In the autumn of 1347, the Black Death arrived in Egypt. In the 18 months that followed, mosques turned into mortuaries across North Africa and the Levant. By the time the pestilence had subsided, up to a third of the Muslim world lay dead. Theologians delved into their books and found a comforting spin: infection was a blessing from God, they pronounced, and all believers touched with it were bound for paradise.
The hordes who fled their villages to escape the disease were apparently unconvinced. So too was an Andalusian scholar named Ibn al-Khatib, whose observations showed it to be spread by human contagion, not the hand of the Almighty. Proof taken from the traditions, this man retorted to the jurists, had to yield to the perception of the senses.
Such collisions between revelation, reason and force of circumstance are central to Sadakat Kadri’s fascinating journey through the centuries of Islamic law. As Kadri, a human rights barrister, points out, at least 11 of the world’s 50 or so Muslim states possess constitutions which acknowledge Islam to be a source of national law. There are two true theocracies — Iran and Saudi Arabia — but the aftermath to the Arab spring is strengthening the hand of those who would wish that number to grow.
In Heaven on Earth he skilfully weaves history with travelogue to guide the reader into this most contentious and topical of territory. Although part of the book’s importance lies in its avoidance of overt polemic, his enquiries are always steered by contemporary concerns, whether writing of seventh-century Arabia or 21st-century Pakistan.
The narrative traces the centuries of Islamic global advance which followed Muhammad’s revelations. This calls for a broad brush, for the shari’a seeks to encompass all aspects of the sacred and profane: to be, as one 14th-century jurist put it, ‘the absolute cure for all ills … the pillar of existence and the key to success in this world in the Hereafter’.
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