السلطة والفتوى السياسية فى العصر العباسى الأول (132ه-234ه/750م-847م)

At the time of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), the fatwas or responses to Muslim questions were carried out according to a divine approach and divine revelation, as they were descended to the Prophet from heaven in the form of Quranic texts or revealed to him and not recited as the Qur’an is recited, which was known as the Sunnah. After the death of the Prophet, the senior companions assumed the task of issuing fatwas. They relied mainly in their fatwas on two sources, the Holy Qur’an and the Sunnah. Also in their fatwas, they avoided responding to matters that did not happen or take a place.
 With the arrival of the Umayyad to power, the course of matters of the fatwa changed. The disagreement among Muslims over the legitimacy of the rule of the Umayyads led to the division of Muslims into political groups such as the Kharijites, the Shiites and others. These groups soon embroiled themselves in a sectarian cover, as their supporters from among the jurists sought to attack the Umayyad authority and question the legitimacy of their rule. On the other hand, the Umayyad authority mobilized their supporters from among the clerics to respond to their opponents and emphasize the principle of obedience of the ruler and the impermissibility of breaking his command.
This matter continued during the early Abbasid rule, but the dispute between the authority and religious scholars developed into philosophical doctrinal issues such as the issue of “creating the Qur’an”. The Abbasid authority adopted this opinion and tried hard to impose it on the people, including the jurists, which caused a sharp juristic and intellectual conflict between the two parties. During that the Abbasid authority used oppression and torture against all the clerics who disagreed with their opinion.
Also, one of the issues noticed during the early Abbasid rule is that the authority sometimes used the accusation of heresy and the Fatwas that permit the killing of a heretic to get rid of some prominent statesmen whose loyalty and credibility to the Abbasid Caliph were under question.

In this study, we will discuss in some details the relationship between the ruling authority and the political fatwas that contradicted it during the first Abbasid rule.