Saudi Witches and the Shari'a
As many of you may have heard, Saudi Arabia, vanguard of progressive rationalism, has sentenced under the rules of the shari'a a woman to death by beheading (there's that beheading again, a seeming favorite of the Wahhabi kingdom--and I'm still looking for proof that Iran beheads, I remain deeply skeptical given the revulsion I hear among Shi'a towards this particular form of punishment). The crime was "witchcraft". Apparently she made a man impotent and also told a divorced woman that her husband would return to her at a particular time, and he did, which of course proves that he was under a spell she cast. She confessed as did the Salem women before her, then retracted it and thus stands the case. If someone's life weren't at stake, the whole affair is actually rather funny, but for our purposes, rather than comment further on this silliness, I thought I would try to provide some perspective on the Islamcity and historical tradition concerning this crime of witchcraft.
Certainly, there is much in the Qur'an to suggest a mystical and occult world of unseen spirits (described as Jinns, or genies) and powerful sinister forces. One of the most common verses carried throughout the Middle East reads "and those who disbelieved nearly caused you harm through their stares when they heard the Message and said 'He is Possessed by the Jinns', yet it is nothing but a Message of Deliverance to the Peoples of the World." It's actually quite beautiful in Arabic but there is implicit a world of Jinns, and the idea that someone could actually hurt the Prophet with a stare. Another popular chapter, also seen in many places, reads "I take refuge in the Lord of the Daybreak, from the evil he has created, from the evil of the darkness as it spreads, from the evil of those who blow on knots, and from the evil of the envious." The evil eye, the conjurers who blow on knots, a dark, mystical place of black magic from which only God provides refuge.
Building on this, the classical jurists made witchcraft into a sort of crime. The real issue was whether it was a scriptural crime (the "hadd"), one of the seven crimes specifically linked to Holy Text, or what are known as "discretionary" crimes, those that are close enough to the scriptural crimes but for some reason are outside its parameters. They never really agreed on this. To the extent it is one of the seven scriptural crimes, it was argued to be a form of apostasy, which carries a sentence of death. If discretionary, it wasn't quite apostasy, it's not like you're necessarily denying Islam by being a witch, but sorta kinda close enough. As for the punishment if discretionary, or how close to the scriptural crime you have to be to fit under it, it's all in the judge's discretion (hence the term).
Of course that was all long ago, and at the start of the 20th century, the reformist Muhammad Abduh from the premier Sunni Islam institution of learning, the Azhar, was not successful at many things, but did manage to rid Islam of a fair amount of the superstitious nonsense. So certainly most of us who practice Islam but are reasonably educated take this stuff more figuratively than literally. I haven't thought much about Jinns, nobody taught me to. I use the term "possessed by Jinns" all the time in Arabic "majnoon", but really it just means "wacko" when I say it, and I think it's understood that way too. I don't think I'd know what to say if someone responded "which Jinn?"
But that said, there's still talk of evil eyes and people still use various talismans with Quranic verses like the ones quoted above to ward off the Jinns and witches and conjurers. I have a good friend, a Basra lawyer who served on Iraq's Constitutional Drafting Committee. His father's name? "The Pain, the Trouble." The point was to ward off the evil eye by giving him a name nobody would want. Educated person of course, quite smart, and his grandparents kept up these traditions and had these concerns.
So we have a reduced, but real, presence of this sort of occultism in Islam in the current day. Where does that leave witchcraft as crime? Pretty far away from the concerns of most Muslims. Evil eyes if their kids have nice names or go to good schools, yes there's concern. Enough to have my mom the medical doctor recite some mantra with this awful smelling spice over my head every time i go home. but enough concern to start beheading people? Certainly not. I have actually heard at least one law professor from Baghdad argue that women have special magic powers that should be subject to tort, but he was about as extreme as they came on this point and certainly no such notion appears in Iraqi tort law. Most seemed to care enough about this occult world to do things that didn't seem to have much consequence (names, weird spices, Koranic talsimans) but no more. I suppose as a result we have our share of faith healers who invoke spirits, but they exist in the US too, and all of that is a far cry from beheadings.
As a result, you don't see this witch nonsense rear its ugly head very often. Even in Islamic societies where apostasy is taken pretty seriously (as noted, changing religion from Islam technically requires death under the classical juristic rules with some qualifications though reformists have a different take), I haven't heard anyone claim apostasy because of witchcraft.
Except in those rare cases where someone actually changes their religion, apostasy is more to exert thought control, to declare someone has renounced Islam because they've expressed an opinion on something the Muslim Brotherhood doesn't like. Maybe they said that Muhammad wasn't Infallible or something. But to try someone for witchcraft is odd in this era I think.
But of course Saudi is sort of in a league of its own, and has been since the Taliban fell (only Taliban Afghanistan among states were as odd as the Saudis) and so their clerics brought this back. At first they seemed to say it was a scriptural crime, a hadd, which had to be the apostasy one, but then when the confessions were retracted, meaning they didn't have scriptural proof (which requires two witnesses or a confession) but were pretty sure she did it (come on, a guy was impotent and another guy went back to his wife, what more proof could you need than that!) they employed the discretionary principle to say it was close enough and therefore a discretionary crime and they decided death was the right punishment. (As in classical law, the idea of legality, or no crime without a statute setting out what it is clearly, does not really exist in Saudi. Discretionary crimes by their nature are uncertain as to precise contours. That said, most modern Islamist nations do adopt the principle that the crime has to be written out and don't permit prosecution for any crime not written down, making the "discretionary" crimes, now written down, far less discretionary.)
So why then? Why bring this back now, why does this strike such a chord with these judges that they actually think to sentence someone to death for witchcraft? The classical law permits it is not enough, it also permits slavery, and they're not doing that. I suspect the reason is that deep in this Saudi society, or I really should say deep in the Saudi judicial culture is a strain of misogyny matched only by the Taliban. They want to go out of their way to kill or lash women. Rape victims, women who marry the wrong sort of man, and now witches, all in the past two months. All else aside, how hard would it have been to say "yeah, all very interesting, but other men are impotent and men go back to their divorced spouses for reasons other than spells, the Qur'an recommends it, and so everyone go away." How could anyone have a problem with that?
But instead they're captivated by this notion of women causing all sorts of social destruction, ripping up class distinctions through inappropriate marriages, talking with men and destroying the social fabric, and spreading witchcraft among susceptible men. The veil is sort of in this vein as well--cover them up or God knows what power they might yield with those sexually tempting bodies (but that alone is worth a book, not a blog post). This is a disturbing but very real modern development not limited to the Muslim world of course. The femme fatale, the vagina dentata, the danger that women possess from which helpless men require refuge. This seems to be the impulse, the drive, the push to get these women lashed or killed. The shari'a is of course there, but without that push, it could have sat this one out rather easily. Nobody's hand is forced when judges in this day and age start finding witches, they're reacting to something not adjudicating some rule they'd rather ignore.
All goes to show how even the most medieval of punishments bend to the (often nasty) winds of our times.
HAH
Certainly, there is much in the Qur'an to suggest a mystical and occult world of unseen spirits (described as Jinns, or genies) and powerful sinister forces. One of the most common verses carried throughout the Middle East reads "and those who disbelieved nearly caused you harm through their stares when they heard the Message and said 'He is Possessed by the Jinns', yet it is nothing but a Message of Deliverance to the Peoples of the World." It's actually quite beautiful in Arabic but there is implicit a world of Jinns, and the idea that someone could actually hurt the Prophet with a stare. Another popular chapter, also seen in many places, reads "I take refuge in the Lord of the Daybreak, from the evil he has created, from the evil of the darkness as it spreads, from the evil of those who blow on knots, and from the evil of the envious." The evil eye, the conjurers who blow on knots, a dark, mystical place of black magic from which only God provides refuge.
Building on this, the classical jurists made witchcraft into a sort of crime. The real issue was whether it was a scriptural crime (the "hadd"), one of the seven crimes specifically linked to Holy Text, or what are known as "discretionary" crimes, those that are close enough to the scriptural crimes but for some reason are outside its parameters. They never really agreed on this. To the extent it is one of the seven scriptural crimes, it was argued to be a form of apostasy, which carries a sentence of death. If discretionary, it wasn't quite apostasy, it's not like you're necessarily denying Islam by being a witch, but sorta kinda close enough. As for the punishment if discretionary, or how close to the scriptural crime you have to be to fit under it, it's all in the judge's discretion (hence the term).
Of course that was all long ago, and at the start of the 20th century, the reformist Muhammad Abduh from the premier Sunni Islam institution of learning, the Azhar, was not successful at many things, but did manage to rid Islam of a fair amount of the superstitious nonsense. So certainly most of us who practice Islam but are reasonably educated take this stuff more figuratively than literally. I haven't thought much about Jinns, nobody taught me to. I use the term "possessed by Jinns" all the time in Arabic "majnoon", but really it just means "wacko" when I say it, and I think it's understood that way too. I don't think I'd know what to say if someone responded "which Jinn?"
But that said, there's still talk of evil eyes and people still use various talismans with Quranic verses like the ones quoted above to ward off the Jinns and witches and conjurers. I have a good friend, a Basra lawyer who served on Iraq's Constitutional Drafting Committee. His father's name? "The Pain, the Trouble." The point was to ward off the evil eye by giving him a name nobody would want. Educated person of course, quite smart, and his grandparents kept up these traditions and had these concerns.
So we have a reduced, but real, presence of this sort of occultism in Islam in the current day. Where does that leave witchcraft as crime? Pretty far away from the concerns of most Muslims. Evil eyes if their kids have nice names or go to good schools, yes there's concern. Enough to have my mom the medical doctor recite some mantra with this awful smelling spice over my head every time i go home. but enough concern to start beheading people? Certainly not. I have actually heard at least one law professor from Baghdad argue that women have special magic powers that should be subject to tort, but he was about as extreme as they came on this point and certainly no such notion appears in Iraqi tort law. Most seemed to care enough about this occult world to do things that didn't seem to have much consequence (names, weird spices, Koranic talsimans) but no more. I suppose as a result we have our share of faith healers who invoke spirits, but they exist in the US too, and all of that is a far cry from beheadings.
As a result, you don't see this witch nonsense rear its ugly head very often. Even in Islamic societies where apostasy is taken pretty seriously (as noted, changing religion from Islam technically requires death under the classical juristic rules with some qualifications though reformists have a different take), I haven't heard anyone claim apostasy because of witchcraft.
Except in those rare cases where someone actually changes their religion, apostasy is more to exert thought control, to declare someone has renounced Islam because they've expressed an opinion on something the Muslim Brotherhood doesn't like. Maybe they said that Muhammad wasn't Infallible or something. But to try someone for witchcraft is odd in this era I think.
But of course Saudi is sort of in a league of its own, and has been since the Taliban fell (only Taliban Afghanistan among states were as odd as the Saudis) and so their clerics brought this back. At first they seemed to say it was a scriptural crime, a hadd, which had to be the apostasy one, but then when the confessions were retracted, meaning they didn't have scriptural proof (which requires two witnesses or a confession) but were pretty sure she did it (come on, a guy was impotent and another guy went back to his wife, what more proof could you need than that!) they employed the discretionary principle to say it was close enough and therefore a discretionary crime and they decided death was the right punishment. (As in classical law, the idea of legality, or no crime without a statute setting out what it is clearly, does not really exist in Saudi. Discretionary crimes by their nature are uncertain as to precise contours. That said, most modern Islamist nations do adopt the principle that the crime has to be written out and don't permit prosecution for any crime not written down, making the "discretionary" crimes, now written down, far less discretionary.)
So why then? Why bring this back now, why does this strike such a chord with these judges that they actually think to sentence someone to death for witchcraft? The classical law permits it is not enough, it also permits slavery, and they're not doing that. I suspect the reason is that deep in this Saudi society, or I really should say deep in the Saudi judicial culture is a strain of misogyny matched only by the Taliban. They want to go out of their way to kill or lash women. Rape victims, women who marry the wrong sort of man, and now witches, all in the past two months. All else aside, how hard would it have been to say "yeah, all very interesting, but other men are impotent and men go back to their divorced spouses for reasons other than spells, the Qur'an recommends it, and so everyone go away." How could anyone have a problem with that?
But instead they're captivated by this notion of women causing all sorts of social destruction, ripping up class distinctions through inappropriate marriages, talking with men and destroying the social fabric, and spreading witchcraft among susceptible men. The veil is sort of in this vein as well--cover them up or God knows what power they might yield with those sexually tempting bodies (but that alone is worth a book, not a blog post). This is a disturbing but very real modern development not limited to the Muslim world of course. The femme fatale, the vagina dentata, the danger that women possess from which helpless men require refuge. This seems to be the impulse, the drive, the push to get these women lashed or killed. The shari'a is of course there, but without that push, it could have sat this one out rather easily. Nobody's hand is forced when judges in this day and age start finding witches, they're reacting to something not adjudicating some rule they'd rather ignore.
All goes to show how even the most medieval of punishments bend to the (often nasty) winds of our times.
HAH
I is hard to fathom beheadng a women for witchcraft in this day and age. I read a book about Saudi Arabia called "Paramedic to the Prince" It was written by an American christian Paramedic who worked for King Abdullah on his medical staff. It really opened my eyes to what Saudi is really like. It is the heart and sould of Islam. Yet it is ruled by a greedy royal family that leave crumbs for it's people and spend the wealth on themselves. The religious police let 13 girls burn to death in Mecca because they would not let the fire department inside. You know it would have been a sin if they saw those girls faces.... Better to let them burn to death and go to paradise. Everything with a messure of common sense my mother says.
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For those people who have not voiced there opposition to the execution of Fawzi Ali, please sign the petition currently online with the Human rights Watch betteer yet, write King Abdullah directly via the Saudi Embasy. Please see the links below.
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Please see the following website petition and article
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At info@saudiembassy.net
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