ʿUlamĀʾ
ʿULAMĀʾ ("the learned"), the religious scholars of Islam, are the guardians, transmitters, and interpreters of its sciences, doctrines, and laws and the chief guarantors of continuity in the spiritual and intellectual history of the Islamic community. The term is a generic one and embraces all who have cultivated the religious disciplines or fulfilled certain practical functions such as judgeship. [See figure 1 for individual titles given to ʿulamāʾ.]
It is an axiom that the scholars are the heirs of the prophets; the emergence of the ʿulamāʾ as a distinct group had, therefore, to await the passing of the prophet Muḥammad and the completion of revelation. However, the Qurʾān itself indicates the necessity and excellence of a learned class, quite apart from extolling, in numerous verses, the virtue of knowledge (ʾilm). The word ʿulamāʾ appears in sūrah 35:28, although obviously not in the precise sense later usage conferred on it, and the expressions "those well rooted in knowledge" (3:7), "the people of remembrance" (16:43), and "those who have been given knowledge" (58:11) have also been interpreted as referring to the ʿulamāʾ. Numerous utterances attributed to the Prophet define the purpose and status of the ʿulamāʾ: in addition to being "the heirs of the prophets," they are described as "the best of my community," "the trustees of the prophets" (in the sense of being repositories of the laws promulgated by the prophets), "the trustees of God over his creation," "the lamps of the earth" (in that through their knowledge they dissipate the darkness of ignorance), and "equivalent to the prophets of the children of Israel" (in stature and authority).
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