The commitment of religious forces and authorities to democracy in the Islamic world has become almost amusing in its fervor. Certainly, it marks a remarkable transformation in the conception of compatibility of Islam to democratic rule from only a few decades ago.
Hence, for example, during the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini was actually reluctant to hold a referendum on whether Iran should be an Islamic state at all, ultimately relenting but describing the vote as merely a confirmation of a fact that the revolution had already laid bare. (Shaul Bakhash describes this well in his own (dated, but still classic) book on the subject of the revolution.) As for the Quietist movements that contested the principle of Islamic rule, led most prominently by Grand Ayatollah Khu’i of Najaf, their commitments were certainly not to the secular state (led at the time by Saddam Hussein, to whom no credible Shi’a jurist would ever be committed) but rather to some form of apathy and alienation from the state or indeed any governance structure at all, waiting instead for the return of the Mahdi, tolerating the state in the thinnest possible sense of toleration. Neither side within this Shi’a doctrinal division advocated anything sounding like democracy.
As for the Sunni world, Ruud Peters 1988 examination of Islamist movements reflects the hostility to the notion that there could ever be a vote over matters on which the shari’a speaks. Either God rules, or man does, but both cannot stand. Of course, significant Islamist forces, Sunni or Shi’i, never denied the possible use of democratic mechanisms at all–hence Mawdudi’s reference to the theodemocracy. But the idea was to relegate it to significant extent to rather significant strictures that would ensure broad compliance with a particularly rigorous conception of shari’a.
Over time, however, as it became obvious that Islamists could actually win elections, the instrumental advantages of a democratic commitment began to grow, and instrumental advantages grow normative roots rather quickly. What the shari’a had to control began to shrink, what the people could demand grew, and suddenly the millennium turned and you have Iraqi clerics demanding elections when the US invades (not shari’a, not the veil, UN monitored elections) and you have Hamas demanding the right to rule and expressing what appears to be genuine moral outrage when it is denied them, because they won an election. Sure you had, and still have, the genuine crazies (Shabab, Taliban, Qaeda, etc), but the mainstream movements by the early part of the century were thoroughly democratized.
And now just a decade from that, look where we are. It’s not just that democracy is compatible with Islam. No, now you have to vote if you’re a good Muslim. “Sacred Duty” is how the Sheikh of the Azhar described it. (Not that it did a damn bit of good judging by the turnout.) If you didn’t vote, you betrayed the nation, which is somehow a sin now. Najaf likewise turned into full election mode about a month ago, similarly describing it as a religious obligation to vote. Those Shi’a who demurred, I am close to one, were specifically told to keep their opinions to themselves, as they do not have the power to exercise ijtihad. The position of Quietism and alienation from the state, the very theory that dominated Najaf only two decades ago has been, at least in its purest forms, totally marginalized and discredited. That’s no small thing.
Of course, the full pendulum swing is not entirely comfortable, perhaps to a liberal like myself it feels as if it has overswung. Naturally I’m pleased with the embrace of democratic politics over army coup among religious party and secular nationalist party alike. But one wonders if it really bodes well for the future of the state to have religious authorities imbuing a fundamentally secular political act such as voting with such religious significance. It is one thing to tolerate a vote and consequent commitment to and loyalty to the state, indeed to even embrace and encourage it is one thing. It is quite another to describe those who stay home as sinners. The effort of religious authorities to boost the democratic state whatever its intentions does begin to stink once again of an intermingling between religion and state that it is best to avoid.
HAH
Category Archives: Shari’a Blogs
Boko Haram and the Proper Classification of What is “Islamic”
In mass media accounts, there exists a perduring problem in the way various activities self-described Islamic actions are characterized. At times, as bearing no relation to Islamic doctrine, when plainly it does. At other times, as wanting to take us back to the seventh century, when it does no such thing. Personally, I think it would simplify matters to classify particular self-described “Islamic” positions (meaning described by their perpetrators as motivated by Islam) in one of three ways.
The first category is what I would call “Islam problematic” meaning that the position is problematic, and is rooted in important ways in the Islamic tradition. I certainly do not mean the position is inevitable in the Islamic tradition, and that if one is Muslim, they adopt such a position. I eschew such categorical nonsense–categorically. Merely, rather, that those who expound it the problematic position are doing so with some important classical pedigree behind them. Hence, Rod Nordland is simply wrong when he suggests in the New York Times that a father compelling a child daughter into a marriage she does not want is more Afghan tribal than it is shari’a. It may well be Afghan tribal, but it resonates in the classical doctrine, classical jurists overwhelmingly approved of such a practice of compelled child marriage by a wali. (Want sources, a smattering is offered here.) Again, this does not mean alternative positions are not plausible, only that one cannot dismiss the position of the Afghan tribes as somehow born out of tribal experience and divorced entirely from sharia. Other examples exist, for example the Saudi judge looking for a doctor who might paralyze a person who had committed an assault that left a second person paralyzed. The law of talion, pursuant to which the victim may demand the same injury on the perpetrator if feasible to do so, has a long and storied history in Islamic law. A judge investigating the feasibility of intentional paralysis is working within the tradition, even if the tradition does not necessitate such barbarity (emphasize that) by any means.
Second category position I would describe as “Islam related” meaning that their reasoning adopts core Islamic normative tenets as its basis, and often takes the doctrinal tradition, or parts of it, seriously enough, but that is not necessarily in any sort of direct accord with the tradition. This would be everything from Tariq Ramadan’s call for a moratorium on capital punishment to Abdulaziz Sachedina reconsidering the classical rules of apostasy.(Hashim Kamali questions this historic rule as well in this video.) But I would also classify Osama Bin Laden’s conception of jihad in this category as well. It really is not a classical conception at all, given its revolutionary stature and the manner in which classical jihad was fundamentally conservative (expansionist, but conservative, in seeking to preserve the internal order, at least of the Muslim state, until the House of War was vanquished, and sanctioning violence only at the direction of the caliph to achieve that end).
I will not here attempt to evaluate the varying plausibilities or logical strengths of the relative arguments. Naturally as a Realist I find that has little to do with which arguments are ultimately adopted anyway. The point, rather, is this. They are Islamic enough to be “Islam related”, departures from the strict tradition, but certainly sounding in Islam with a sufficiently robust base of reasoning and argumentation to render them Islamic. Many of my Islamic positions would certainly fall within this category, as a Muslim I believe them but acknowledge their departure from the tradition. Naturally, I lean very strongly liberal in the positions I adopt from this category.
Then there’s the third category of positions, which I will call “IINO’s”, or “Islam in name only.” This is something that really is not Islamic, in that bears no resemblance to the tradition and makes no attempt at all to justify itself Islamically beyond the adoption of convenient terminology. Whatever Islamic reasoning is deployed is so poor and rudimentary that it can hardly be called the adoption of an Islamic normativity or stemming from any sort of Islamic preconception. The most obvious example of this, you may have gleaned from the post title, is Boko Haram’s horrific kidnapping of 200 schoolgirls and threat to sell them. I heard a risible commentary on the Diane Rehm show last Friday describing this as the Taliban or Qaeda incarnate, some seventh century vision of Islamic extremism. Sorry, but if that is seventh century Islam, then Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army is first century Christianity, and Joseph Kony is the Christ of the New Testament. That you are more brutal and barbaric does not mean you are closer to the true source material.
This categorization is not apology–I already said above Islamic law has a deep and storied tradition of permitting children to be compelled into marriage. By their wali. Meaning a father, or a grandfather. And once those two are not around–dead, insane, whatever–and there is a different wali, then the power of the guardianship changes for some schools, and the power to compel disappears, hence the well known Hanafi khiyar al bulugh, or the option of the child at puberty to renounce a marriage she was entered into not by her father or grandfather but a different wali. So this idea that you can rampage around and kidnap schoolgirls who aren’t your children when they have parents and force them into marriage is very far beyond the doctrinal tradition. If you wanted to be Islam related, you’d have some major hurdles to jump, far more serious than anything explored above. But the Islamic reasoning I’ve been able to gather in defense of this from the Boko Haram videos are as follows:
1. Western education is a sin. Suffice it to say, the idea that the wali loses his power over his daughter and it is ceded to Boko Haram because the daughter is Western educated lacks classical pedigree.
2. Girls should marry instead of getting Western education. You might be able to develop some sort of Islamic argument in favor of this, but again, it won’t get around the question of who might compel them to marry, which is the problem in point one.
3. Slavery is permissible in Islam. Yes, that’s an “Islam problematic” argument, category one. But it does not work here at all. First, slaves can only be taken in a jihad, and even then, he’s got problems. He wants to sell the
m into marriage, that’s not how it works. You’re sold, not sold into marriage. So you don’t take a slave because you think they should be married, that makes no sense at all. And that’s not all. Some of the captives are Muslims, and you have really lost Islamicity here, unless you’re calling them apostates but even then, you wouldn’t sell them, you’d make them repent their apostasy or kill them (if you took the severe doctrinal position, which I presume Boko Haram would).
So about nine impossible things you have to get around before breakfast, and suffice it to say, no real attempt is made to work through those. This really isn’t an Islamic argument, it’s an IINO, devoid of any real Islamic substance and not terribly interested in that substance. More interested in the mayhem he associates with it. Throw in a ‘by Allah’, as in “I will sell them, by Allah” get your followers to shout “Allahu Akbar!” behind you, and he thinks that makes it Islamic. And apparently he’s got some folks fooled. . . .
HAH
Islamic Banking, Iranian Style
I have had the good fortune to have a Farsi speaking student act as my research assistant this past semester, and he has used his considerable skills to get me access to and to translate various Iranian bank documents into English. Primarily, these are form contracts used for Islamic financing vehicles, not entirely public (in the sense that they are not publicly available from the website of the respective Islamic banks), but not really confidential (in the sense that anyone who wants a mudaraba loan gets this form contract, so there must be tens of thousands in circulation). Naturally the details of particular borrowers and the amounts they borrow (I’m sorry, borrowing is haram, “sharers in wealth”) would be confidential but I neither sought nor have any completed contracts, only the forms with blank spots where such details would be inserted. It offers a glimpse I think into how some of these banking contracts tend to work in practice in Iran, though it would be of course a mistake to describe it as more than a glimpse. Still, I will seek to pursue these in more detail in subsequent work, a shorter law review article I expect, giving due credit to my research assistant’s work in permitting it to happen. For now, I wanted to point out just a few provisions, and the extent to which Islamic finance is, quite often, just as sloppy as I have always claimed it is in its supposed shari’a adherence. This is, in other words, but a glimpse of a glimpse. The subject for this glimpse of a glimpse is the mudaraba contract of Pasargad bank. I will say at the outset I was rather surprised to see a mudaraba as a financing vehicle at all. It is frequently within the literature praised as the ideal means by which financing takes place in a banking style system, Sadr extolling it broadly as early as 1979 for the Shi’a. But it requires a sharing of profits and losses, which is obviously problematic for any bank, because when it loses, it has to pass that on to depositors, and depositors don’t like to lose money, and so a bank run is created, etc etc. (One of many problems). So the mudaraba is a custom far more adhered to in the breach than the observance, and so I figured perhaps this was one of those sort of token things they did to demonstrate true Islamicity, akin to the interest free qard hasan loans Islamic banks give out from time to time to a mosque to rebuild its roof or something. Charity, not commerce. Meant to improve an image, not the backbone of a real practice. But I was wrong. It is a commercial instrument, just one that plays fast and loose when it comes to shari’a adherence. In the meat of the contract, Article 8, we do have a provision that divides the profit of the subject goods of the contract, whatever they are, to a [blank] percentage as to bank and [blank] as to borrower, with the profit defined as revenues over expenditures. Blanks need to be filled in, anyone who has even taken one course in accounting (like me!-accounting for lawyers) can see the reductiveness of the profits definition, but so far, so good. The idea of the mudaraba is conveyed. But then comes Article 9, which reads as follows (RA’s translation, emphasis mine) If any loss happens to the funds of this contract ,or if there is any waste or any loss from the subject commercial activities of this contract, the agent is committed to pay the amounts of this contract plus anticipated profit to the bank from his own assets, even if the loss was not due to a trespass or waste of the agent. So much for sharing then. There’s sharing on the upside, but not the downside. If anything bad happens to result in a loss, for whatever reason, the bank gets its profit. I should note it gets its profit as well if the contract is terminated due to a borrower breach (Article 10) or if the bank accelerates the loan due to borrower default (Article 11). Those are standard provisions of credit agreements, which of course this is. In fact, the only nonstandard provision is the one requiring the entrepreneur to share profits (but not losses) according to a specified percentage. This makes the contract much worse for the aspiring entrepreneur than ordinary lending. Because while the bank in a conventional system will attach everything it can think of that belongs to the entrepreneur to get its money on the downside because it has no intention of “sharing”, it does limit its upside to a fixed relatively modest percentage. Citibank doesn’t lend Facebook $1M and get a percentage back that corresponds to Facebook’s growth, it gets LIBOR plus 1.5%. Or something. That of course is precisely the defense of fixed interest, it is the reduction of the downside risk that enables the bank to limit its profit on the upside. Here, the downside risk is removed, but the upside sharing is not, giving the bank a far superior legal position to what it would have in conventional finance. Put differently, in conventional finance, it gets a fixed small percentage over what it lent. In the mudaraba, it gets a percentage of the profits made from the money contributed. Eliminate the downside risk, and that’s a better deal because there is no theoretical limit on the upside. I will say I think that is unlikely that the Iranian bank actually operates like this, mainly because the bank cannot really monitor the goods. That’s another problem with the mudaraba, to work the bank would have to know what profits the entrepreneur was making, and this imposes rather significant monitoring costs. So rather than share in the actual profits of whatever goods the entrepreneur is getting less expenditures, my guess is the entrepreneur just figures out the bank’s anticipated profit, which corresponds to an interest rate, and gives it that and says this is the Article 8 amount. And the bank does not bother to check. So it’s interest, my guess is, along with a healthy dose of indirection and dishonesty. Either that, or it’s screwing the entrepreneur. Take your pick. Again, there are other contracts, I will address them in published work I expect, but for now, this will do. The point is not only that Islamic finance is about as far from profit, loss and risk sharing as can be imagined, and any claims to the contrary are at best empty rhetoric. I’ve said that before, will no doubt say it again. But also, the point is the high degree of selectivity deployed by Islamic financiers themselves in adhering to rules. And I do not mean the high degree of selectivity in application of classical fiqh—though of course that is present as well (has everyone forgotten the shurut rules? Seems so.) But rather selectivity in applying the actual rules of the practice. I point this This is a matter on which I have received some strong criticism, erudite and well articulated. For an example, from a friend and a real leader in Islamic finance practice, see here. The idea is that I have in some early work described Islamic finance as ignoring its own rules at times, in a way that prominent practitioners like my friend Michael McMillen have found unjustified. And to be fair to the criticism, I probably did in my early work paint with an unjustifiably broad brush. Here we have a perfect example of what is done when resources are not committed to legalistic and formalistic workarounds. Toss the rules. It’s sort of a problem to allow banks to lose money on a transaction. So simple! We’ll take a profit and loss silent partnership structure, call the transaction that, and then remove the loss component from the bank’s side. Right, except now it’s not a profit and loss partnership, now it’s a loan, with theoretically infinite upside and conventional risk downside. It’s declaring interest unlawful and shari’a violation, throwing an Islamic word out to describe a permissible vehicle, and then making changes to the vehicle that the very same practice would also describe as violation. Take it off the website, leave it exclusively in Farsi, and reach an unwritten understanding that the upside won’t really be shared either, and it all works. Interest, through a combination of selective application of rules, deception, obfuscation, secrecy, precisely as I said in 2007. And lest you think this is a problem of Iranian banking, I assure you American Islamic retail banking is selective (as I have said before) in its own right. If you want to prepay the murabaha, you can go right ahead, and the bank is contractually obligated to then discount the money left for you to pay them back, in a manner that Usmani specifically described as unlawful. I was told once that it was wrong for me back in 2007 to describe the murabaha as a “simultaneous” purchase and sale. In fact the financier owns the item, albeit for a short period of time, and that is how the sophisticated transactions are done. Perhaps (I was wrong I admit to use a broad brush) but that is decidedly and absolutely not how home financings are done in the US under a murabaha structure. It is simultaneous, and the bank never has a real beneficial interest in the property for any period of time at all. None, zero. And that is universal. How do I know that? Because that is the assumption upon which the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency relies in permitting this type of financing notwithstanding the prohibition against banks owning real property. So that’s what they do, or they’re operating illegally. Again, the shari’a rule respecting at least transient ownership is avoided, and again, deception, obfuscation, confusion, secrecy, is designed to manage the divide. (How many banks do you think tell their customers they don’t actually ever own the subject property of the murabaha?) This is sort of akin to one castigating a person for eating pork because God forbids consuming any part of the pig, and then saying the pizza tastes better if they cook it with pepperoni and then take the pieces off afterwards. Of course, nobody does that, because everyone can see the problem that arises (you’re still eating pig fat, just melted pig fat on cheese). With finance, with so much money to be made, you can just bury the pig fat in Article 9, not release the contract, and shout out to the world: Look at us! We do Islamic finance! HAH
But I also think it’s something of a mistake to presume that the highly sophisticated transactions designed by the likes of Michael McMillen are representations of the entire practice. Those transactions probably do a little better job of trying to adhere more closely to articulated Islamic finance rules, admittedly. (My criticisms respecting selective application of fiqh, of a near total absence of the profit and loss sharing to which the industry is supposed to aspire, and above all else to doing not a thing to address the broad dissatisfaction that so many Muslims have with the global economic order remain quite salient on this aspect of the practice as any other.)
So long as religious adherence isn’t the point, but rather expressing one’s identity as a Muslim is, it works well enough for the American Muslim homeowner and the Iranian bank borrower alike.
Islamic Rationalism and Same Sex Marriage Permissibility
There is, I think, a common perception that somehow it is more difficult to rationalize the permissibility of same sex marriage in the Islamic tradition than there might be in the Christian. I actually think that is wrong, at least within those parts of the tradition committed to moral rationalism; namely, the Mu’tazila among the Sunnis and the Shi’a generally, though in particular the Usulis. The rationalist tradition, to summarize and of course reduce centuries of moral philosophical thought into a sentence, regards the identification of the praiseworthy and blameworthy as intelligible through the faculty of reason, and further regards God as necessarily acting in accordance therewith. Reason, alone, of course is hardly sufficient to lead one much of anywhere without prior premises-indeed the call of many reformists for more “reason” in jurisprudence often seems to be a call to insert current ideological preferences in the place of the preferences of the medieval jurists. I, for my own part, have no objection to such replacement, though I think it should be done more openly and honestly than through a claim that it is somehow more “reasonable.” But as concerns same sex marriage the premises of the medieval fiqh help advance the rationalist argument for same sex marriage, in a manner that they might not in at least modern articulations of Christianity. One of my favorite activities in an Islamic law class when we discuss the rules of marriage is to ask students what the purpose of marriage is under the Islamic fiqh. The non-Muslims are decidedly at an advantage, because they stare at me blankly wondering why I would expect them to know the answer to such a question. (The answer, of course, is that it is in the reading, which all too few do.) But the Muslim students often raise their hands and tell me of the Chapter of Rome in the Holy Qur’an, and the placement of compassion and mercy between spouses, and of course of the beauty of this world that is provided by offspring, and so forth. And, of course, they are utterly, completely wrong. The purpose of marriage is neither to produce offspring, nor is it to create a lifelong bond of compassion and mercy. These matters, which are used to defend the prohibition of same sex marriages (in particular the latter one) in other religious traditions, are simply inapplicable in the Islamic juristic tradition. They are plausible readings of the Qur’an, but they are not the fiqh. Rather, under Islamic law, the purpose of marriage has nothing to do with family creation at all. It is to render sex licit-to take an act that in the absence of the contract would be a serious sin, and to turn it into a legal activity. Hence marriage is a highly recommended activity, rendered important to do whenever there is some fear that one might fall into the dangerous abyss of fornication like rampant rabbits on https://www.tubev.sex/. So let us add to this premise the rather unremarkable one, to my mind, that a homosexual does not choose his or her orientation. This is a more modest claim than that the orientation is genetic, importantly. For example if you were to see someone featured on a website like twinki.xxx, it’s likely their orientation (whether bisexual or homosexual) was decided on before he could speak. President Obama repeatedly informs us that the children whose status he is normalizing through executive order despite their undocumented status are in the United States illegally “through no fault of their own.” In other words, they made no choice. Suffice it to say, however, that genetics do not render them undocumented. Thus, the fiqh posits for us that the sex drive is strong, nearly entirely overwhelming. And that God in His Infinite Mercy has blessed us with a means to satisfy that sex drive, to render it licit, to live not in constant unrequited desire, but in fact in harmony with His Will while still satisfying this core earthly need. This means is marriage. Those who use it live in His Grace. Those who do not are sinners who have gone astray. Oh, yes, one more thing. It’s not available to some of you, because of a preference you didn’t choose. You have to just live with this overwhelming and near debilitating sexual desire and abstain from sex, or be killed for fornication. The rule, I submit, is deeply and thoroughly irrational. One can, of course, play the Ash’arite card, and insist that God’s Reason is superior to any ability of ours to comprehend. In the rationalist traditions, however, the matter is not so easy. I do not deny the textual sources that suggest different conclusions than reason alone might, nor would I suggest that the texts can be ignored in their entirety. And of course, I have always stood as a Realist in favor of contingency and preference-where what controls, reason or text, and what text, is determined by factors much more complex than the dry mechanical application of an interpretive process. All of this may be true, but a single point remains true alongside it. The argument exists, and it is eminently plausible.
HAH
The Appalling Shi’i Personal Status Law of Iraq
First, like me on Facebook or subscribe to my Twitter feed, I’m now all in on professional social media. Links lie to the left.
Moving on to the subject at hand, many of you might have heard of the draft Shi’i Personal Status Law approved by the Iraqi cabinet some weeks back and sent over to the legislature to enact into law. Nothing has happened yet and I suspect nothing will, as the draft is far too controversial to make passage likely.
Nevertheless, there has been a fair amount of discussion respecting it, most relating to human rights considerations, and I decided to take a closer look, which is when I realized how appalling it really is. Not in terms of being an affront to human rights, though it is that too, but in terms of being a haphazard, ill considered, sloppy law almost organized at random seemingly by some 25 year old kid in the Ministry of Justice delegated the task and given less than a week to do it. If it is the effort of anyone older than 25, or anyone with more than a week, I would be very surprised.
Specific examples appear in my Jurist piece which I encourage you to look at. Honestly I would have spent more time dissecting it as the dreadful legislative work that it is except that I saw little point once Grand Ayatollah Bashir al-Najafi came out and more or less trashed it, making me believe it has to be dead. How can you pass something purported to give the Shi’a the right to live by Islamic rules that the Islamic rulemakers themselves describe as bad?
Suffice it to say for now then that however one feels about the codification of shari’a, nothing is a better metaphor for the sad and slow intellectual decline of the Middle East than that in the lands of the great codifiers Ahmed Cevdet and Abdul Razzaq al-Sanhuri, legislation like this is what we have devolved to. The shame of it.
HAH
I forgot Bangladesh (and some stuff about Twitter)
As an addendum to the last post, I completely forgot to mention Bangladesh, which in some ways is the most ironic. It has recently moved to ban the Islamist JI, a group whose central plank in their political platform (or at least one of whose central planks) is the introduction of a blasphemy law. So you’d think that the government, resisting this group, indeed seeking to ban it, would likewise resist blasphemy prosecutions.
Not so, for the law currently bans the “hurting of religious sentiments,” and bloggers have been arrested for blasphemy on this basis. (This law is a 19th century relic of colonialism, the Indians have it too, and just recently used it to ban a book called The Hindus. As I noted in a previous post, lots of these highly criticized laws assumed to be the product of Islamist fanatics are in fact the creation of the colonizers. Damn English.) Though, to be fair, I said in Egypt the Islamists were no worse than the current regime as concerns blasphemy prosecution, which remains true. But in Bangladesh, the Islamists are worse. They want the bloggers hung. The government merely approved the idea of the maximum punishment extended to fourteen years. Let freedom ring!
Also, I’m on Twitter now, as the sidebar attests. I’ll be on Facebook very shortly. Follow me, soon all my regular writings will be tweeted out.
HAH
The Entrenchment of Blasphemy Laws
There seems to be some sort of broad, and broadly inaccurate, belief that somehow the obsessions with blasphemy throughout the Islamic world are the product of Islamism. Hence, the theory seemed to run, once Morsi was removed in Egypt via coup, there would be a new birth of religious freedom.
In fact, as the cases of Amr Abdullah and Karam Saber demonstrate, prosecutions for failing to be sufficiently orthodox in one’s belief are alive and well in Egypt even as the Brotherhood is hunted down and systematically killed. (529 of them sentenced to death in a day? Are you kidding me?) Abdullah was arrested and sentenced to five years in a prison labor camp for being a Shi’ite–the crime is actually called “insulting the Companions” –and Karam Saber wrote a series of short stories, entitling his collection “Where is God?” I read them, didn’t find them at all blasphemous, though decidedly secular. However, the Azhar and the Beni Suef Diocese found them quite blasphemous, and declared them insulting and artistically meritless, which of course must mean not only do I not have any artistic taste (for who am I relative to the wise censors of the Coptic Church authorities and the Azharites)but their author deserves five years in prison. Then there’s the leading role the Azhar is currently playing in seeking to ban the movie Noah. Which actually bothers me less, mainly because I figure Russell Crowe can take care of himself much better than poor, besieged Amr Abdullah and Karam Saber can.
Turn to Malaysia, another state that makes a practice of sentencing Islamists to death on dubious charges, and the issue remains whether or not Christians can refer to God as “Allah”. Currently there is a ban on that. This is really helpful to those of us in the American Muslim community who keep insisting that the term “Allah” just means “God”, and in fact was the word Christians and Jews used for “God” before the Qur’an. All some crackpot Tennessee legislator has to do is pull up a newspaper and start quoting the Malaysians insisting Allah isn’t God and there goes my rather robust intellectual position.
So the point is, blasphemy is alive and well in the Islamic world, and quite often, practiced not only by Islamists (though they practice it too) but even more remarkably and forcefully in many instances by their supposed enemies. If someone can discern any sort of movement in the Egyptian courts away from blasphemy prosecutions in the post Morsi era, they are seeing things I can’t. It’s not “Brotherhood lite” any more than Obama’s drone policy is “Bush lite.” It’s just “Brotherhood.” I’d say the same for Malaysia, though of course the UMNO never lost power there, and I don’t read the language well, so I cannot judge the progress of the court system with any level of sophistication or nuance.
I’ve always found First Amendment absolutism a little extreme in the United States–it always struck me as perhaps an American luxury that could not be afforded elsewhere. Why risk the social stability of an entire state on the fact that some loon wants to burn a Qur’an (or a Bible) or post an image of the Prophet depicted as a pig (or Jesus or Buddha). Is the right to be an ass that important? Does a man have to hear about or see a sign about how God loves dead US soldiers because of American support for gay rights while he seeks to bear his boy in peace? Really?
But of course the problem is that all too often on the other side you end up as Egypt is–pure and unadulterated thought control where any idea that lies beyond the narrow confines of long accepted orthodoxy is blasphemous, and religious discourse is thereby rendered sclerotic and positively tiresome to anyone seeking even mild intellectual engagement. And there is no real choice as between those two alternatives.
As for the destabilizing loonies? Probably easiest to ostracize and harass them out of existence. It works okay for the Westboros, who seem to be in trouble, and for Terry Jones who can say he was arrested for wanting to burn Qur’ans, but I’m sorry it seems to me a better world when folks are free to think what they want but are absolutely not allowed to be driving around armed and carrying literally 3000 books of any kind soaked in kerosene in a pickup truck on their way to a public park to start a fire. and of course in the Islamic world this isn’t our problem in any event when it comes to prosecutions of provocateurs because people this extreme wouldn’t get to court. There isn’t someone dumb enough to burn a Qur’an in public, and even if there was, he’d be dead, and the police would never “find” the perpetrators. If that happens for honor killers, it will certainly happen for Qur’an burners. So we might as well get our legal and judicial system at least a little more accustomed to a little more openness in our religious discourse, if we are to have any hope of advancing it.
HAH
The Regulations Respecting Transexualism in Iraq
Wandering as I was through various Iraqi regulations for a variety of purposes, all professional of course in the end, I came across these still effective regulations respecting gender change under Iraqi law. I could not resist but translate them.
For context, these regulations date to 2002, and specifically November of 2002, when Saddam was in control and the threat of a US invasion was already imminent. I do not think that threat particularly significant, certainly I do not think it in any way related to the promulgation of these regulations, but that is the broader geopolitical context.
Rather, what I suspect is that the numbers of Iraqis who sought to change their gender was significant enough to garner the interest of the Health Ministry. Yet Iraq fundamentally identified itself as an Arab country to its deepest core in November of 2002 (even my Kurdish brothers and sisters would not so much deny that self identification as decry it, with some justifications). Moreover, it was among the most steeped in machismo of the Arab countries. We are Iraqis, we drink our whiskey neat, we smoke our tobacco unfiltered and we fuck without condoms, the mantra goes, though usually said outside of the company of women. (I still remember the look on my good friend the kind and gentle Dr. Majid saw my other kind and gentle friend Kimberli pour Diet Coke on her Johnny Walker Black. She might as well have peed in it.) What could be more macho than all of this? And yes, it is a Muslim country too, though there are other Muslim countries less driven by this hypermasculine sense than Iraq. I played an entire 15 point set of volleyball in Malang, Indonesia once with a group of drag queens (they needed a sixth, I wanted to play. We won, for the record, wasted the other six drag queens 15-4.) In Iraq, the whole lot of them would have had the crap beaten out of them along with me for playing with them well before the set ended.
So here you have this collision of social need and social taboo. And the Health Ministry left to navigate it, necessarily relying on “science” as some sort of “objective” basis to deal with the problem. Because, you see, once it is “scientific”, it is no longer normative. Or so the theory goes. You be the judge, my editorializing limited to the italics.
HAH
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Based on the articles 1 and 105 of the rules of the Law of Public Health, No. 89 of 1981,
[Article 1]
No notation as to Article 1, but I will assume it is that below since Article 2 follows it.
A specialized committee was formed in [each] public hospital exclusively in each health department, and two sections in Saddam City and Yarmouk tasked with studying the need to correct the gender from those affected or those in their custody under 18 years of age [whose members have] the following specializations:
This was issued in 2002, hence the reference to Saddam City, that which would be called Sadr City now. Even in 2002, it would have been known as Revolution City rather than Saddam City, its largely Shi’a underclass residents never would have referred to their home as relating in any way to Saddam Hussein, but officially, it was Saddam City. Yet we digress. Article 1 of the law in question merely guarantees good physical and mental health to Iraqis, and Article 105 authorizes regulations in furtherance of the Law. So these regulations were not so much demanded as, at best, authorized.
Note the term. “Correct” the gender, not “change” it. It’s a matter of getting the thing right, “scientifically.”
1. Injury to the urine pathway
2. Obstetrics and gynecology
3. Mental health
4. Cellular genetics
5. Legal representative whose task is direction and understanding of applications of legal consequences to the change and supporting the committee in legal matters as to this.
This fifth sounds like the Ba’athist overseer, making sure the committee does not go too far in its regulations. Still, note that mental health and injury to the urethra play a role in gender change. I read this as an attempt to permit gender change without acknowledging some sort of broad right to do so.
Article 2
An applicant must present a medical report from a medical specialist in the operation, which includes a scientific opinion of the type of gender correction in a detailed fashion.
Interesting, I think. Gender change needs to be “scientific” and recommended by a medical specialist.
Article 3
An application must submit to the following inspections and present the findings to the committee referenced in Article 1 of these regulations.
i. Psychological evaluation
ii. Phenotype inspection of exterior reproductive organs.
iii. Ultraviolet or similar, such as MRI, inspection of interior reproductive organs, and a specification of the type of reproductive glands.
Forgive me, but I am a lawyer, not a doctor. I am not sure I know what this means medically.
iv. Inspection of the following hormones
And the presence among men and women differs in the pituitary gland
a the activity of the sex gland FSH
b LH
c Male hormone testerone
d Female hormone progesterone
e Estrogen
The result of the identification of hormones
f. Hydroxylose 21
Article 4
If it is confirmed after the psychological and phenotype evaluation that the condition is the result of confusion in gender identification TRANSEXUALISM [this word appears in allcaps in the original, no edition here] then the afflicted is transferred to the initial psychological medical committee and then to secondary psychological committee. [Lots of committees, but not unusual in the case of Iraq. Still, two layers of appeals to ensure the “correct” result is reached, as in legal questions.] In the event of their agreement on the operation of correcting the gender, the afflicted is subject to the treatment and rehabilitation program for a period determined by the committee to accommodate the correction.
[Technically the word for “accommodate” is “coexist”. The idea being to get the person used to the fact that they will be changing their gender.]
Article 5
The operation may take place in a public or private hospital based on the desire of the applicant or those caring for him after the period of rehabilitation set forth by the committee.
Article 6
The hospital administration and its surgeons are responsible for the operation to correct gender that conflicts with the rules of the law and these regulations.
[This is important. You can only “correct” gender if done in accordance with these legal provisions and if you fail to do so, consequences attach. Needless to say, in Saddamist Iraq, these consequences are not minor.]
Article 7
The health department shall inform the relevant drafting board and the civil status board of the correction in gender.
[These are obviously necessary even in the United States at this point. Women are not drafted, and same sex marriage is yet to be universally permitted, making gender references necessary in civil status documentation and to any military selective service board. Though given how many wars Saddam had fought by 2002, and given the imminence of a second war against the United States, I wonder how many men would give up their penises to avoid being drafted into another war. Probably not many, though who knows . . . . ]
Article 8
These regulations are effective from the date of their issuance in the Official Gazette
Umaid Madhat Mubarak
Health Minister
Random Thoughts on Arizona Religious Freedom and the Shari’a
Two thoughts, not necessarily connected, respecting the recently vetoed Arizona religious freedom bill, Muslims and Islamic law.
First thought. The dominant fear of Muslims can be rather funny at times.
Of all the rather amusing things I found throughout the discussions of the now vetoed Arizona bill that would have permitted individuals to refuse service to someone if providing such service violated their religious obligations, the most was the rather broad discussions respecting the law being “too broad”, so broad, in fact that it might permit Muslims to refuse to serve Christians on the grounds that they are infidels (the CNN version) or it might permit a Muslim cab driver to refuse to pick up a woman without a male guardian on the grounds that they aren’t supposed to be out alone (the NY Times version). Notice I left aside the Fox News versions, too obvious to merit comment in their case.
Personally I’m rather amused by these examples, as I wonder why it is that the assumption appears to be that (i) there are significant numbers of Muslims who adopt more extreme interpretations of Islam than are common in much of the Islamic world, and (ii) that such individuals have a viable business plan in Arizona by putting these ideas into action. As to (i), it is common in much of the Arab world in particular (Iraq, Egypt, Jordan) and even in Iran for a woman to take a cab alone. In fact, it is often preferred to taking a cab with a male colleague. If I’m teaching a class in Beirut, Basra, or Qatar, as I have done and continue to do from time to time, and I offer a woman a ride home, the reaction is almost as if I had offered to kiss her on the lips. Because the scandal! Obviously if I’m giving her a ride home then halfway there our libidos will get the better of us and we’ll be ripping off each other’s clothes and having wild sex, which surely happens whenever a professor and a student ride home together as is well known. Anyway, sarcasm aside, it’s scandalous. By contrast, a woman riding a cab home alone is not. Nobody thinks a random female student is engaged in a relationship with a guy who she doesn’t know and whose cab she hailed to go home. Libidos not presumed to run quite that high.
So this Muslim who doesn’t pick up this unaccompanied female is more conservative than cab drivers in Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Syria, etc. But such people do exist, and countries do exist where a woman cannot ride a cab unaccompanied with grounds being given related to Islam, so he exists, and let us presume that somehow for some reason he got it in his head with these ideas that he’d move to Arizona and become a cab driver. The brother is ill advised, I guess. His plan now is not to pick up women, because it’s sinful. And I’ll assume he’s no more or less racist than your average NYC cabdriver, by which I mean he won’t pick up black men either, because he assumes they’ll rob or shoot him. So his plan is just to cruise the streets waiting for white guys to pick up? Will he not pick them up if they’re going to a bar? Or from one? Surely that’s worse than women alone. How is this going to work?
Muslims not serving Christian infidels is even dumber, as I cannot conceive of a version of shari’a that permits residence in the non Muslim land and prohibits commercial engagement with non Muslims. Some classical authorities have argued the reverse (trade with anyone, live in the Abode of Islam) but this version is odd, I dare say completely unprecedented. And, of course, it’s entirely self defeating. Arizona Christians are honestly worried that the 1% Muslim population of Arizona is going to somehow cut off their business? Can I say as a Muslim I’d be more worried about the 99% doing business with me than the reverse?
Why didn’t the New York Times or CNN give that as the example (“for example, Wolf, Christians might end up refusing to serve Muslims on the grounds that they are all violent terrorists, and it is a sin to serve them, and as a result the entire Muslim population would be relegated to a ghetto.”) Unlikely you say? Sure. But a Muslim dude opening a pizza place and then denying service to 99% of his customer base (or lets say 99.5% since he won’t serve unaccompanied Muslim women either), adopting a thoroughly unorthodox and unheard of interpretation of shari’a to do it–this is likely?
Second thought. The bill isn’t too “broad” as drafted because it lets Muslims discriminate against random single women or random Christians. It’s just precisely the same discrimination as proposed in the bill itself, the only real distinction being that it is discrimination directed against the drafters.
When one describes a piece of legislation as “too broad”, what they mean is that it covers circumstances that are really beyond the scope of what is intended to be regulated. Hence, for example, a ban on vehicles on a gravel path that runs from Pittsburgh to DC is too broad, as the whole point of it is to create a bike path, and a bicycle is a vehicle. (This is a real example, somewhere on that road I always pass a sign on my bike that says “No vehicles.” My letters indicating the sign should read “No MOTORIZED vehicles” have gone unanswered. As nobody enforces that sign as against bicycles I have chosen not to pursue the matter further.)
In any event, I presume the point is clear. There are reasons that one would ban cars and motorcycles from a paved surface on which bicycles and pedestrians are welcome. To ban the bicycle through a ban on vehicles is “too broad”, a mistake in fact.
To describe the law as “too broad” because it permits Muslims to discriminate against Christian infidels or unaccompanied women is a misnomer, as the same wrong would be committed, just by different people. In fact, to describe it as not narrow enough is either anti Muslim or anti gay. Anti Muslim in the sense that discrimination is not acceptable only when practiced by them, anti gay in the sense that discrimination is acceptable only when practiced against them.
It’s actually probably both. As in:
1. Christians refusing service to gay people because it violates their religious freedom to do that. (Religious freedom)
2. Muslims refusing service to gay people because it violates their religious freedom to do that.. (on the borderline)
3. Muslims refusing service to Christians because it violates their religious freedom to do that. (too broad).
Of course that’s the conservative version, the one advanced by the supporters of the Arizona bill. The liberal version is not necessarily different, however, at least when advanced by those who find the law bad, but also “too broad.” It would go like this:
1. Christians refusing service to gay people because it violates their religious freedom to do that. (Bad)
2. Muslims refusing service to gay people because it violates their religious freedom to do that. (Worse)
3. Muslims refusing service to Christians because it violates their religious freedom to do that. (Now do you see the horrible thing you idiots have done?????).
Or we could just say that any attempt by any of these people to discriminate against any of these people in providing services that are not in their core religious in nature (nobody is forcing priests, rabbis or imams to do anything) will not be tolerated because they are all, yo
u know, different examples of the same damn thing.
HAH
The True Source of the Afghan Criminal Procedure Amendments
There has been much discussion recently respecting proposed changes to the Afghan criminal procedure code that would prevent family members from testifying against one another in criminal court. These, it appears, are proposals being advanced by “Muslim conservatives” and naturally are opposed by human rights organizations staffed largely, though not entirely by Westerners. Anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to this blog would be able to discern rather quickly which side of the debate I would be on—with the human rights activists, against the conservatives. But there is an irony to all of this. This notion, that family members should not testify against one another in court, that to do so is somehow an invasion of the sacred marital union and familial privacy, and that the state should not therefore interfere with such private affairs, is one that is Western in conception, Western in its normative framework, and Western in its historic application. It is, let me absolutely clear, absolutely and entirely foreign to the shari’a—conceptually, normatively and in application. Those who want to find a Muslim acting as a shari’a apologist should go elsewhere, I’ve been fairly clear on where I stand respecting the shari’a, certainly not in its idealist conception but as it has been articulated through the work of medieval scholars producing the classical fiqh—and I have described that historic work (the classical fiqh, not the shari’a as a concept, to emphasize the matter) as severely problematic on any number of fronts, women’s rights among them. Hence, for example, the other proposed Afghan legislation getting attention, making child marriage easier for a father to engage in (or so we are told) does have shari’a antecedents, those which I have set forth at length elsewhere. This, however, does not. Even those elements of the classical fiqh that might be fairly described as gender discriminatory demonstrate this. How does a man dissolve his marriage under the classical rules? He declares himself divorced. How does a woman? She has to have cause, and she then has to go to court. The judge evaluates the case and is empowered to dissolve the marriage. In other words, she sues her husband. Nor is dissolution the only basis upon which a wife might sue her husband. She can sue him because it is his obligation to maintain the family home, and she can attach his assets if he fails to fulfill that obligation. Ottoman court records are filled with such cases, to say nothing of the extensive Egyptian and Iraqi court files I have myself reviewed on this subject. The notion that a couple cannot both be in court and be married is grounded in a different conception of marriage, one in which marriage is sacred covenant, not earthly contract. In other words, Christian, not Muslim. Hence spousal evidentiary privileges, and restrictions on prenuptial agreements, and the like, are all creatures of Western legal systems, not Eastern ones. In the Muslim world, we not only permit parties to figure out what a husband is going to give a wife if he divorces her, we require it as a condition of the marriage. What kind of contract lacks a dissolution clause after all? The Islamic conception has thus long been, without question, without ambiguity, that it is no more unusual for a wife to sue a husband and continue to live with him than it is unusual for a contractor to sue an owner and for them to continue to work together. Just business, you see. Now it is true that this legislation only concerns criminal matters, and so would not change the relationship of the parties in family court. Yet once one considers the Islamic conception, the whole raison d’etre of the provision evaporates. Why in the world would it matter which court parties are testifying in? If we accept that the state’s job is to administer and adjudicate relationships as contracts, then surely that role cannot disappear when the husband is no longer a philanderer, no longer a deadbeat who won’t provide for his home, but is a wifebeater and a criminal. The normative framework disintegrates into total incoherence. So what the Muslim conservative is doing in this instance is not seeking to uphold shari’a, it is to import Western conceptions and Western laws. He’s aping the West here, not resisting it. Some may object, and indicate that surely a beaten wife may testify against her husband in state court in the West, and prenuptial agreements are more common than ever. True, as it is true that the colonial era is long behind us, but when it existed, these conceptions did exist. They disappeared in the West, they were grabbed onto in much of the East, and ironically, by the most antiWestern of all political and social forces. A similar story exists with sodomy laws, which were also largely introduced by the colonials and hence most of the anti gay laws that exist in places like Qatar, home of the upcoming World Cup, are actually colonial remnants, held to firmly by Islamic conservatives and described as retrograde by the very leaders of the very countries that introduced them decades ago. But at least in that instance, the condemnation and indeed criminalization of homosexuality has some resonance in the shari’a. Here it has none, this is not an Islamic conception, and never was one. And yet here are the “Muslim conservatives” demanding it, over the objection of those whose historical traditions are replete with ideas of this sort. The irony, the irony.