(Alleged) Muslim Sacred Text on (I quote, and not for normative value) "Dogs, Asses and Women": Forcing Change in Islamic Preconceptions
Conventional wisdom in the field of Islamic law in American legal academies clings to a proposition that I think is worthy of examination. This is that the only real force for positive social change in the Muslim world is through religion. In other words, if you want to have any hope of improving the lives of people in the region, you have to make a shari'a argument, not a legal one or an economic one or a secular normative one, none of that works.
What you really need is something from Islam, something inventive, sparkling and clever and yet respectful of tradition, to carry the day, and all will be well. Ink is spilled everywhere setting forth the most ingenious reasons that Islam is compatible with a modern liberal democratic and tolerant state, and our law reviews are filled with footnotes citing such eminent scholarship over and over again. When I entered the field only a few years ago, my own earliest scholarship reflects some of this very forceful trend in our field--finding ways to make Islam compatible with modernity in the commercial field. At the time, it seemed to me the most obvious way to make my way in the Islamic law world--identify a problem, show how some people who associate that problem with Islam are looking at it the wrong way, and then show a better solution that can be derived from historical tradition. No that's not the only way to do it, I like Mohammad Fadel's ways to break that trap through references to things the state can do that don't necessarily derive from interpreting sacred text, which is a new trend in scholarship these days (Clark Lombardi does some of this too). The method I outlined is the tried and the true, I am not claiming it is the universal. It is the easiest way to start out given the tendencies.
My problem with this (predictably) is that it exalts the rhetoric over the reality. That is, it's not the cleverness of the argument that controls, the dumbest thing Khaled Abou El Fadl ever said, maybe when he was four, is about a million times more intelligent than the smartest thing Saudi Judge Luhaidan ever said, but the latter is more influential. It's got nothing to do with how articulate one is, other factors control. But that's old hat on this blog by now, I want to focus for this purpose on one that I think is not sufficiently discussed in our Islamic law academy (even as it is dismissed as obvious elsewhere in the West), and it is the fact that quite often religion is not the force of progression in the Muslim world, but the force of stasis and conservatism.
I think many in the US make the same mistake concerning law--they seem to think everyone before 1964 was an unrepentant racist and then Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and all was well. In fact, a pretty good argument can be made that the Senate prevented the passage of legislation long after social changes and significant national majorities thought it was well past due. Isn't that what the Senate is, the "cooling chamber?" When it kept blacks from achieving any level of meaningful equality, didn't it do precisely and exactly what it was designed to do? If so, was the law really the force for social change, or was it the hindrance? Isn't it the hindrance not just by happenstance, but by design? Were Malcolm X or John Brown then wrong to see the law, and the government, as the enemy to be fought to achieve racial equality?
This is not to deny the obvious force of calls like those of Baqir al-Sadr (or Martin Luther King) for social change and social justice precisely on the basis of religion, or the good they have done in some contexts. I do not say that religion can only be a force for stasis, personally I find religious inspiration in the radicals who wanted to change the world for the better and found support and aid in the Divine, from Malcolm to Baqir alSadr. But it is to say that religion, like law, can be played both ways, by actors favoring social change, and rather more often, by privileged institutions and elites opposing it.
This is because often religion's power comes from its perceived immutability. That the perception is preposterous does not detract from its power, and from this a powerful influence to prevent change, not force it, can be found. My example for the next day or two is a brief flareup around April of last year, when the head of the Azhar, Sheikh Tantawi, went on a rampage against newspapers in Egypt which he said were orchestrating a campaign against the Prophet's Companion, Abu Hurayra.
By way of background, Abu Hurayra is a popular narrator of statements of the Prophet, and a target of liberals worldwide, who suggest he didn't narrate what Muhammad said very well (mainly because what he did narrate jars with the conscience of any liberal, particularly one concerned with women's dignity, much less rights.) He has a disproportionately high number of reports, and some seem to conflict with other Muslim companions. Fatima Mernissi, the Moroccan Muslim feminist, has a wonderful section in her book on a Tradition reported by Abu Hurayra indicating that the Prophet had said "the dog, the ass and the woman" who stand in the way of a praying man (ie between him and Mecca as he prays) break the prayer. Only those three--dogs, donkeys and women. Someone shovels pig crap in front of you when you pray, under this statement you are okay, but if your mama steps in to call you to dinner, it's broken. Or so it seems to read on its face.
And so Muslim liberals abound in their attacks on the authenticity of statements attributed by Abu Hurayra to the Prophet Muhammad. In some ways the attacks are simplistic, in that he isn't the only narrator in the world that reports problematic statements, but he is the most common and these are the most offensive, so throwing his stuff out clears the way for a lot of modernization, and so Muslim liberals would love to take that step. Hence the Egyptian paper Al Fajr printed a rather benign article casting some doubt on some of the things that Abu Hurayra reported and the way he lived his life. Certainly it didn't compare to Mernissi's portrayal of the man as a bitter, lying misogynist with an inferiority complex by virtue of the fact that he was assigned to clean the rooms of the Prophet's wives.
But even the mild version received a predictably vociferous reaction from the Azhar. While liberals may have their agenda to make Islam progress, the Azhar wishes nothing of the sort, for it, religion is the vehicle of stasis, not progression, and they use it as best as they can to achieve that effect. Abu Hurayra is a Companion, they said, a man of impeccable honesty and sincerity. Moreover, no man today may question someone who knew the Prophet personally. With this then, the doors are closed, that which is reported must be accepted as true, for none of us may question the giants of that walked the earth before us. If we do open that door, then, it must follow, the foundations become unglued, we now are judging the Companions, will we judge next the Prophet himself? Will we dismiss Islam? Have we become atheists then? The horror of it all!
It's almost what Professor Leebron (now President Leebron of Rice University) called a Ctrl-V argument in torts class those many years ago. Because it's the same one any time anyone argues for any sort of innovation or change from prevailing notions of Islamicity--you just have the response somewhere, and copy it and hit control-v and it's pasted right there. What about not stoning adulterers? Ha, it is in the Qur'an, do you now judge what is and is not good in the Qur'an? What is next, will you dismiss prayer, or the Oneness of God? Have you become a polytheist? The horror, the horror! And what you are pasting always has the same import--religion cannot change, because God cannot change, and if you change the religion, you effectively uproot it from any source of legitimacy, or anything Eternal, ie the Divine. And this is the road to atheism.
Hence the (Sunni) Muslim saying that every innovation is a deviation, and every deviation leads to the Hellfire. Just think about that, then explain how you are going to convince anyone that what they assume Islam to be, what they were taught growing up, that a woman for example breaks the prayer of a man praying to Mecca as a dog and an ass, is somehow wrong because Anu Hurayra is not reliable. You can do it, you can aim at Abu Hurayra, and there are forces of influence that have started to do that obviously with at least some success, which brought the Azhar reaction, but you have to contend with the simple fact that it sure looks like an innovation. And every innovation is a deviation, and every deviation leads to the Hellfire.
It at least suggests that the Muslim argument on its own isn't going to work, that maybe there should be less concern with convincing everyone that Islam means something else, and more on effecting the social and cultural and economic and cultural and normative changes that might then lead good, believing Muslims to question whether or not our Holy Prophet would really say such a thing. In other words, the doctrine is the lag, not the lead, even as the law was in 1964 in the Civil Rights Act. And even then, when Muslim sensibilities lead us in other directions, there will be those with their own biases and preferences, material and otherwise, even as there were in the 60's south, shouting that we have destroyed Islam (or the federal republic) because we have changed it fundamentally, and every innovation is a deviation, and every deviation leads to the Hellfire. But it will change, as slavery disappeared, so will other things, the only real question is whether the doctrine lags or leads that change. I tend to think the former much more than the latter, in most but not all cases.
Next post will continue on the Abu Hurayra example to discuss issues of state law and religious doctrine in more detail, a focus of my current scholarship.
HAH
What you really need is something from Islam, something inventive, sparkling and clever and yet respectful of tradition, to carry the day, and all will be well. Ink is spilled everywhere setting forth the most ingenious reasons that Islam is compatible with a modern liberal democratic and tolerant state, and our law reviews are filled with footnotes citing such eminent scholarship over and over again. When I entered the field only a few years ago, my own earliest scholarship reflects some of this very forceful trend in our field--finding ways to make Islam compatible with modernity in the commercial field. At the time, it seemed to me the most obvious way to make my way in the Islamic law world--identify a problem, show how some people who associate that problem with Islam are looking at it the wrong way, and then show a better solution that can be derived from historical tradition. No that's not the only way to do it, I like Mohammad Fadel's ways to break that trap through references to things the state can do that don't necessarily derive from interpreting sacred text, which is a new trend in scholarship these days (Clark Lombardi does some of this too). The method I outlined is the tried and the true, I am not claiming it is the universal. It is the easiest way to start out given the tendencies.
My problem with this (predictably) is that it exalts the rhetoric over the reality. That is, it's not the cleverness of the argument that controls, the dumbest thing Khaled Abou El Fadl ever said, maybe when he was four, is about a million times more intelligent than the smartest thing Saudi Judge Luhaidan ever said, but the latter is more influential. It's got nothing to do with how articulate one is, other factors control. But that's old hat on this blog by now, I want to focus for this purpose on one that I think is not sufficiently discussed in our Islamic law academy (even as it is dismissed as obvious elsewhere in the West), and it is the fact that quite often religion is not the force of progression in the Muslim world, but the force of stasis and conservatism.
I think many in the US make the same mistake concerning law--they seem to think everyone before 1964 was an unrepentant racist and then Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and all was well. In fact, a pretty good argument can be made that the Senate prevented the passage of legislation long after social changes and significant national majorities thought it was well past due. Isn't that what the Senate is, the "cooling chamber?" When it kept blacks from achieving any level of meaningful equality, didn't it do precisely and exactly what it was designed to do? If so, was the law really the force for social change, or was it the hindrance? Isn't it the hindrance not just by happenstance, but by design? Were Malcolm X or John Brown then wrong to see the law, and the government, as the enemy to be fought to achieve racial equality?
This is not to deny the obvious force of calls like those of Baqir al-Sadr (or Martin Luther King) for social change and social justice precisely on the basis of religion, or the good they have done in some contexts. I do not say that religion can only be a force for stasis, personally I find religious inspiration in the radicals who wanted to change the world for the better and found support and aid in the Divine, from Malcolm to Baqir alSadr. But it is to say that religion, like law, can be played both ways, by actors favoring social change, and rather more often, by privileged institutions and elites opposing it.
This is because often religion's power comes from its perceived immutability. That the perception is preposterous does not detract from its power, and from this a powerful influence to prevent change, not force it, can be found. My example for the next day or two is a brief flareup around April of last year, when the head of the Azhar, Sheikh Tantawi, went on a rampage against newspapers in Egypt which he said were orchestrating a campaign against the Prophet's Companion, Abu Hurayra.
By way of background, Abu Hurayra is a popular narrator of statements of the Prophet, and a target of liberals worldwide, who suggest he didn't narrate what Muhammad said very well (mainly because what he did narrate jars with the conscience of any liberal, particularly one concerned with women's dignity, much less rights.) He has a disproportionately high number of reports, and some seem to conflict with other Muslim companions. Fatima Mernissi, the Moroccan Muslim feminist, has a wonderful section in her book on a Tradition reported by Abu Hurayra indicating that the Prophet had said "the dog, the ass and the woman" who stand in the way of a praying man (ie between him and Mecca as he prays) break the prayer. Only those three--dogs, donkeys and women. Someone shovels pig crap in front of you when you pray, under this statement you are okay, but if your mama steps in to call you to dinner, it's broken. Or so it seems to read on its face.
And so Muslim liberals abound in their attacks on the authenticity of statements attributed by Abu Hurayra to the Prophet Muhammad. In some ways the attacks are simplistic, in that he isn't the only narrator in the world that reports problematic statements, but he is the most common and these are the most offensive, so throwing his stuff out clears the way for a lot of modernization, and so Muslim liberals would love to take that step. Hence the Egyptian paper Al Fajr printed a rather benign article casting some doubt on some of the things that Abu Hurayra reported and the way he lived his life. Certainly it didn't compare to Mernissi's portrayal of the man as a bitter, lying misogynist with an inferiority complex by virtue of the fact that he was assigned to clean the rooms of the Prophet's wives.
But even the mild version received a predictably vociferous reaction from the Azhar. While liberals may have their agenda to make Islam progress, the Azhar wishes nothing of the sort, for it, religion is the vehicle of stasis, not progression, and they use it as best as they can to achieve that effect. Abu Hurayra is a Companion, they said, a man of impeccable honesty and sincerity. Moreover, no man today may question someone who knew the Prophet personally. With this then, the doors are closed, that which is reported must be accepted as true, for none of us may question the giants of that walked the earth before us. If we do open that door, then, it must follow, the foundations become unglued, we now are judging the Companions, will we judge next the Prophet himself? Will we dismiss Islam? Have we become atheists then? The horror of it all!
It's almost what Professor Leebron (now President Leebron of Rice University) called a Ctrl-V argument in torts class those many years ago. Because it's the same one any time anyone argues for any sort of innovation or change from prevailing notions of Islamicity--you just have the response somewhere, and copy it and hit control-v and it's pasted right there. What about not stoning adulterers? Ha, it is in the Qur'an, do you now judge what is and is not good in the Qur'an? What is next, will you dismiss prayer, or the Oneness of God? Have you become a polytheist? The horror, the horror! And what you are pasting always has the same import--religion cannot change, because God cannot change, and if you change the religion, you effectively uproot it from any source of legitimacy, or anything Eternal, ie the Divine. And this is the road to atheism.
Hence the (Sunni) Muslim saying that every innovation is a deviation, and every deviation leads to the Hellfire. Just think about that, then explain how you are going to convince anyone that what they assume Islam to be, what they were taught growing up, that a woman for example breaks the prayer of a man praying to Mecca as a dog and an ass, is somehow wrong because Anu Hurayra is not reliable. You can do it, you can aim at Abu Hurayra, and there are forces of influence that have started to do that obviously with at least some success, which brought the Azhar reaction, but you have to contend with the simple fact that it sure looks like an innovation. And every innovation is a deviation, and every deviation leads to the Hellfire.
It at least suggests that the Muslim argument on its own isn't going to work, that maybe there should be less concern with convincing everyone that Islam means something else, and more on effecting the social and cultural and economic and cultural and normative changes that might then lead good, believing Muslims to question whether or not our Holy Prophet would really say such a thing. In other words, the doctrine is the lag, not the lead, even as the law was in 1964 in the Civil Rights Act. And even then, when Muslim sensibilities lead us in other directions, there will be those with their own biases and preferences, material and otherwise, even as there were in the 60's south, shouting that we have destroyed Islam (or the federal republic) because we have changed it fundamentally, and every innovation is a deviation, and every deviation leads to the Hellfire. But it will change, as slavery disappeared, so will other things, the only real question is whether the doctrine lags or leads that change. I tend to think the former much more than the latter, in most but not all cases.
Next post will continue on the Abu Hurayra example to discuss issues of state law and religious doctrine in more detail, a focus of my current scholarship.
HAH
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