The Book of Jihad

Excerpted from Qadi Abu Muhammad Abdul Wahhaab ibn Ali al-Baghdaadi's "At-Talqeen fil fiqhil Maliki" (The Instruction in Malik's Jurisprudence)

Purpose:  The purpose of this translation is to present an authentic and reliable source for the Sunni view of Jihad.  It is intended as a contribution to the current dialectic which posits that Jihad is either the free-for-all of homicidal terrorism described by the Islamophobes or the purely spiritual, sweetness-and-light struggle posited by the Muslim apologists.  It is neither.  Jihad is in some ways similar to the "just war" of Catholicism, but broader in scope and open ended.  It neither encourages the killing of civilians nor does it prohibit it entirely.  It certainly does not conform with modern standards of international law but it is not lawless.  It is also quite clear from the classical texts, such as the one presently translated, that it is neither obligatory on each and every Muslim nor something that can be entirely abandoned.  Between the extremes of the dialectic we can find the truth.

The author of this blog believes firmly in non-violence, except in strict self-defense.  Terrorism, pre-emptive war, slavery, apartheid, and occupation, along with most of the tactics, strategies, and weapons used in modern warfare, are morally repugnant and ought to be rejected, regardless of what any religion says.

Note on the translation: This translation is based on Darul Kutubil 'Ilmiyyah edition published in 1999.  The text begins on pg. 68. Being a student, and not a master, of Arabic, I welcome any corrections to my translation, provided permission is given to publish them with credit according to the terms of this blog's Creative Commons license. I have tried to render this translation into idiomatic English because keeping to the formal structure of the book would inhibit clarity. I have summarized rather than translated the section on the conditions for participating in the spoils due to lack of contemporary relevance. Anyone interested in this particular topic can consult Aisha Bewley's translation of the Risalah.

Jihad is a communal obligation* and is incumbent, some of the time, on those who face the enemy. It is not permissible to abandon it entirely in truce except from an excuse. He (the Mujahid**) does not desist from the enemy except that they embrace Islam or enter into our pact (dhimma) and hand over the poll-tax (djizya) in our abode. It is desirable that they are called to Islam before fighting them except that they swiftly descend upon us. It is permissible to harm the enemy via all possible means from among the following: burning of the planted gardens and of fodder, cutting date-palms and trees, wounding animals, and destruction of the country side. Do not touch the bees unless they are numerous. In that case the consensus transmits their destruction.

The spoils are divided in five, all of it, it’s substance and its incidentals, equally, except the gardens, for they are left as pious endowments (awqaaf). Looting and the like are, without distinction, not favoured during fighting except with the permission of the leader (Imam) when he deems that appropriate. The leader takes from the spoils one fifth (al-khums) of it and distributes among the army four fifths of it. It is not permissible to steal from the war booty before it is distributed and the doer of that is punished. His saddlebag is not burned and his portion is not forbidden. The army may eat the food, slaughter the livestock, and take the fodder of the enemy without the permission of the leader. The leader does not reckon it among the spoils.

...


[The author here gives the conditions for participating in the spoils, including that it was gained by fighting or at least by "the exertion of horses" and that it may be distributed to those who are part of the army but did not fight due to sickness and the like. Also, the shares due to cavalrymen and infantry are described. ]

…

Women and youths are not killed nor are very old men, nor hermits nor monks, unless harm or a ruse is feared from them. And their wealth is given back if they are many and what was left for them is only a little.

Protection of the enemy commanders is legally valid. Protection of other than them from the rest of mankind, according to Malik (Allah have mercy on him!), is also valid and their destruction is not permitted. And he also said: “To them [commanders in the Jihad] is the right to permit it or deny it. And when it is permitted it is all the same whether it is a man or a woman, or slave or free adult or adolescent."

In regards to captives, the leader has a choice in the disposition of one fifth. The choices are: killing them, enslaving them, freeing them as a gift or ransoming them, and contracting a covenant. In regards to spies and to the return of hostages, the leader exercises independent reasoning (ijtihad). If they become Muslims, then he who became Muslim is entitled to a settlement and he has the right of possession of his land. And he who became Muslim after his land was forcibly conquered, then it is of the spoils and not returned to them with his Islam. The leader secures it to whoever he deems appropriate. He takes its land tax from he who possesses it. The commandments of booty, the leader's fifth, the land-tax, and poll-tax are one; the leader takes his business from it without assessment and returns the remainder in consolation of the Muslims, and he gives the first quarter from it according to his independent reasoning.






Notes:


*-A Communal Obligation (fard kifayyah) is an act that must be performed by at least one member of the community else the whole community is sinful.

**-Mujahid is the active participle (ismul faa3il) of jaahada, meaning "to endeavor, strive; to fight...; to wage holy war against the infidels" according Hans Wehr. One who engages in Jihad is a mujahid.

Islam and Female Genital Mutilation

While not as much in the news lately as it has been in the past, Female Genital Mutilation is still a scourge of women worldwide.  Muslim apologists have repeatedly claimed that this practice is strictly cultural and has nothing to do with Islam as a religion. For example, the Muslim Women's League informs us that "According to Sayyid Sabiq, renowned scholar and author of Fiqh-us-Sunnah, all hadiths concerning female circumcision are non-authentic."  Shaykh Tantawi and Shaykh Ali Gomaa of Al-Azhar were both against the practice.

But what is the reality?  When we examine classical, relied upon texts on Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), another picture emerges.  In Umdat as-Salik, translated as the "Reliance of the Traveler" we find that "Circumcision is obligatory... for both men and women." In the Risalah of Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani, a core text of the Maliki school of fiqh, it is recorded that circumcision for women is "honourable."  Notably, the translation for the commentary on male circumcision was provided while the commentary on female circumcision was omitted.  It gives some detail as to what is required and so I have decided to translate it myself.  The commentator, Shaykh Saalih Abdus Samee al-Azhari, tells us that "[Circumcision [literally: reduction] in women] And it is cutting the protuberance at the top of the vulva that is like the comb of the rooster. [is honourable] ... with the meaning that it is desirable."  Quite colourful.

What of the modern inheritors of the classical tradition?  Shaykha Shazia at Sunnipath tells us that "Female circumcision is it itself obligatory in the Shafi`i school, and Shaykh Nuh Keller’s translation in the Reliance of the Traveler is accurate and defines the meaning well. She emphasizes that the clitoris should not be completely cut off and laments " that the correct practice has become an almost-lost art."  Abu Haleema at the Hanafi Fiqh Blog informs us that the practice is "sunnah" according to "the view of the Hanafis and Maalikis, and [this] was narrated in one report from Ahmad." This is after giving an over view of the textual evidence in favor of the practice. The Guiding Helper, a modern Maliki fiqh text, defines circumcision as "the removal of the foreskin at the head of the penis or the small cap that covers the clitoris)" (Footnote 2186) and notes that "it is a fadilah (weaker mandub) to remove the small cap over the clitoris in females (of all ages).  [Nothing more than this small cap should be cut.]  Please note that cutting this small cap usually does not affect the ability of the female to reach orgasm (and by cutting this cap, the female will be able to get mandub credit in the next world for having performing circumcision)" (Footnote 2188).

What is one to make of all this?  First, the practice of cutting the sexual organs of women is definitely an Islamic practice.  It is not merely cultural and is either obligatory or encouraged in all of the four schools of law.  Second, the cutting countenance by the shariah is limited (it is not removal of the whole clitoris) and does not include common practices such as sewing up the vagina.  Some critics have maintained that Shaykh Nuh was being dishonest in his translation and that the text literally means to "cut off the clitoris."  The Arabic verb qaTa3a means both to cut and to cut off, among other things, but the Shaykh is drawing on the entire tradition of Shafi'i scholarship to which he is heir.  The intended audience of the Reliance is the body of English speaking Muslims, not non-Muslims, so I don't think there is a reason to be deceptive because this would constitute misleading fellow Muslims.  If his intent was to sugar-coat the issue, he would have simply removed the material entirely or left it untranslated, such as he did with the section of the Umdat that deals with slavery.
But, it must be said, the insistence of modern Shuyookh such as Faraz Rabani, that the practice is no longer recommended (besides being questionable from a fiqhi standpoint) implies that they recognize the abuses that can come out of even this limited permission to cut.  The question is, given that the proper procedure has become a "lost art" and horrendous abuse is rampant, why would any scholars recommend it all?  Is adherence to medieval formulations of religious law worth all the (female) suffering that results?

Returning to Irony

After an absence of several months, I all but shut down this blog, deleting all of its entries and posting a short mea culpa. My heart wavers before the blows of opposing arguments, now swaying one way, now swaying another. But each time I return to my skepticism I am more vehement in it. My previous arguments (now restored to this blog) I maintain more forcefully. I will expand on them as time permits.

What occasions this change? Anger. Anger at having been sold a bill of goods. Anger at my own lack of critical thought. Anger at believing apologists.

Anger at the instructions given by Shabbir Ahmed Usmani in his commentary on 34th ayay of Suratan Nisaa’ that, when beating one’s wife for being “impudent or discourteous or impolite” that “the beating should not be serious- short of bone fracture.” Again, “the beating should not be so serious that the bone is fractured, nor the blow should be so hard that it may smite a wound leaving a scar after healing.” He admonishes us that “Every fault has its own degree [of beating]” and that “if there is any big fault on the part of woman [sic], then there is no sin or fault in beating” (Volume I. pg. 335) provided that she has been first admonished and then, if she persists, been abandoned sexually. Only after these first two measures have failed does the Shaikh, in his magnanimity to the women, recognize that beating is permissible. This was all prefaced by a discussion of the “natural” and “material” reasons for the superiority of men over women, reasons such as the “fact that man is superior to woman in knowledge and action- and the whole sociology (sic) is controlled by this one single fact” (ibid., pg. 334-335). These are not the obscure writings of a back water Shaykh. These statements are found in a tafseer of the Qur’an famous throughout the sub-continent, written by a scholar of world-wide renown and a major figure within the Deobandi movement.

Anger at the double standards displayed by Muslims activists. I am still opposed to Zionism, just as I am opposed to all forms of colonialism and racism. But the attitude of Islamic activists on the issue of Palestine disturbs me. While rightfully decrying the destruction of the olive trees and confiscation of land that the Israeli Army practices, acts which are against international law and any morality with pretensions towards universality, they ignore the fact that these types of actions are allowed in Jihad. The Talqeen, a relied upon manual of fiqh (jurisprudence) within the Maliki school of thought, states that burning planted gardens, cutting trees and date palms, wounding animals, and destruction of the country are all permissible in Jihad. A condemnation of Isaeli actions cannot be based upon Islamic morality because this morality countenences these acts when performed by Muslims against non-Muslims. An Islamic condemnation can therefore be nothing but tribal and thus unworthy of support by anyone with a critical mind. Similarly, there has been much justified anger in the Muslim world at the practice of extra-judicial killings and drone assassinations by the US, actions which frequently result in the deaths of civilians (euphemistically referred to as 'collateral damage'). The case here is the same as that of the Palestine: I condemn these actions as immoral, striking against the very notion of the rule of law and due process. This condemnation, however, is a product of a secular process of critical moral deliberation. The Islamic critique, in so far as it is traditional and not itself a product of secular modernity, can only be tribal: it is wrong for them to do it to us, but not for us to do it for them. This issue can be considered under two headings: a.) the permissibility of extra-judicial killing in Islam and b.) the permissibility of undertaking military action when it is known that this will result in civilian deaths. Both of these types of actions can be established from sound Islamic sources. The first is established from the assassinations that were ordered by the Prophet of Islam against his enemies such as Ka'b ibn al-Ashruf and Abu Rafi’. These are all mentioned in reliable sources such as Al-Bukhari. The second is established from a hadeeth in Bukhari which is as follows:

Volume 4, Book 52, Number 256:

Narrated As-Sab bin Jaththama:

The Prophet passed by me at a place called Al-Abwa or Waddan, and was asked whether it was permissible to attack the pagan warriors at night with the probability of exposing their women and children to danger. The Prophet replied, "They (i.e. women and children) are from them (i.e. pagans)." I also heard the Prophet saying, "The institution of Hima is invalid except for Allah and His Apostle."

A similar hadeeth can be found in Muslim:

Muslim Book 019,Number 4322:

It is narrated by Sa'b b. Jaththama that he said (to the Holy Prophet): Messenger of Allah, we kill the children of the polytheists during the night raids. He said: They are from them."

Note, however, that I am not claiming that these narrations are used to justify suicide bombings or the like; they are sufficient, however, to establish that the likelihood of collateral damage is not sufficient for a military operation to become impermissible under Islamic Law (see http://www.load-islam.com/artical_det.php?artical_id=414&subsection=Misconceptions#29 for a more detailed discussion of this). It is hypocritical for Muslims to condemn the US (or Israel, for that matter) for an action that would be permissible if Muslims carried out themselves. The only way to avoid this hypocrisy is to posit a universal ethical framework that applies to both Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Anger over women being forced to veil. According to the Hanafi, Maliki, and Shafi’i jurists, the face veil is obligatory. Not something that the apologists like to mentioned, to the annoyance of traditionalists such as Ustadh Abdus Shakur Brooks and Abu Layth. Being a civil libertarian, I don't think it should be banned, but any critically thinking person has to ask themselves: is this the type of social relationship between the sexes that I can affirm? Is it right to confine women to a mobile cage of cloth?

One good thing to come from my recent re-embrace of traditionalism was a renewed commitment to the Arabic language. I love its beauty and rhythm and richness. I love its poetry. And it is the miftaah (key) to understanding Islam. To getting beyond the gloss of the apologists. To getting to the truth of Islam, whatever is commendable or repugnant from the view of critical consciousness. The concept of shariah has been a hot topic in American culture for the past year. I hope to weigh in on this subject with translations from authentic texts representing the traditional (pre-Modern, pre-Apologetic) views on such topics as Jihad, Apostacy, the status of women and non-Muslims under Islamic law. If there is to be a fruitful discussion of this subject it must be conducted on the basis of the historically normative legal views of classical Islamic scholarship, not on the basis of the misrepresentations of both the Islamophobes and the Islamophyles.

Culture War is not Liberation

I recently intended an informal gathering that featured a long lecture on Islamic politics. One of the points made during this talk really struck me as typical of the problems of Muslim political thought in the current era. The speaker said that Islam was currently the only force capable of resisting the onslaught of Western imperialism and that this was because, to paraphrase, Muslims don't drink liquor and their women don't follow western modes of dress. This, of course, was in a room with many women, at least half of whom were dressed in western clothes. 

I talked to the him later and asked him to clarify his remarks. He then gave me a more nuanced, if flawed, explanation of his words: Western Capitalism is constantly seeking out new markets for its products and the social restrictions peculiar to Islam hamper this expansion significantly. The glaring flaw of this statement is that the one country that, more than any other, imposes all of these social restrictions "with extreme prejudice" is also the most integrated into the global capitalist system. I am writing, of course, of Saudi Arabia. While subjecting women to the most restrictive controls of any country on the planet and imposing strict forms of censorship various cultural practices, they not only function as a leading petroleum exporter but as a major investor as well. They've been more than willing to invest massive amounts of money in the American economy to keep it going, fueling the very culture it is intent on resisting.

I take his point that alcohol and other drugs have been used by those in a position of power to keep their charges in state of thralldom. The use of alcohol to subjugate American Indians is well known. The FLN targeted bars and brothels during the Algerian independence struggle because these institutions were used by the French to demoralize and degrade the Algerian people, weakening their capacity to resist. The penetration of American urban ghettos by liquor stores is widely noted as contributing to the downward spiral of the disenfranchised. These attacks on what can be called the political economy of liquor are not sufficient to justify a total cultural prohibition of the practice. Alcohol consumption, for example, has often been used by progressive and leftist groups to build up comradery and group solidarity. The numerous drinking songs of the Wobblies and other left groups are an example of this (the International makes an excellent drinking song!). The absolute prohibition on consumption therefore can not be justified on political grounds alone. In the hands of an absolute monarchy like Saudi Arabia, the prohibition becomes another means to cultivate subservience to royal fiat. Abstaining from drink does not make you a chic revolutionary and indulging in it does not make you a dupe of imperialism.

The political economy of women's dress is a long and complex topic. It is easy to find justification for a number of views simply by observing the endless conga line of fashion trends that surge into prominence and then fade into oblivion. Coach bags? Those are totallyVeblenian objects of conspicuous consumption, meant to inspire an invidious comparison between those who possess them and those who do not. In previous times, a well-accessorized woman was a reflection of worth of the man who kept her, a form of vicarious consumption. Now these items have become direct status-symbols for the woman, reflecting the increasing integration of women into the mainstream of economic life. 

The endless round of seasonal variations that characterizes fashion in Pakistan serves many purposes: conspicuous consumption, assertion of identity in the midst of enforced religious anonymity, a creative outlet to compensate for narrowing prospects of professional empowerment. While on the subject of fashion, the speaker stated that it was odd that gay men worked as fashion designers for women. Acting on the theory that gay men are rejectors of women, he cited this as an example of the producers of mass culture having contempt for its consumers. This struck me as odd. It would seem to me that if one wanted a form of dress that did not attempt to objectify women as mere sexual objects, gay men (and heterosexual women, of course) would be just the ones to turn to. But I guess its hard to resist taking pot-shots against the gays.

The reasons which prompt individual women to take up the abaya and niqab are too numerous to mention. When this mode of dress becomes a uniform enforced by the power of the state, such as in Saudi, the effect is to reduce women to the status of what Agamben named Homo Sacer: sacred humans. Their rights are guaranteed in the abstract so that they may be violated in the concrete particulars. They are protected by way of abuse. In the words of the No Doubt song Just a Girl, 

"'Cause I'm just a girl, little 'ol me 
Don't let me out of your sight 
I'm just a girl, all pretty and petite 
So don't let me have any rights

'Cause I'm just a girl I'd rather not be 
'Cause they won't let me drive 
Late at night I'm just a girl, 
Guess I'm some kind of freak 
'Cause they all sit and stare
With their eyes"

This perfectly encapsulates the paternal voyeurism that plagues gender relations in most Muslim societies. The restrictions are really protections and any woman who in the least way foregos them is fair game for the male gaze and the male hand. I am reminded of Marx's passage in the Communist Manifesto: 
"Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class... the bourgeois is a bourgeois — for the benefit of the working class." 

One could easily rephrase this as:
"Burqas: for the protection of women. Driving restrictions: for the protection of women. Chaperones: for the protection of women. A patriarch is a patriarch, for the protection of women."


What the fight over women's dress in the context of Islam most thoroughly unveils (don't kill me!) is the extent to which women are excluded from this struggle. A political football can't be allowed to dictate its own trajectory. Militant secularists in Tunisia rip the veils from women and then rape them with soda bottles, Islamists (or old-fashioned misogynists) splash acid in the faces of unveiled women, representatives of Saudi state force girls back into their burning school because they don't have their scarfs, veiled women are denied a place in civil society in Turkey, Tunisia, and, increasingly, Western Europe. What is lacking, or, to be precise, actively silenced or ignored, is the voice of Muslim women themselves. The debate over appropriate dress needs to be one internal to the community of Muslim women, without the bearded men or the humanitarian warmongers intervening. Of the Muslim women who have been most active in shaping the debate over hijab, the four most influential have been Fatima Mernissi, Amina Wadud, Maryam Jameelah, Yvonne Ridley, and Asra Nomani. The first three wrote influential books touching on the issue and the last two have been prominent in activism and journalism. Of these four, only the latter has been prominent during the latest phase of the debate: the recent increase in islamophobia in the US and the attempts to criminalize the veil in Western Europe. Whatever side they take on this issue, Muslim women need to play a more prominent role in how it is decided. They should not remain mere objects of debate, but the principal participants.

Both the issue of alcohol and women's dress demonstrate the limits of a culture war as a response to empire. A culture war can easily provide the pretext for a community's incorporation into the global capitalist economy via the ideology of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is a ploy to support capitalism: it buys off the Muslim leadership, sells out the women, and paves the way for the more thorough capitalization of the Muslim world. We must think dialectically here. It is not a matter of islamophobes getting the government to start concentration camps. The professional islamophobes serve certain very specific goals: invoking the feared Other during a heated election, supporting US foreign policy vis-a-vis Israel. They will come and go as required. It is the ideology of multiculturalism that is the key to the long-term sustainability of capitalism. The dialectic of the closed, mono-cultural, (usually) mono-racial society proposed by the Islamophobes and their secular anti-immigrant allies pitted against the institutional advocates of liberal multi-culturalism will soon give way to a new synthesis: an ‘enlightened’ yet ‘principled’ tolerance that tames the Other, defangs it, and displays it for purposes of ideological reinforcement and entertainment. 

This dialectical process will repeated on a larger, global scale vis-a-vis the West and the Islamic world. The ultimate result will be ‘quaint’ survivals useful for justifying the existence of Western civilization as a way of life and, on the more liberal end, to meet the ideological requirement of tolerance of diversity. These survivals will be economically integrated, their resources, both physical and cultural, will be tapped, but they will be self-policing. Identity politics will give way to identity police. Saudi Arabia and Occupied Palestine are both illustrative examples. 

In the latter case, the West Bank plays the part of the respectable, secular Arab state. It clamps down on the Islamists, negotiates with Israel, and accepts money from the US in order to more effectively control its own people (an example of the latter being the funding of the Dahlan gangs’ attempted take over of Gaza). The Gaza Strip, under the rule of the Islamist Hamas party, acts as a crucible of Islamist political identity. When the pressure increases, the women feel it. Women, for example, can no longer smoke sheesha (hookah) in public. Lingerie ads are now banned, although perhaps this affects the men more than the women. Women are no longer free to have fabulous male hair-dressers. There is a dialectic at work here: the harder that one side asserts its secular/islamic identity, the greater the identity policing performed by the other side. In Gaza, women are slowly being squeezed back into the home while in the West Bank the space of political participation is being restricted to Fatah apparatchiks. The only solution for the vicious dialectic of multiculturalism is a new global project committed to universal emancipation. Partial solutions and parochial battles are no longer sufficient.

More Thoughts on Domestic Violence

One of the acts of a wife which may trigger the chastisement discussed in the earlier post on domestic violence is "nushuz" or disobedience. Nushuz covers many acts, including leaving the home without permission or refusing to have sex with the husband. Because of this, acting in a way that many if not most women living in the west (including Muslim women) take for granted, whether it be freedom of movement, freedom to work outside the home, the right to refuse her husband when she is angry or because she is simply not in the mood, is criminalized in the Shariah. While it is true that a wife may place many stipulations in the marriage contract, most women do not and, to quote Kecia Ali, "this approach misses the forest for the trees" because it "fail[s] to address the basic parameters of the marriage contract itself and the assumptions it is based on." More than this, it fails to take into consideration the universal ethical principles that make life in a diverse, multicultural society possible.

It is this lack of principle that I find to be the most objectionable trait of the Muslim community. All the other evils that I have written about or will write about in this blog, gender injustice, racism, irrational prejudice against Jews and homosexuals, etc., are symptoms of this cardinal failing. Muslims are quite quick to condemn the injustices done to them by invoking universal moral norms or by taking shield behind legal structures that embody these norms, such as the Bill of Rights. On the other hand, when criticism is made of certain Islamic practices, they are just as quick to retreat into the particularities of their own religion, eschewing any universal framework for moral thought. 

While the theoretical foundation can be quite different and specific application may vary, the universal ethical principles which have guided moral decision making have at least one trait in common: they admonish us to place care for the other and care for ourselves on equal footing. This is true whether we are talking about the Golden Rule (in it's Jewish, Christian, or Confucian forms), the principle of utility, the Categorical Imperative, veil of ignorance underlying Rawls' Theory of Justice, or Schopenhauer's injunction to "harm no one; on the contrary help everyone as much as you can." These rules force use to take a universal perspective in our decision making, to consider other people as beings with the same inherent worth as we ourselves possess. This universality is independent of their usefulness to us, our emotional attachment to them, or their familial, cultural, or religious bonds to us. Unfortunately, Islam's version of the universal rule, "Love for your brother what you love for yourself" is ambiguous. While many Muslims interpret the term "brother" (akh in arabic) in a universal sense, embracing all of humanity, there are a large number of Islamist ideologues who interpret this term in an exclusive way, referring only to the brotherhood of Muslims. Another ambiguity, to return to the topic of this post, is the manner in which this principle is applied in practice. 

Islam is the religion of Submission. Muslims seek the pleasure of Allah and a share in his paradise by way of a life-transaction or, in Arabic, deen. This life-transaction requires sincere submission to a number of religious rites, restrictions, and duties. When notions of gender equality are mentioned to Islamic scholars and other ideologues, the most common apologetic tactic is to invoke the notion of this ultimate goal. Yes, we should love for our sisters in Islam what we love for ourselves. In this case, we should want them to go to paradise just as we desire to go to paradise. The way to paradise according to Islam is clear: in the sphere of gender relations it requires obedience to certain norms regarding dress, speech, association with members of the opposite gender, and compliance with certain laws regarding marriage and family life. Islam is not concerned with equality but equity. A good husband is not the one who indulges his wife's desire but one who ensures that she gets to paradise via adherence to the formal code. Indeed, as any member of the Tableeghi Jamaat will tell you, men will be held accountable for the action of "their women." This creates a further incentive, beyond the strictly ethical, to maintain prescribed norms within the Muslim household. The problem with this approach is that it permits virtually any behavior in the name of the benevolent tutelage of the wife and the sanctity of the home.

To what extremes can this attitude lead? Kecia Ali argues that, based on a study of several Sunni legal texts, "The husband's right to derive pleasure from his wife... led the jurists to grant him total control over her mobility." She quotes a striking example from the Hanafi Law Book, Kitab an-Nafaqat, by Al-Khassaf. What measure can the husband take in response to a refusal of sexual relations? "Is it lawful for the husband to have sex with her against her will...? It is lawful because she is a wrongdoer." This is not an isolated opinion, at least not within the Hanafi school which is dominant in South and Central Asia and parts of the Middle East. Marital rape is a serious issue in every community. It does not need a religious sanction or motivation to occur; it is an expression of the desire for absolute power over another. When this illicit desire is fed the fuel of piety and righteousness, when it is combined with the urge to punish a wrongdoer, it is easy for the marital chamber to become a torture chamber.

Islam and Domestic Violence

The reaction of the Muslim community to domestic violence is extremely ambiguous. On the one hand, there are organizations that do good work, especially in providing women’s shelters. On the other hand, we have a community that is in deep denial about the existence of spousal and child abuse within our homes. This results in a continuance of problems that, in any other community, would have been long ago resolved and in a chronic lack of funding for the organizations mentioned above.



This ambiguity has its root in two realities of the Muslim community: troubling textual sources that appear to give permission for domestic violence and the desire to maintain a “good” image for the community. The latter has its origins in the struggle for acceptance and for relevance that the Muslim community has engaged in since the fall of the Islamic world as a major world power. This impulse can be found in virtually any community, religious or non-religious, that has a stake in the battle for public opinion. While disturbing, it is not unique to Muslims.



The textual source is a uniquely Muslim problem. In the 4th verse of Surat an-Nisaa’ (Womankind) Muslim men are given the command “iḍribūhunna” in the context of dealing with a disobedient wife. This literally means “hit them” or “strike them.” The verb Daraba (he hit) is a favorite among Arabic Grammarians and is used often in giving examples of new grammatical forms. Zaidun Daraba Huseinan (Zaid hit Husein), unfortunately, can quickly become Zaidun Daraba Hindan.



Recently, I had a conversation with a friend who is a native Arabic speaker on this subject. Her objection was not just to the command itself, but to the ambiguity of the command. As Muslims apologists are quick to point out, the verb Daraba has more than one meaning, even in the Qur’an. In the name of apologetics or even reform one could use these alternate meanings to defang the command. But, as my friend pointed out, the very ambiguity is what does the most damage: it allows some to live with themselves and continue to maintain a religious system which gives permission to others to engage in domestic violence. She argued that this ambiguity makes it hard to believe that the Qur’an (or parts of it, at least) is a true scripture sent down by an Omniscient being. Such a being would know precisely how these ambiguities would be used for evil and would therefore avoid them.



There is a further problem with this command, however. Let’s assume the apologists are correct and this is not a reference to physical violence. Let’s go beyond them and assume it really is unambiguous and any interpretation which gives permission for physical violence is in bad faith and unauthentic. We are then forced to confront the problem of existential choice. This command and obedience to it affirms a system of values in which men have authority over women and have the right to admonish, instruct, and discipline them. It is a system of values in which women are reduced to permanent childhood and tutelage vis-a-vis men. This system of values finds its concrete expression in the legal systems of various Muslim countries. Even more “liberal” nations are deeply steeped in a patronising patriarchy, an phenomena illustrated in this report out of the United Arab Emirates.



I find this much more disturbing and destructive to faith than any empirical test of religion (i.e. Did Ancient Egyptians crucify people, was there a flood that killed Nuh’s people, etc.). When I was in college, I had a professor who was astonished and disappointed by my conversion. He brought up this verse and I was ready with my copy of Muhamad Asad commentary explaining all of the problems away. A tooth brush (miswak) was all that was meant and it was purely ceremonial! My professor told me (paraphrasing), “What right does a man have to subject a woman to such an undignified ceremony?” I had no answer for that and I still do not. No one has the right to strip away the dignity of another person, in the name of religion, the family, or pure egotism. As a thinking being endowed with a body, I affirm a set of values when I think and I act. That is the higher level of my responsibility, beyond the thoughts and actions themselves. Is it possible to affirm a set of values that avoids the injustices that are rampant in the Muslim community and yet still authentically Islamic? I now have serious doubts.

Islam and Race Relations

Towards the end of my first marriage, my soon-to-be ex told me that she should have married another Pakistani because he would understand her better. We never had disagreements directly about race, so I assume this is a judgement about the overall trend of my behavior. Because I was consciously adopting a Pakistani identity I no doubt engaged in too much essenctializing, reducing the complex phenomena of Pakistani culture to easily adopted symbols. The increased intensity of my commitment to Islam which followed upon my trip to Lahore and Islamabad also contributed to the deterioration of our relationship, for related reasons. I fastened on to the Islamic identity of Pakistan while that aspect of Pakistan was what she disliked the most. She favored the elements of continuity with the shared culture of India, even learning Bharatnatyam.

I've had to struggle with this issue since I first converted to Islam. I always felt bad when my brothers (or my then wife) would call me "the white guy?" Didn't they get the message that I wasn't white anymore? Didn't they see my long scraggly beard, my kufi, my shalwar-kameez? Didn't they see the kafiyyah I wore in solidarity with my Occupied brothers and sisters in Palestine? I got called the same names they did, "rag-head," "sand-nigger," and what not. Why couldn't they get with the program? Now, of course, I see how pretentious and narcissistic this was. I think the comments that I received that I was more Pakistani than Pakistani people may have been a good-natured attempt to get me see the reality of my position. In the end, I could shave my beard and switch back to jeans and a t-shirt. They were stuck with their skin-colour, facial features, and names. It's not good to humour someone with an obsessive "Dances with Wolves" complex.

While not a major problem in my current marriage, there have been some flare ups. There has never been an argument over specific things that I have said, but my comments here and there left her with a nagging feeling that I look at her in a paternalistic way. The problem for me is two fold: I have to look at myself, my actions, my words and determine what truth there is in her statement and I have to express my reply in a way that will not strengthen the very suspicions that it is meant to alleviate.

Zizek mentioned the need to get beyond the paternalistic multicultural bullshit that keeps us from connecting as individuals (the my culture is great, your culture is great syndrome). But it is sometimes that connection that leads to a more intense racial feeling; when we feel connected, we express ourselves more freely. When we express ourselves more freely, we are more likely to say something that will be misconstrued or that becomes demeaning due to the social position of the person making the statement. Should I then retreat into the multicultural bubble, expressing my admiration for her culture or, to be more precise, for the strength of Indian women? Is that not patronizing as well? Zizek's answer to this conundrum was to form a new solidarity based on struggle. It may not be a panacea, but I think it will be an effective response not just to the problem of inter-cultural or inter-racial marriages, but to solidarity within the Muslim and American communities. We can unite together in the struggle to build a strong family, to deal with the serious issues facing the Muslim community,to confront the flagrant injustice that constitutes the social fabric in America.

Zizek on the Qur'an and Science

"We find the same phenomena in some forms of contemporary Islam: hundreds of books by scientists "demonstrate" how the latest scientific advances confirm the insights and injunctions of the Koran- the divine prohibition of incest is confirmed by recent genetic knowledge about the defective children born of incestuous copulation, and so on and so forth. (Some even go so far as to claim that what the Koran offers as an article of faith to be accepted because of its divine origin is not finally demonstrated as scientific truth, thereby reducing the Koran itself to an inferior mythic version of what has acquired its appropriate formulation in contemporary science.)" In Defense of Lost Causes

I have personally seen this taken to such an extreme that scientific expertise is called on to result disputes in the fiqh (Islamic law) of prayer. It was recently argued that the sunnah of doing prostration directly on the earth instead of a rug is confirmed by the fact that the discharge of static electricity between the earth and forehead changes the mental state of the prayer, conferring feelings of peace and contentment. 

A little bit later, Zizek observes that "the true danger of fundamentalism does not reside in the fact that it poses a threat to secular scientific knowledge, but in the fact that it poses a threat to authentic belief itself." Fundamentalism squeezes out of existence any space for enlightened belief, a belief that is not founded on certainty but instead on existential choice as to the constellation of values that will be affirmed.

Who am I?

I am a white convert to Islam. I have written elsewhere of my conversion to Islam giving the rational arguments I found persuasive, describing my experience as an activist against the Occupation of Palestine and against the Iraq War as essential in framing the emotional structure which made my conversion posible. These considerations are true as far as they go, but they are incomplete. I am a white convert to Islam. That needs to be foregrounded to understand the innerworkings of the process of deliberation that resulted in my choice. My conversion can be fruitfully interpreted as a fetishistic disavowal of my own whiteness. Filled with rage at the rank injustices perpetrated against the “third world” abroad and against people of color at home, I sought to distance myself from the cultural and social order that were responsible and, if possible, acquired oppression. Michael Muhammad Knight has written on this phenomenon in his articles for Muslim Wake Up!, so this may not be surprising to some of my readers. I do think that there was something deeper going on here than a case of bad conscience. I never, for example, disavowed my Appalachian heritage or my Irish heritage or my German heritage. I think that I was attempting to give up my status as a pure cartesian subject, a universal man, and embrace a new particularity. The category of white, in western culture at least, is the category of the cartesian subject. It alone is universal, free from history but engaged in the conversation of ideas. All other identities, black, Arab, Indian, Muslim, Jewish, are particular, contingent, bound up inextricably in their specific histories and struggles. The problem, of course, is that this transforms white people into rootless cyphers with no history, no sense of the past while at the same time making it possible to exclude those assigned a particular identity from category of universal humanity that are recognized as the bearers of human rights. It doesn't just suck to be you. It sucks to be. I think this phenomena is profoundly illustrated by the late history of Judaism. From the enlightenment until the rise of the Nazis, the Jewish struggle was to define themselves a cartesian, universal men, as members of a cosmopolitan society free from the particularities of their religion and ethnicity. Judaism itself began to take on this character, transforming, in the guise of Reform Judaism, into a universal monotheism. The Jewish mission then became of one of being the apostles of universality. The failure of this project, culminating in the rise of the Nazis, launched the Jewish people onto a new trajectory: they now seek to particularize themselves, their culture, language and religion. The acme of this particularization is the State of Israel, the ultimate state of exception.

I am a white convert to Islam. I fell in love with a woman of Pakistani descent. This sustained my interest in Islam and, along with my inability to accept the sordid fruit of Zionism, resulted in my rejection of Judaism as a viable religious choice. This is ironic, given that, like many Pakistani women born in this country, her relationship with Islam was and is strained at best. Regardless, I loved her madly, she reciprocated in her own way and we married. The following years were varied in their emotional texture but I recall them as happy. I desperately embraced a Pakistani identity, learning Urdu, reading up on the history and culture of Pakistan, enjoying urdu poetry, listening to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Junoon. I even embraced the appropriate even-handed apologetic stance when the subject of the 1971 civil war was brought up. Despite all of this, there were fundamental illusions underpinning are relationship and failings of character on both sides. We divorced and I had to come to terms with my immediate lack of identity once Pakistan had been subtracted from me.

For a time, I seriously considered leaving Islam. I stopped using my muslim name, flirted in my quiet way with non-Muslim girls, didn't pray very much, etc. My Muslim identity was saved by the fortuitous advent of Ramadan and the considerable amount of time that members of the Muslim Student Association spent with me. I swallowed my doubts, completed my degree, went to work in the community. I got married again. But a doubt deferred, like a dream, explodes.

And that brings me to this current project. The only way to find closure, one way or another, is for me to write about and explore the cracks I see in the edifice in Islam. To explore also my own inner life and the hidden springs of my intentions. Some of this blog will be political, some philosophical, some polemical, some personal. I welcome your comments, for and against, Muslim, Atheist, Christian, Hindu, Jew.

I will say, quite clearly, that I am not Irshad Manji. I am not Ibn Warraq. I am not Ayan Hirsi Ali. I still love my Muslim friends and I still see good in the community and beauty in the religion. I am categorically and unequivocally against imperialism, sexism, and racism in all of their forms. I am a hard-core anti-Capitalist and unrepentent Leftist. What brings me to this present venture is my growing feeling that this is simply not enough. To quote Rage Against the Machine, “I'm a truth addict, oh shit I gotta head rush.” I need to reconcile the contradictions I see, in the intellectual edifice of Islam itself, between the ideology of Islam and empirical reality, between the ideals and the practice of the Muslim community. This last is complicated; it is not that Muslims fail to live up to the perfect ideals of Islam. Often, I see Muslims behaving virtuously and courageously in spite of Islam. This especially true when it comes to the rights of women, where I see many people desperately seeking justification in texts for the upright actions dictated by their hearts.