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Jordan RELIGIOUS LIFE
More than 90 percent of Jordanians adhered to Sunni Islam in
the late 1980s. Although observance was not always orthodox,
devotion to and identification with the faith was high. Islam was
the established religion, and as such its institutions received
government support. The 1952 Constitution stipulates that the king
and his successors must be Muslims and sons of Muslim parents.
Religious minorities included Christians of various denominations,
a few Shia Muslims, and even fewer adherents of other faiths.
Early Development of Islam
In A.D. 610, Muhammad, a merchant belonging to the Hashimite
branch of the ruling Quraysh tribe in the Arabian town of Mecca,
began to preach the first of a series of revelations granted him by
God through the angel Gabriel and to denounce the polytheism of his
fellow Meccans. Because the town's economy was based in part on a
thriving pilgrimage business to the Kaaba, the sacred structure
around a black meteorite, and the numerous pagan shrines located
there, Muhammad's vigorous and continuing censure eventually earned
him the bitter enmity of the town's leaders. In 622 he was invited
to the town of Yathrib, which came to be known as Medina (the city)
because it was the center of his activities. The move, or hijra
(known in the West as the hegira), marks the beginning of the
Islamic era. The Muslim calendar, based on the lunar year, begins
in 622. In Medina, Muhammad--by this time known as the Prophet--
continued to preach, eventually defeated his detractors in battle,
and consolidated both the temporal and spiritual leadership of all
Arabia in his person before his death in 632.
After Muhammad's death, his followers compiled those of his
words regarded as coming directly from God into the Quran, the holy
scripture of Islam. Others of his sayings and teachings as recalled
by those who had known Muhammad (a group known as the Companions)
became the hadith. The precedent of his personal behavior was set
forth in the sunna. Together the Quran, the hadith, and the sunna
form a comprehensive guide to the spiritual, ethical, and social
life of an orthodox Sunni Muslim.
During his lifetime, Muhammad was both spiritual and temporal
leader of the Muslim community; he established Islam as a total and
all-encompassing way of life for human beings and society. Muslims
believe that Allah revealed to Muhammad the rules governing proper
behavior and that it therefore behooves them to live in the manner
prescribed by the law, and it is incumbent upon the community to
strive to perfect human society according to holy injunctions.
Islam traditionally recognizes no distinction between religion and
state, and no distinction between religious and secular life or
religious and secular law. A comprehensive system of religious law
(sharia--see Glossary)
developed gradually during the first four
centuries of Islam, primarily through the accretion of precedent
and interpretation by various judges and scholars. During the tenth
century, however, legal opinion began to harden into authoritative
doctrine, and the figurative bab al ijtihad (gate of
interpretation) gradually closed, thenceforth eventually excluding
flexibility in Islamic law. Within the Jordanian legal system,
sharia remains in effect in matters concerning personal status
(see Jordan - The Judiciary
, ch. 4).
After Muhammad's death, the leaders of the Muslim community
consensually chose Abu Bakr, the Prophet's father-in-law and one of
his earliest followers, as caliph, or successor. At that time, some
persons favored Ali, the Prophet's cousin and husband of his
daughter Fatima, but Ali and his supporters (the so-called Shiat
Ali or Party of Ali) eventually recognized the community's choice.
The next two caliphs--Umar, who succeeded in 634, and Uthman, who
took power in 644--enjoyed recognition of the entire community.
When Ali finally succeeded to the caliphate in 656, Muawiyah,
governor of Syria, rebelled in the name of his murdered kinsman
Uthman. After the ensuing civil war, Ali moved his capital to
Mesopotamia, where a short time later he, too, was murdered.
Ali's death ended the period in which the entire community of
Islam recognized a single caliph. Upon Ali's death, Muawiyah
proclaimed himself caliph from Damascus. The Shiat Ali, however,
refused to recognize Muawiyah or his line, the Umayyad caliphs; in
support of claims by Ali's line to a presumptive right to the
caliphate based on descent from the Prophet, they withdrew and
established a dissident sect known as the Shia.
Originally political in nature, the differences between the
Sunni and Shia interpretations rapidly took on theological and
metaphysical overtones. Ali's two sons, Hasan and Husayn, became
martyred heroes to the Shias and repositories of the claims of
Ali's line to mystical preeminence among Muslims. The Sunnis
retained the doctrine of the selection of leaders by consensus,
although Arabs and members of the Quraysh, Muhammad's tribe,
predominated in the early years. Reputed descent from the Prophet,
which King Hussein claims, continued to carry social and religious
prestige throughout the Muslim world in the 1980s. Meanwhile, the
Shia doctrine of rule by divine right became more and more firmly
established, and disagreements over which of several pretenders had
a truer claim to the mystical powers of Ali precipitated further
schisms. Some Shia groups developed doctrines of divine leadership
far removed from the strict monotheism of early Islam, including
beliefs in hidden but divinely chosen leaders with spiritual powers
that equaled or surpassed those of the Prophet himself.
The early Islamic polity was intensely expansionist, fueled
both by fervor for the new religion and by economic and social
factors. Conquering armies and migrating tribes swept out of
Arabia, spreading Islam. By the end of Islam's first century,
Islamic armies had reached far into North Africa and eastward and
northward into Asia. The territory of modern Jordan, among the
first to come under the sway of Islam, was penetrated by Muslim
armies by A.D. 633
(see Jordan - Islam and Arab Rule
, ch. 1).
Although Muhammad had enjoined the Muslim community to convert
the infidel, he had also recognized the special status of the
"people of the book," Jews and Christians, whose own revealed
scriptures he considered revelations of God's word and which
contributed in some measure to Islam. Jews and Christians in Muslim
territories could live according to their own religious law, in
their own communities, and were exempted from military service if
they accepted the position of dhimmis, or tolerated subject
peoples. This status entailed recognition of Muslim authority,
additional taxes, prohibition on proselytism among Muslims, and
certain restrictions on political rights.
Social life in the Ottoman Empire, which included Jordan for
400 years, revolved around a system of millets, or religious
communities
(see Jordan - Ottoman Rule
, ch. 1). Each organized religious
minority lived according to its own personal status laws under the
leadership of recognized religious authorities and community
leaders. These recognized leaders also represented the community to
the rest of society and the polity. This form of organization
preserved and nourished cultural differences that, quite apart from
theological considerations, distinguished these communities.
Data as of December 1989
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