How can one ummah disagree without dividing?

By keeping differences where the Companions kept them: in questions open to more than one reading. On the road to Banu Qurayzah, some Companions prayed Asr on the way and some on arrival, and the Prophet ﷺ blamed neither group (Bukhari 946, sahih (al-Bukhari)). The Qur’an forbids splitting into rival camps (Qur’an 3:105).

Two prayers, and no blame

In 5 AH (627 CE), on the day he returned from the Battle of the Trench, the Prophet ﷺ sent the Companions to Banu Qurayzah. Ibn ’Umar narrates:

One group held to his words, the other to what they understood as his purpose. Both were acting in good faith on what he said, and he let both stand. In Muslim’s narration the prayer is Zuhr (Muslim 1770, sahih (Muslim)).

Two rewards, or one

’Amr ibn al-’As narrates it. Scholars have long read it as covering any qualified scholar who works hard to reach a ruling: the one who misses is still rewarded for the effort. A difference of this kind is not a sin on either side.

“Differing is evil”: Ibn Mas’ud at Mina

At Mina during Hajj, the Prophet ﷺ, Abu Bakr and Umar prayed the four-rak’ah prayers as two. Later in his caliphate, Uthman prayed four. ’Abd Allah ibn Mas’ud objected that he had prayed two there with the Prophet ﷺ, with Abu Bakr and with Umar. Then he prayed behind Uthman anyway:

He kept his view, said it openly, and did not break the congregation over it.

Malik and the book he would not impose

Imam Malik (d. 795) wrote al-Muwatta’, one of the earliest books of hadith and law. Ibn Sa’d records Malik describing a meeting with the caliph al-Mansur during Hajj. The caliph said he had decided to have the Muwatta’ copied, send a copy to every Muslim city, and order people to follow it and leave everything else. Malik answered:

Commander of the Believers, do not. People have already had sayings reach them, heard hadith and narrated reports. Each people took what reached them first, acted on it and made it their religion, from the differences of the Companions of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ and others. Turning them away from what they hold is hard. Leave people with what they follow, and what the people of each land have chosen for themselves.

“By my life,” al-Mansur replied, “had you agreed, I would have ordered it.” Al-Dhahabi (d. 1348, Damascus) quotes the report in his great biographical dictionary of scholars; the translation is ours.

Al-Dhahabi gives a second report, with a chain he calls hasan, in which a caliph asked to hang the Muwatta’ in the Ka’bah and make people follow it. Malik said no: the Companions differed in the branches of the law and spread out across the lands, “and each is right in his own view”. Al-Dhahabi doubts only the caliph’s name: the report says Harun al-Rashid, but a man named in the same story died before Harun ruled.

“Can we not be brothers?”

Malik’s student al-Shafi’i (d. 820) disagreed with his own teacher on many questions and founded a school of his own. Yunus al-Sadafi, an Egyptian scholar, said:

I have not seen anyone wiser than al-Shafi’i. I debated him one day on a question, then we parted. He met me, took my hand and said: “Abu Musa, can we not be brothers, even if we do not agree on an issue?”

Al-Dhahabi records it in the same dictionary (10/16); the translation is ours.

Why great scholars differ

Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328, Damascus) wrote a short book, Raf’ al-Malam ’an al-A’immat al-A’lam (Lifting the Blame from the Great Imams). He opens it by saying that none of the imams the ummah accepts would knowingly go against the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ in anything, small or large. When one of them holds a view that a sahih hadith contradicts, he must have had a reason. Every reason, he says, falls under one of three:

• He did not believe the Prophet ﷺ said it, often because the hadith never reached him, or reached him through a chain he could not accept.
• He did not believe it was meant for that question.
• He believed the ruling had been abrogated.

The first, a hadith that had not reached him, is the most common, he says. No one in the ummah ever knew all of the Prophet’s ﷺ hadith.

Where the line is

None of these were differences over whether to pray, fast or believe. They were about how to read and apply texts that more than one honest reading allows. The Qur’an warns against a different thing:

That is division after clear proof has come, into groups that each treat the other as outside. Scholars kept the two apart. On this site we use the Amman Message’s definition of who is a Muslim, which recognises the schools of law and bars takfir between their followers: see our ground rules.

Read next: Race, tribe and nation: where do they fit in the ummah?

Sources

1. Al-Dhahabi, Siyar A’lam al-Nubala’ (Mu’assasat al-Risalah edition), 8/78-79: Ibn Sa’d’s report of Malik and al-Mansur. shamela.ws
2. Al-Dhahabi, Siyar A’lam al-Nubala’, 8/98: the report of the Muwatta’ and the Ka’bah, with al-Dhahabi’s comment on its chain and the caliph’s name. shamela.ws
3. Al-Dhahabi, Siyar A’lam al-Nubala’, 10/16: Yunus al-Sadafi on al-Shafi’i. shamela.ws
4. Ibn Taymiyyah, Raf’ al-Malam ’an al-A’immat al-A’lam, pp. 9-10: the three kinds of reason, and the first and most common (OpenITI text). raw.githubusercontent.com

Qur’an and hadith on this page

• Qur’an 3:105
• Bukhari 946, sahih (al-Bukhari)
• Bukhari 7352, sahih (al-Bukhari)
• Muslim 1716, sahih (Muslim)
• Muslim 1770, sahih (Muslim)
• Abu Dawud 1960, sahih (al-Albani); sahih (Shu’ayb al-Arna’ut)