Viewing the doctrine of ijmā‘ through the Christian concept...

Viewing the doctrine of ijmā‘ through the Christian concept of council presupposes the existence of an orthodox “Church” in Islām which, like the Christian Church, can be recognized and differentiated from other “sects” or “heresies,” and as a juridical, hierarchical, sovereign, visible, empirical, and easily perceived institution for all to see. Gibb’s ecclesiastic conception of Islamic consensus is misguided and even false.

It fails to appreciate that in Islām both elements are identical: the doctrine of ijmā‘ as a source of law and canon of the Scriptures, on the one hand, and Islamic orthodoxy, both internal and external, on the other. Both of them co-exist and coincide in the application of the sharī‘ah and the sunnah of the Prophet as sovereign expressions of the Qur’ān in both Sunnī and Shī‘ite Islām.[^2] Let us now turn from a general critique to some more specific observations.

It must be noted that Gibb’s Christianizing conception traces back to the 1950s, a period when the type of distinction we are discussing was not viewed with the same importance as it is currently. Hence, the absence of a broader and more elaborate perspective is fully justified. Many of the problems we are discussing here, such as the question of “sects,” had barely even been posed.

What we would have liked to observe, among the Orientalists who followed the same Christianizing line as Gibb, is a degree of academic, analytical and philosophical evolution. Above all, we would have liked them, starting with Gibb, the Orientalist from Oxford, to come to a better understanding of the questions raised by the study of Shī‘ite Islām. Unfortunately, this has not been the case.

Besides a handful of honorable exceptions, the majority of research published in the West during the last decade of the fifties and even well beyond consists of nothing more than worthless compilations whose theoretical weakness is in sad contrast to the solid scientific work done by Orientalists in the past. [^3] These solid scholars include Reynold A. Nicholson, Louis Massignon, Jacques Berque, Miguel Asín Palacios and, why not, even Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb.

Despite their incomprehension of the Islamic spirit, they practiced and professed a science which was more consistent with their intellectual qualifications.