Damaris Wilmers’ Beyond Schools is a fascinating and original study of two prominent Yememi Zaydi religious scholars from the turn of the fifteenth century. One is Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā b. al-Murtaḍā (d. 840/1436), a proponent of Bahshamī Muʿtazilism and the superiority of Zaydism as a distinctive legal school. Wilmers uses Ibn al-Murtaḍa as a foil for the primary focus of her work, Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm al-Wazīr (d. 840/1436), who is often seen to stand at the beginning of a Sunnization-of-Zaydism genealogy that culminates in Muḥammad al-Shawkānī (d. 1250/1834).
Chapter 1 reconstructs the biographies of Ibn al-Wazīr and Ibn al-Murtaḍā (more about this chapter below), and chapter 2 describes Ibn al-Wazīr's writings in generous detail. Chapter 3, on epistemology, makes clear that the key difference between the two scholars concerns the scope of knowledge (ʿilm). As a kalām theologian, Ibn al-Murtaḍa divides knowledge into two kinds: necessary (ḍarūrī) and acquired (muktasab). Necessary knowledge imposes itself upon the human subject without discursive reasoning. Acquired knowledge is likewise certain but follows on from inference and discursive reasoning. Certain knowledge of God's existence derives from rational speculation (naẓar) on the nature of the created world. By way of contrast, Ibn al-Wazīr radically narrows the scope of certain knowledge by consigning everything known by rational processes to the realm of conjecture (ẓann). So-called acquired knowledge and rational speculation never provide certainty, and kalām proofs for God are no more than conjectural. Only a few things shared by all Muslims come under the rubric of necessary knowledge, things such as the Pillars of Islam based on multiple transmitted (tawātur) reports and certain basic Islamic doctrines about God grasped immediately by the original human disposition (fiṭra).
What Wilmers calls Ibn al-Wazīr's “epistemology of ambiguity” greatly limits the grounds for intra-Muslim conflict and for charging rival Muslim currents with unbelief. As Wilmers writes, “Ibn al-Wazīr reduces almost every doctrine and theological problem to a minimum. Then he claims essential agreement on this minimum in the sense of a lowest common denominator” (p. 170). Differences among Muslims do not concern anything essential. They are merely matters of conjecture and ambiguity. The result is remarkably similar to the minimizing spirit of modern liberal Protestantism, and Wilmers herself notes at the end of the book that Ibn al-Wazīr “provides an answer to the challenge of theological and legal diversity that is even more compelling today than it was in Ibn al-Wazīr's lifetime” (p. 366).
Wilmers takes up Ibn al-Wazīr's theology in chapter 4. One thing that Ibn al-Wazīr does know necessarily is that God wills and acts for wise purposes. It is not for humans to know exactly what those wise purposes are, but it is necessary knowledge that God acts wisely. Ibn al-Wazīr criticizes Ashʿari argumentation against purposes in God's will. Beyond that, however, he harmonizes Ashʿarism and Muʿtazilism by explaining that the Ashʿarī Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210) and the Muʿtazilī Abū al-Ḥusayn al-Baṣrī (d. 436/1044) both posit a motive or preponderator causing human acts. Ibn al-Wazīr achieves this harmonization by glossing over fundamental Ashʿarī and Muʿtazilī differences on the degree of independence in the human act. Wilmers observes that Ibn al-Wazīr “paints a vague picture of a good God” (p. 258) and keeps his foot inside the door of the Zaydī community by laying claim to the heritage of Abū al-Ḥusayn al-Baṣrī. A strand of non-Bahshamī Muʿtazilism originating in Abū al-Ḥusayn al-Baṣrī held some sway within Zaydi circles.
The question of legal authority is at the core of chapter 5, the last major chapter. Both Ibn al-Wazīr and Ibn al-Murtaḍā are infallibilists in ijtihād. That is, they both maintain that all mujtahids are correct so long as they follow recognized procedures of ijtihād when considering questions of law falling into the realm of conjecture. The subjective character of infallibilism can lead to legal confusion and instability. Ibn al-Murtaḍā controls this by narrowing the range of acceptable mujtahids to those who adhere to Zaydi theological precepts and follow specifically Zaydi legal principles and rulings. The result is a distinctive Zaydi school of jurisprudence that considers itself superior by virtue of its Shii affiliation to the ahl al-bayt. Ibn al-Wazīr takes infallibilism in a far more open direction by lowering the bar for engaging in ijtihad, adopting the authority of Sunni hadīth, and rejecting the authority of legal schools. Wilmers concludes that Ibn al-Wazīr does not so much “Sunnize” Zaydism as follow his evidence wherever he sees it leading.
We might ask why the two Yemeni Zaydis, Ibn al-Wazīr and Ibn al-Murtaḍā, adopted such different intellectual paths, but Wilmers curiously frustrates this question in chapter 1. Here, Wilmers presents a richly detailed study of Ibn al-Wazīr's biography along with a shorter examination of the life of Ibn al-Murtaḍā. Wilmers shows that the two scholars received similar educations and wrestled with the same challenges posed by Sunni influences. From this she concludes, “No external element in Ibn al-Wazīr's development renders him more prone to initiate or endorse a ‘Sunnisation’ of the Zaydiyya than his contemporaries, since Sunni texts and teachers as well as alternatives to the Bahshami-Muʿtazili theology were already present in the Zaydi heartland” (p. 59). Having ruled out external causes to explain the differences between Ibn al-Wazīr and Ibn al-Murtaḍā, Wilmers might have turned to psychological factors to explain their diverging views. The two figures were clearly of differing temperament, but Wilmers does not appeal to this to explain their intellectual divergences either. She is rather more interested in highlighting the radical contingency of Ibn al-Wazīr's theological and legal positions than explaining their historical origins and causes. Wilmers' book is a superb piece of ground-breaking work and without doubt a major milestone in the study of theology and legal theory in medieval Zaydism, but it does leave the historical question unanswered.
