The Date of the Great Fitna

Datos Bibliográficos

ID16645451
AutoresG H A Juynboll (autor de correspondencia)
Año1973
Volumen20
Número2
Páginas142-159
Fecha de publicación1973-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaArabica (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0570-5398 • E-ISSN: 1570-0585
EditorialWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1163/157005873x00347
OpenAlexW2011173302
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas7

WHEN Schacht published his The origins of Muhammadanjurisprudence in 1950, the book immediately met with immense approval. However, no scholar has ever attempted to subject the mass of material contained in it to detailed criticism. Only N. J. Coulson, J. W. Flick and A. Guillaume offered criticism of one or a few issues 1. The structure of the book with its numerous cross-references was so difficult that it obviously discouraged the reviewers from writing more than very superficial reviews 2. One of the theories Schacht set forth, which was never refuted but which did and does not find general recognition, concerns the date of the political event called al-fitna. This theory I should like to scrutinize in the following lines, thus hoping to make a contribution to a badly needed evaluation of Schacht's book. When thinking of the fitna scholars in general have hitherto associated that immediately with the murder of the caliph 'Utman in 35/656. Muslim tradition has it that on the day that 'Utman met his death the Islamic world entered upon the time of the fitna. Western scholars have always accepted this dating without question. Wellhausen, for example, did not even mention an Arabic source when he introduced the wordfitna for the first time in his book Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz 3. In later studies we find nothing that might indicate that this date of the fitna is not fully taken for granted 4. Only Schacht presented a new theory, when he postulated that the great fitna of Islam began with the murder of the Umayyad caliph

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