INTRODUCTION

Of the preceding sixteen chapters, some were devoted to particular bodies of religious literature dating from the early centuries of Islam: the Koran and Koranic exegesis, tradition and biographical literature. Other chapters – the majority – dealt successively with the literature of each of the surviving sects and schools: the ḥanbalites at different times and places; the Mu'tazilites and their Shī'ite heirs; the ḥanafīs, Shāfi'ites, Mālikīs and Ibādīs; and finally, Ghazzālī (d. 505/1111) and the Sūfīs. In the course of this extended survey, many themes have recurred again and again, so that the reader by now has a sense of the standard elements of the theory and practice of forbidding wrong. However, the extent of the survey, and the vast amount of detail it contains, mean that the reader may at times have been unable to see the wood for the trees. Hence one of the purposes of the present chapter is to pull together and amplify some of the themes that have been scattered here and there in the preceding chapters. In doing this I shall not attempt to produce a unified version of the scholastic doctrines of forbidding wrong that have been examined above. Instead, I shall pick out a number of themes which seem to me to be of particular historical significance. I shall also be making a preliminary effort to step back from the whole phenomenon of forbidding wrong in classical Islam, and to see it in some kind of perspective.