Muslims are nowadays being viewed or stereotyped as humourless. Muslim men with grim faces, bushy eyebrows, and wild, unkempt beards, and women covered from head to toe in black garb, have also become part of the collective media picture. Images of burning flags and besieged embassies in the aftermath of the Danish cartoons published in 2005 were printed over and over again to emphasize the ugly, humourless aspect of Muslims. The shooting in January 2015 of several staff members of the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo, presumably for its controversial cartoons about Prophet Muḥammad, as well as Islamic leaders, also served to highlight this stereotype.

Consequently, an entire civilization and culture is being regarded as devoid of humour and the light touch of laughter, and has been simply encapsulated by those blazing eyes of the fundamentalists and their merciless harshness. However, it is an unreal image completely at odds with the humanity of the Muslim people and the abundant evidence of humour in Arab and Islamic countries for many centuries – evidence which proves not only that Muslims have a sense of humour, but also that many medieval authors were not afraid to use their religious scriptures to create laughs, and these jokes lived on.

Humour is an intelligent way of looking at life. It is also often used to address taboo topics, but it is most certainly not limited to these. Its goal is to expose the paradoxical aspects of life, such as hypocrisy, lies, contradictions, and bad habits. Humour enables people to see a fault and learn to avoid it; to notice virtue and emphasize it. Since medieval times, like any other community, Arabs and Muslims have laughed – and laughed very hard – at their conditions, their rulers, and their religious clerics and their rulings.

Some of the jokes incorporating the Qur’an are borderline irreverent or blasphemous, yet they are found in numerous classical texts, literary works, and anecdotal collections. These jokes provide confirmation that the Muslim community did not shy away from using the Qur’an in numerous ways in their daily lives.

Of my seven siblings, my brother Hussein was always closest to me, not only in terms of age (I am the youngest, he was the second youngest), but also in our love for reading and writing, and our intellectual pursuits in general. From a very young age, Hussein was driven by a thirst for knowledge and a desire to accumulate as much of it as possible. He was highly intelligent, and possessed a brilliant memory. From the time when he first started writing, his style was beautiful and fluent, becoming more forceful and eloquent as he got older.

At the age of eight, Hussein embarked on writing a book on Umar Ibn Al-Khattab, whom he considered to be his role model at the time. His intention, he said, was to turn it into a three-volume masterpiece, only to find that his material had run out after the first thirty pages! This failed first attempt was followed by two historical novellas written at the age of ten, and a story, of which I still have a copy, titled The Joy of Old Age, written at the age of twelve, that I still find a delight to read. However, he was most proud of a novel he wrote soon after, titled The Punishment. My father, Ahmad Amin, wanted to encourage him to continue in his footsteps, and so he arranged for the Authorship, Translation and Publication Committee Press to print 200 copies of the book at his expense.

Hussein had a highly developed sense for beauty in literature, and would tirelessly roam the bookshops of Cairo and beyond for the next book on his reading list, and follow the news of the latest publications of authors he admired or believed to be significant.

His interests did not go unnoticed by our father, and so he asked the publisher of his books (the owner of the Al-Nahda Al-Misriyya bookshop in downtown Cairo) to allow Hussein to buy any books he wanted from the bookshop at a discount, to be deducted from my father's royalty payments. He only protested when he found that Hussein had purchased several volumes of Andre Gide's journals, a writer who my father believed to be immoral.

There is no greater indication of the impact of the Islamic Daʿwah in the hearts of the Prophet's contemporaries, and the radical changes his message brought about in concepts and values, political, social and otherwise, than the fact that even those who apostated from Islam shortly before his death and after, and refused to recognise the Medinan caliph's authority over the entire Arabian Peninsula, still saw it as necessary to give a religious tinge to their Daʿwah. Their leaders ascribed prophethood to themselves, and portrayed their insurgencies or revolutions as divinely inspired by God, even if the motives for these revolutions are known to have been purely political, social or economic.

In its original form, Islam did not distinguish between civilian and religious authorities, or between civil and religious legislation. Religious community and state were one, the latter only existing to serve the former. The Prophet had been at the helm of both, and was followed by his successor, then his successor's successor and so forth.

The foundational principle of succession (khilāfa) was to protect the Sharīʿa. The purpose of the Sharīʿa was to regulate all aspects of human life, those that related to the community and communal life, as well as those that related to individuals in their private life. The relationship between the imam and his subjects was a religious relationship, which bears no resemblance to the political or social relationships as we know them today.

One of the most prominent features of Islamic history was the fact that all revolutionary movements that started in Dār al-Islām (Abode of Islam, i.e., Muslim lands) due to social considerations, and thus became politicised, were, from the time of their inception, closely tied to some religious thought. For the followers of such movements, it would have been inconceivable to protest against the ruling power from non-religious motives, or to do so other than against a ruling power that God was not pleased with, to return the nation to the path of the true faith.

Al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī (in Tārīkh Baghdad) and Tāj al-Dīn Al-Subkī (in Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfiʿiyya al-kubra) list countless examples of the reverence enjoyed by religious scholars in the Middle Ages. The latter writes that when a religious scholar visited Khorasan once, the entire population, including women and children, came out to touch his robes and collect the dust off his shoes to use it as medicine to heal themselves. Merchants brought out their goods of sweets, fruit, garments and furs, scattering them above people's heads. The Sufiwomen of that town threw their rosaries at him, hoping these would touch him and that they would therefore receive his barakāt (blessings).

Ibn al-Jawzī describes the crowd attending Aḥad Ibn Ḥanbal's funeral, saying:

A thousand thousand [i.e., a million] people gathered, the likes of which had never been seen before, neither in Jahiliyya nor in Islam. They estimated that about sixty thousand women gathered next to the wall. Some people spent the night by the tomb. There was no household untouched by grief, except the houses of evil. The day he died, twenty thousand Jews, Christians and Magi converted to Islam.

Centuries later, Ahmad Amin wrote in his autobiography Ḥayātī (My Life) that when he sought marriage:

The writing of history and biographies has a history of its own. This is not only due to the evolution of methodologies and research methods, but also due to the predominance of particular theories, and the writers’ reflection of the spirit of their age and of certain prevalent intellectual “fashions” or trends. The impact of such trends on historical and biographical writings (interesting and revealing though it may be) would have been enough to belittle both genres and call their value into question were it not for the ignorance of the majority, or their deliberate choice to ignore such effects, as well as the philosophical acceptance on the part of the minority of the inevitable subjectivity that characterises both these branches of knowledge.

It is noticeable that the greater the amount and diversity of information available on a certain historical era, event or prominent historical figure, the more likely it is for the writing about them to be subjective and for a variety of theories to be formulated about them. The historian or biographer then has a bigger pool of data to choose from, to pick the events that agree with his inclinations or that confirm his opinion. In his book What is History?, E. H. Carr likened the position of the historian with regard to the information available to him to that of a fisherman setting out to catch a certain kind of fish, choosing certain tools and utensils and steering his boat to the place where this type of fish is known to be plentiful. He then forays into the sea until he reaches the distance that he deems appropriate. Some of the fish that come out in his net or attach to his fishing rod may be of the type he does not want, so he returns them to the sea, keeping only those he set out to catch!

The Early Muslim Historians’ Concept of History

Some have criticised the early Muslim historians who wrote the history of the Islamic world after the death of the Prophet for simply listing the events without commentary, and for producing a mere record without any preconceived perspective.

With the Prophet's death, divine communication ceased. The people – among them ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb – imagined that he would remain in his ummah to manage its affairs and be the last man standing, and then bear witness to this ummah on the Day of Resurrection. When, after Abu Bakr's sermon, they ascertained the news of his death, they became – in the words of ʿAʾisha – “like sheep on a rainy winter night at the loss of their Prophet”.

The Muslims were at once deprived of both heavenly guidance and the presence of the Prophet. However, they still had God's book, which His messenger was given. The Qur’an alone was enough to govern and regulate the conditions of the first Muslim community and its religious, social and political affairs. However, it was not long after the Prophet's death that the Arabs expanded from their desert like a giant genie released from its bottle. Within a century, they controlled territories from the Oxus River in Central Asia to the far north of Africa on the Atlantic Ocean, governing various nations with customs, morals and values, environments and civilisations very different from those of the people in the Arabian Peninsula. They founded new cities and inhabited existing cities already densely populated with their original indigenous inhabitants. All this resulted in a need for more complex and detailed laws than those that were sufficient for the simple desert community in Mecca and Medina. The rules governing the simple life of the first Muslims no longer met the needs of their grandsons, who were now living in new environments, mixing with followers of religions radically different from their own, and facing conditions that the Qur’an did not talk about, or addressed only in general terms, without elaborating on the details.

The Sunna as the Second Source of Law

Faced with this massive geographic expansion, the pressures of the new, historic and ever-changing conditions, as well as the changing times and places, the Muslims and their jurists sought guidance on how to deal with all these new circumstances.