seem
to have rejected his criticism, siding instead with Ibn al-Bazzāz. 81 The fact that criminal law
became the prerogative of the colonial powers made such tough talk mere rhetorical bluster
until the “Islamicization” of law in Pakistan of the 1970s.
In conclusion, though Ibn Taymiyya sought to flatten interscholastic distinctions on the
crime of insulting the Prophet with his al-Ṣārim al-maslūl ʿalā shātim al-rasūl, a project
later taken up very fruitfully by Ibn al-Bazzāz, jurists advanced arguments within both the
Shāfiʿī and Ḥanafī schools to the effect that non-Muslims were wont to say things about the
Prophet that Muslims would find offensive and should not be punished for it. In fact, neither
Ibn Taymiyya’s treatise nor Ibn ʿĀbidīn’s nineteenth-century attempt to resurrect the more
lenient interpretation of the law demonstrates the subtleties of the important khilāf between
the two Shāfiʿī factions of the eleventh century on this issue.
81. Aḥmad Riḍā Khān, Fatavā-yi rizviyyah (Lahore: Raza Foundation, 1991–2006), 14: 296–302, 636–45, 15:
230–33.

The Problem of Non-Muslims Who Insult The Prophet Mu Ammad

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The Problem of Non-Muslims Who Insult The Prophet Mu Ammad

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The Problem of Non-Muslims Who Insult the Prophet Muḥammad

Author(s): Mark S. Wagner

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Journal of the American Oriental Society 135.3 (2015) 529

of a transformation of “Sunna-piety” into “Muḥammad-spirituality” that occurred in Sunni

28. Al-Umm, 4: 209; Subkī, al-Sayf al-maslūl, 273.

38. Subkī, al-Sayf al-maslūl, 113–14.

43. Ibid., 246.

52. Ibid., 268.

62. Ibid., 153, 157, 167–70, 175, 534–37.

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