Sadakat Kadri, a lawyer by training, is careful to issue disclaimers. "Lest it be necessary to say so and it probably is," he writes in the prologue to Heaven on Earth, "it [his book] does not intend at any point to challenge the sacred stature of the Prophet Muhammad, the self-evident appeal of Islam, or the almightiness of God."
Kadri is right to be careful, for he has managed, in an area often saturated with pieties, to write a truly penetrating and provocative book. Heaven on Earth, though it might not challenge the sanctity of Islam, leaves the average reader with a kind of wonder, akin to when he first learns of the apocryphal gospels, as to what a malleable and, at times, politically expedient a thing God's law was in the early days of its arrival on Earth.
The book in part a straight history of the sharia, in part a journey probing its application in our present time opens in 7th-century Arabia. The year is 610 and a 40-year-old Meccan trader is feeling the first throb of revelation. With the exception of Barnaby Rogerson's Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad, I have read few books that give as humane and believable a portrait of the Prophet as this. The picture that emerges is of a man balancing the pressures of divine revelation with the political demands of having become, at the end of his life, king and general of Arabia. As faith adjusts to the needs of the moment, the ground is prepared for one of Kadri's big themes: the tension between text and context.
And, no one, it turns out, is better at managing the two than the Prophet himself, now once the Jews betray him changing the direction of prayer away from Jerusalem to the pagan temple of the Ka'bah at Mecca, now producing a swift revelation to protect the honour of his young wife, Aisha.
Muhammad's flexibility, rather than casting a dubious light on his prophethood, emerges as an attribute of his political wisdom and leadership. And it seems that a similar spirit, protean and adventurous, guides Islam through those first few centuries of its ascent, when it breaks out of the little world of Arabia and is fertilised by the classical civilisations of Byzantium, Persia and India. "Indeed," Kadri writes, "Islam would have been incapable of developing such traditions without a capacity to learn and borrow." The traditions referred to here are architectural, but the point holds equally true for other schools of learning, like medicine, mathematics and Kadri's speciality the law.
In this last area, we are disabused, always in very good prose, of any illusion we might have that the sharia is a uniform, unchanging code, whose application is a crude and simple thing. Kadri's account of those early years of Islamic law, the collecting and codifying of the hadiths, the emergence of the different jurists, the establishment of schools of jurisprudence, gives a picture not of the rigid frame that modern revivalists wish to impose on the world today, but of a living and fluid tradition adapting constantly to the demands of a changing world. And when that openness ceases and an Islamic world decimated by Mongol invasions seems for the first time, under the influence of men such as the 13th-century scholar, Ibn Taymiyyah, to draw back behind its walls, we are introduced to another big theme of this book, one that contains a note of caution for the world we live in: the tendency all civilisations have, in the face of threat, perceived or real, to reel in the freedoms that are their greatest strengths, thereby opening the door to further decline.
In the second part of the book, Kadri travels in those places where decline has brought withdrawal and retreat. I must confess that I liked this section less than the first. Kadri is not a good traveller; his visits to Deoband in India, madrasas in Karachi, Qom in Iran and Cairo can feel bitty and scripted. He does not have the ability to probe the people he travels among; he does not, through the close observation of behaviour here a man's mannerisms, there his clothes, his speech, his smile flush out deeper truths about them. His people, often ideological anyway, can sometimes feel like symbols, as if they are standing in for grander, more abstract theories about law and Islamic tradition. And there is something bloodless about looking at people in this way; it gives this section of the book a faintly predetermined and preachy quality. Kadri goes from place to place, assiduously establishing moral equivalencies, now chiding Muslims, with their own holy words, for playing God, now reminding westerners of the dangers of Islamophobia. All very even-handed, but a little dull. There is also a trace of that strange tendency, so common in the Muslim world, of working backwards: of finding a basis in the sharia for values, such as modern human rights and liberties, the truth of which nobody, least of all Kadri, needs the sharia to tell us.
But these are small criticisms of an otherwise first-rate book; and they are not so damning: for even in these travel sections Kadri's research is prodigious and his descriptions of the abuses of Islamic law, such as in the area of blasphemy in Pakistan, very affecting. At its best, Heaven on Earth is a meditation on how decline and the attendant loss of self-confidence can reduce the once grand ideas of a civilisation to petty rigidities.
Aatish Taseer is the author of Stranger to History, The Temple-goers and, most recently, Noon (Picador)
