I only have taken one undergraduate course in Islam, and that was 22 years ago. Despite having read much since then, I don't claim to be an expert in any aspect of this complex religion. There are posters, and commenters, here much better qualified than I am to write about this. But the recent row over the role of Islam in Iraq's constitution made me revisit some thoughts -- or gropings toward thought -- I had on the topic. I put them here for amendment and criticism. If nothing else, perhaps the link to Al-Sistani's Web site will repay the use of bandwidth.
Both the Islamic world and the secular West live by the rule of law, but in the one case the law is evolved primarily from secular, rational traditions and in the other it is laid down by the hand of God and is one with the worship of God. [Samuel Huntington, surveying the world, finds that only the West and Hindu civilization separate religion and politics. "In Islam, God is Caesar; in China and Japan, Caesar is God; in Orthodoxy, God is Caesar's junior partner."]
Islam is a path through a defined space, with firm walls and open courses. In Islam, every act of life, from dressing to wife-beating, is an act of worship (or, if done wrongly, a fault in worship).
Some people instantly feel stifled there. Not all traditions fit all people. Huston Smith, the great religious scholar, writes a telling anecdote in an introduction to a book on Islam. Smith writes that he felt an instant affinity for the supple music of the Upanishads, but was repelled by the legalistic rigidity of Islam. Then he met another Western religious scholar who confessed he had no idea what the Hindu texts were talking about, "but when I read the Koran, I'm home."
" 'Umdat al-Salik wa 'Uddat al-Nasik" ("Reliance of the Traveller and Tools of the Worshipper"), is a classic manual of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) based on the Shafi'i school of thought. As the English translator of my edition of "Reliance of the Traveller" writes:"I had been a commercial fisherman in the North Pacific for seven seasons, and I remembered a book the captain used to keep in the wheelhouse near the charts, a book of bearings, with the precise compass directions between one point of land and another in Alaskan waters. This was the sort of work I hoped to produce in shari'a, a book that I could open up and find accurate, substantive ethical knowledge to apply in my life."Muslim jurists count 500 Qu'ranic verses with legal content. Their proportion in the Qu'ran is even greater than that appears, because the rest of the Qu'ran often repeates itself, both thematically and verbatim, but the legal subject matter in it almost never does. And the average length of the legal verses is two or three times that of the average non-legal verses. Some have argued, and it would be difficult to refute them, that the Qu'ran contains "no less legal material than does the Torah." Even in Mecca, Muhammad was organizing his followers into a community, a political and social unit. In Medina, he not only set up a "constitution" for governing the city, he served as an arbitration judge. "Law can never be deemed Islamic without being somehow anchored in these two sources (Qu'ran and Sunna)" [Wael B. Hallaq, A History of Islamic Legal Theories]. But taken altogether, the legalistic aspects of Islamic tradition fall short of a full code of laws. And they fail to take into account, obviously, anything that has gone on in the world since about 800 C.E.
In propounding his message, the Prophet plainly wished to break away from pre-Islamic values and institutions, but only insofar as he needed to establish once and for all the fundaments of the new religion. Having been pragmatic, he could not have done away with all the social practices and institutions that prevailed in his time. [Hallaq]That leaves Islam in the worst possible situation, commitment to religious law, but with an incomplete and badly dated system of law. A tendency toward legal structure without a finished form. That leaves it vulnerable, eternally, to determined minds that would install their own dark, bloody, reactionary, anti-humanist desires into the word of God. Sometimes it takes an outsider to see things plain. Like Robert G. Ingersoll, the great 19th century agnostic. What he said of Protestant Christianity might as well apply to Islam:
The Catholics have a Pope. Protestants laugh at them, and yet the Pope is capable of intellectual advancement. In addition to this, the Pope is mortal, and the church cannot be afflicted with the same idiot forever. The Protestants have a book for their Pope. The book cannot advance. Year after year, and century after century, the book remains as ignorant as ever.There are other ways to interpret Islam. Brilliant minds and brave hearts in the Islamic world have advanced them from time to time. But they never seem to make much headway. Even in the modern-day "crisis" of Islamic thought, the bid to give reason a place alongside revelation must be rooted in God, not man. When humanistic and positivist tendencies collide with the imperatives of revelation, in the Muslim world, revelation wins. Even among those who reject the medievalism of the old ways as irrelevant to the modern age. "Except for a minority of secularists, the great majority of modern Muslim thinkers and intellectuals insist upon the need to maintain the connection between law and the divine command." [Hallaq]
This gives Islamic reformers a long, steep path to climb. For instance, Ali Abd al-Raziq (1925) argued that there was no Islamic authority for the caliphate and that Islam has no political component. It was a radical argument yet forcefully made and in the finest Islamic scholarly style. It had some influence among secularizing Muslims in the middle of the last century, before the Islamist Revival swept it off the board.
Yet even if al-Raziq is accepted, the societal rules of the Qu'ran and Sunna -- with regard to women, say, or to religious minorities -- remain binding on individual Muslims.
In Iran a generation later, Mohammed Mosaddeq seems to have held the view (per Roy Mottahedeh) that Shi'a jurisprudence allowed a central role for common sense and for parliaments to pick and choose from Islamic law such dogmas as were appropriate to the modern situation at hand. With that approach, if the CIA and the British oil interests and the shah had not got to him first, he undoubtedly would have faced a challenge sooner or later from the ayatollahs.
The daunting difficulty of breaking through that impasse, I think, is why many Muslims reject rationalism and modernity as Western corruptions, and seek a "puritan" Islam. And since Islam was born in a time of war to the death against unbelievers, only a few small steps stand between fundamentalist Islam to jetliners plowed into skyscrapers.
Thoughtful Muslim reformers in the past century have tried to navigate a path between secularism and Shari'a. If the choice offered to the Islamic people must be between Shari'a and Western secularism, however, Shari'a always will win, as it is the Islamic alternative, bound up in that people's sense of religious duty and resentment of the West. And the Islamists know this, and in their Anti-Western and anti-modern extremism, they prevent a third way. By keeping the Shari'a immutable, by making it heresy to attempt to alter a word of it, the fundamentalists keep control of the political flow.
Their goal is not merely to hold political power. That is their means to the end they seek. It is not to make laws. It is to enforce laws laid down in the mid-Seventh Century C.E., by the word of God.
This, too, is why I think it matters less to the Shi'ites than the Sunnis whether Iraq is officially denominated an "Islamic republic." The Sunnis may have their eyes on the caliphate. But whatever the laws of the nation, the Shi'ites will be bound to the set of rules and behaviors laid down by the various ayatollahs. Every one who is a shi'ite must look to one or the other of these sources of inspiration as his religious guide. And each of the ayatollahs spends a great deal of time and effort teaching his followers how to live, what to do, what to avoid.
Al Sistani, for instance, even has an English language Web site listing his prescriptions.
Islam divides things into pak (pure) and najis (unclean). Al Sistani lists "ten things are essentially najis." They include blood, shit, piss, dead bodies, pigs, dogs -- and infidels (kafir). Even the tears of an infidel, if he eats pork, are unclean.
Islamic theologians debate who exactly is a kafir, and especially whether the term applies to Christians and Jews. Sistani has a fairly humane interpretation of Islam. He believes Christians and Jews may be pak, not najis. Then again, they may not be. Because of the uncertainty, he advises, "it is better to avoid them." According to Sistani.org:An infidel i.e. a person who does not believe in Allah and His Oneness, is najis. ... As regards the people of the Book (i.e. the Jews and the Christians) who do not accept the Prophethood of Prophet Muhammad bin Abdullah (Peace be upon him and his progeny), they are commonly considered najis, but it is not improbable that they are Pak. However, it is better to avoid them.As a polytheist, I'm clearly najis. Could I be treated in a hospital if I fell sick in a land where this division of pure and impure was believed? Could I be permitted to use a public toilet? As I read Sistani's interpretation, if I shake hands with a Muslim, who is sweating, he becomes najis by his contact with me. And if he dries his hand on a towel, that towel, too, becomes najis. But if another Muslim with wet hands uses the towel, the najis is not communicated to him.The entire body of a Kafir, including his hair and nails, and all liquid substances of his body, are najis.
If the parents, paternal grandmother and paternal grandfather of a minor child are all kafir, that child is najis, except when he is intelligent enough, and professes Islam. When, even one person from his parents or grandparents is a Muslim, the child is Pak.
If a Pak thing touches a najis thing and if either or both of them are so wet that the wetness of one reaches the other, the Pak thing will become najis.
Thanks for a good essay. I think you've painted the picture correctly. Islam does have a mode for change, ijtihad. But the "door of translation" has been closed for centuries. Muslims need to find a way to break the lock on that door.
Individual Muslims have opened that door, in much the same way that individual Catholics have decided that the Church is wrong on birth control: they say, "Well, maybe, but that's between God and me." Collections of individuals make up societies and most Islamically oriented societies have stepped through the door that they opened for themselves. As a result, we have "tolerant" Islamic societies such as Turkey and Mali or, generally speaking, Indonesia. Fundamentalists, of course, who claim "orthodoxy" as their right, do not agree.
There is an aspect of Islam that is frequently overlooked, however: Pragmatism. Islamic law has loopholes galore for situations beyond an individual's control. Travelers, pregnant women, and soldiers in arms, for example, need not fast for Ramadan. A missed prayer can be made up at a later, more convenient time. Heart valves made from pig tissue can be surgically implanted. (Strongly challenging Sistani's concept of najis.
And even though Sistani's form of Shiism ('Usuli) is the dominant one, it's not the only one. In Iraq and along the Arab littoral, but predominantly in Bahrain, you find Akbari Shi'a who reject the role of a religious leadership. They say that ever since the 12th Imam vanished, there is no-one more qualified to give religious advice than anyone else. This tolerance for individual choice in the absence of religious dictate, this willingness to let religion be between God and the individual, leads to some fairly incredible results, like the daughter of an Akbari imam marrying the son of a Jewish merchant. Incredible, at least, to those who see Islam as monolithic.
From the beginning Jews had an oral tradition which modified the written tradition.
I don't think Islam has that flexibility. At least if you believe the current gang out to grab the brass ring.
"I don't think Islam has that flexibility."
No, it has that flexibility. It's just that every so often the wind blows out of the desert, dries up any spirit of charity and inquiry in Islam, and leaves it to crumble in the resulting aridness.
This is not a new thing. It's happened again and again in Islam's history. It happened before the Crusades. It happened before the reconquest of Spain. It's tied to the fact that the two signs of Islam are the Koran and Victory. When Islam falters and fails to achieve victory, the true believers can only blame the defeat on each other for departing from 'Islam'. Then the warriors murder the philosophers and the jurists. Then the civilization crumbles, and after they run out of people and Jews to murder, they blame The Outsider for some cunning plan that is responcible for their misery.
This of course requires a certain degree of cognitive dissonance, because afterall, how can the outsider thwart the will of God? I've never understood that part, but that's how it is.
The history of Islam is like the desert. Mostly barren and blasted, with occassional flowerings of great beauty when well watered, followed by swift death and withering when the heat returns.
A very informative essay. The only exception I will take is that I don't think we're as far away from them as we often think. I say this after reading this morning that Falwell has called for a fatwa against Hugo Chavez. Also, I worry about the Christians in this country who claim to be "oppressed" by secular humanism. However, I must admit that, realistically, we have a long way to go before we're in as bad a shape.
Some Fella, actually I think one of the import differences between American Protestantism and much of Islam is that when a preacher in the U.S. -- a Falwell or a Robertson (it was he who called for the assassination of Chavez) or a Franklin Graham -- speaks out and says something provocative or stupid, he speaks only for himself. Even the members of his church are in no sense bounf by his words.
In the Islamic world, an imam or other religious leader speaks, and for many thousands, at least in theory, that word is law.
I think many Muslims haven't been told enough to understand this difference, therefore the words of a Franklin Graham can be far more damaging to the cause of cross-civilization dialogue than those of a senator or prime minister.
"The only exception I will take is that I don't think we're as far away from them as we often think. I say this after reading this morning that Falwell has called for a fatwa against Hugo Chavez."
The fact that you have to resort to a non-English word to express your meaning indicates to me that we are probably much farther away than you understand. In fact, it suggests to me that we are farther away than you are presently capable of imagining. By this I do not mean to fault your intelligence, but rather to note that the distances involved are right out of your reconning in much the same fashion that a Minister I heard speaking this morning was unable to imagine the scale of galaxies and so said that there was a distant galaxy so huge that 'it took 9 years for light to travel across it'.
There is no real word in modern English you can apply to Robertson's statement to express the meaning you want to give it, and that's because you can't make fatwa's in America. You can't even think fatwa's in America. We lack the culture for even understanding one, as is evidence by the fact that you thought Robertson's statement was one.
I once had a fellow Christian from a different denomination who knew of my particular background who said to me, "So, I here that your denomination finally renounced the heresy of semi-pelagianism." This was news to me, I hadn't heard that we were semi-pelagians, much less that anyone had renounced it, and so I responded, "Your perception is based on four false ideas: first that I belong to a denomination, second that we have official creeds, third that there is anyone in the Church in a position to tell everyone else what to believe, and fourthly that we proscribe to a doctrine of Salvation by Knowledge and thus care particularly about such fine points of theology."
To differ a bit with Ingersoll, I would add that the difference between Protestant Christianity and Islam is that Protestants emphasize that man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law, and thus an individual or system of modernizing religious law is not needed.
The book cannot advance. Year after year, and century after century, the book remains as ignorant as ever.
I don't think that is the point.
Islam, as you say, rules over civil matters, and rules on them in a clear way incompatible not only with the Western World, but with any other culture. It is not a matter of interpretation, it is clearly described what is an infidel and what is a jihad, and how persons are not equal before the law. That is the truth and we must face it to understand the actual dimension of the problem. Personally, I would not compare Christianism or many other religions with it.
The solution? Well, Attaturk, facing the colonization of Turkey, abolished the rule of Islam over civil matters and saved his motherland, but Turks are Turks.
I agree with Joe A. Simple analogies between Islam and other religions aren't really that helpful. The degree to which that is true can't really be understood until you actually undertake to read the Koran.
I think that the biggest difference between Islam and Christianity is for the purposes of this discussion, Christianity right from the start operated as an non-state institution which leaves the door wide open for a separation between church and state. Christs proclamations like, "Render unto Ceasar the things that are of Caesar..." and "My kingdom is not of this world...", develop in the Pauline epistles into a fully realized (but not always applied) doctrine separating the Church and the state, the secular from the spiritual. Islam is nothing like that and has nothing like that. There is nothing in Islam to provide a basis for the separation of Church and state. Mohammed's kingdom was most manifestly of this world.
Let me go ahead and get some more death threats. The basic problem with Islam is that the Koran is a particularly flawed book, particularly for the purposes to which the Moslems are trying to put it. The most remarkable thing for me about Islam is that anyone ever thought the Koran was particularly remarkable. It's not even well written. It's a tedious and self-contrictory work, filled with tense shifts, spelling errors, bizarre grammar and arcane archaic words the meaning of which is often unknown even to the Arabs, and its seems at times to consist of nothing more than endlessly repeated exhortations to obey 'the Prophet'. Anyone expecting when opening the Koran to find something like the Bible is going to be shocked. You open up a translation of the Greek and Hebrew bible, and you expect to see something which reads like literature - at least through large sections. I'm convinced that the main reason for claiming that you have to speak Arab to understand the beauty of the Koran is that otherwise they would have to explain why the Koran is so appalling bad literature.
But of course, the Koran is the sole 'attested' miracle of Islam. The Koran is thier sign and wonder, and without it the religion has nothing to stand on. Even the portentious seeming early conquests have turned to dust. So, the Koran must be unquestionable, because to question it is to call into question the only shred of common fabric in the whole of the culture.
The problem of course is, that as a deeply flawed document, no one came really agree on what it means. You think that this is a problem shared by Islam and Christianity, but that's like saying tricycles and space shuttles are the same because they share the properties of being vehicles. Christian apologists can make a show of believing that thier document is coherent and doesn't contridict itself. Moslem scholars don't even bother, and instead are forced adopt a doctrine of superceding revelation to explain its manifest contridictions.
Sure, its easy to say that all law should be based on the Koran, but the disconnected 500 or so legal proclamations of Mohammed didn't even begin to cover the breadth of the legal needs of the community even in 8th century, much less today. I think it is unfair to say that the problem with the legal strictures of the Koran is that they are dated. The problem is that they were outdated even at the time that they were written and failed as a sole guide almost immediately. For example, notably absent in the supposed perfect body of law is the very obvious question of how you pick a successor. Choosing a successor is the fundamental question of government. In fact, we distinguish governments largely by how they answer this question - monarchy, democracy, meritocracy are all words which have to do with not just who has the power, but how that power is transfered. The open endedness of the succession question resulted in the first major rift in Islam, and keeps Arabs killing each other and thier neighbors to this very day.
You can use the partial picture of how to run a society which is the Koran in one of two ways. Either you can take that partial picture and then fill in the blank areas in some pragmatic fashion which works in a clumsy fashion as long as you squint and don't look to closely for the hypocracies, or you can take the society and try to chip off everything that isn't in the Koran's picture - which results in a broken society that doesn't in fact function in nearly the Utopian fashion that it is billed to.
And the really ironic thing is that today's Islamic reformers that want to return the Ummah to the glory days of the 9th or 10th century when Islam was in thier minds 'pure' are so badly educated that they don't realize that when Islam actually had glory days, it was because the jurists of that day had adopted a flexible and tolerant version of Islam that looks nothing at all like the version that the modern Jihadists envision. In fact, back in the 'good old days' that the modern jihadists are always wishing for, the jihadists would have been executed as terrorists by the very people that they claim to admire.