Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism (16 page)

13. Qur’an 33:59.

1. Not even the puritanical Saudi religious police believe that men are commanded to cover the hair on their head. The custom of Saudi men, including the religious police, however, is to wear a piece of cloth that covers a part of their head.
   

2. Geoff Simons,
   Saudi Arabia: The Shape of Client Feudalism
   (London: St Martin’s Press, 1998), 48. For other wide-scale human rights abuses committed in Saudi Arabia in the name of Islam, see pp. 3–68. I worked on this case very closely with Human Rights Watch in a vain attempt to save al-Naqshabandi’s life, who for three years after his arrest, and despite being tortured, continued to profess his innocence, re-affirm his Muslim faith, and state that he had never believed in or practiced witchcraft until the very end. Citing the works of Ibn Taymiyya, al-Naqshabandi wrote several long letters to the judge in charge of his case, arguing that no authority in Islamic law ever held that the punishment for possession of an amulet was death, and insisted that he was a believing and practicing Muslim. He also asserted that his employer framed him, and that he was never allowed to consult a lawyer after his arrest, and that the court had refused to call any of the twenty- two witnesses who would testify to his innocence. The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, and the Saudi Ministry of Interior justified the execution by charging that al-Naqshabandi “undertook the practice of works of magic and spells and possession of a collection of polytheistic and superstitious books. . . In view of what magic and witchcraft produce in the way of serious damage to the individual and society with
   

respect to religion, the soul, money, and intellect, and considering that what the defendant did has the potential of producing great harm, his acts are worthy of severe punishment so that his evil will be terminated and others will be deterred. Therefore, it was decided that he be sentenced to the discretionary punishment of death.” According to the Ministry of Interior, the death sentence was reviewed and affirmed by the Saudi Appeals Committee (
hay’at al-tamyiz
) and the Higher Judicial Council. Having worked on the case, and after reviewing all evidence and legal material, I am thoroughly convinced that this man was unjustly murdered, and even if he was guilty as charged, his execution was a flagrant violation of Islamic law and ethics. For the details of the case, see Clarisa Bencomo, “Flawed Justice: The Execution of ‘Abd al-Karim Mara’i al-Naqshabandi,” a report of Human Rights Watch / Middle East Division (New York, 1997).

16. Qur’an 9:39; 11:57; 47:38.

17. Qur’an 9:67; 59:19.

1. For a detailed study on the role of authorial enterprise, communities of interpretation, and Islamic law, see Khaled Abou El Fadl,
   Speaking in God’s Name: Authority, Islamic Law, and Women
   (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001).
   

2. For a valuable study on the duty to enjoin the good and forbid the evil in the Islamic tradition, see Michael Cook,
   Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought
   (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
   

20. Qur’an 2:143; 3:110.

21. Qur’an 4:135; 5:8.

1. Interestingly, the expression “false universalisms” was used by Samuel Huntington in arguing that the Western belief in the universality of their values is both immoral and dangerous, Samuel Huntington,
   The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking of World Order
   (New York: Touchstone Press, 1996), 310.
   

2. For examples of such accusations, see the essay critiquing my work by Abid Ullah Jan, in Abou El Fadl,
   The Place of Tolerance in Islam
   .
   

3. Ironically, this is the gist of Huntington’s argument about the wrongfulness of believing in universal Western values, Huntington,
   The Clash of Civilizations
   , 308–12. This is also Lawrence Rosen’s argument in his
   The Justice of Islam: Comparative Perspectives on Islamic Law and Society
   (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 153–75, where he contends that what Westerners would consider despotic and oppressive is entirely acceptable for Muslims because of their own conceptions of justice and reality. See my critique of this book in Abou El Fadl, “Islamic Law and Ambivalent Scholarship,”
   Michigan Law Review
   , vol. 100, no. 6, May 2002, 1421–43. For the utilization of the relativism argument in the international human rights field and a critique of this position, see Ann Mayer,
   Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics
   (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999). Also see Khaled Abou El Fadl, “Soul Searching and the Spirit of Shari‘a,”
   Washington University Global Studies Law Review
   , vol. 1, nos. 1–2, Winter/Summer 2002, 553–72.
   

4. On this subject, see Khaled Abou El Fadl,
   And God Knows the Soldiers: The Authoritative and Authoritarian in Islamic Discourses
   (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001), 138–56.
   

5. For instance, see the following valuable studies on the usage of ethical terms in the Qur’an: Toshihiko Izutsu,
   The Structure of Ethical Terms in the Quran
   (Chicago: ABC, 2000); Toshihiko Izutsu,
   Ethico-religious Concepts in the Quran
   (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1966).
   

6. On this subject, see Khaled Abou El Fadl,
   Reasoning With God: Rationality and Thought in Islam
   (Oxford: Oneworld, forthcoming). Also see George F. Hourani,
   Reason and Tradition in Islamic Ethics
   (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
   

7. See my essays in Abou El Fadl,
   The Place of Tolerance in Islam
   .
   

8. Qur’an 38:87. The Qur’an states, for instance, “And God does not desire for human beings to suffer injustice.” (3:108) A statement such as this generates layers of meaning, but it is reasonable to conclude that the Qur’an recognizes certain ethical principles as universally applicable and pertinent.
   

9. “Westoxification” is a derogatory expression used to describe self-hating Muslims who are in awe of everything Western to the point that they seem to be intoxicated on the West.
   

10. Some scholars have argued that most of Muslim society in the modern age is characterized by a cultural schizophrenia in which there are profound distortions in the self- consciousness of Muslims. See Daryush Shayegan,
    Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic Societies Confronting the West
    , trans. John Howe (London: Saqi, 1989). Also see Louay M. Safi,
    The Challenge of Modernity: The Quest for Authenticity in the Arab World
    (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), esp. pp. 153–93.
    

11. There are many works that document the influence of Islamic culture and thought on Europe. Two impressive works are: George Makdisi,
    The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West
    (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990); Mourad Wahba and Mona Abousenna (eds),
    Averroes and the Enlightenment
    (New York: Prometheus, 1996). Even when preserving the Greek philosophical tradition, Muslim scholars did not act as mere transmitters, but substantially developed and built upon Greek philosophy. In a fascinating text that demonstrates the level of penetration that Islamic thought achieved in Europe, Thomas Aquinas, in an attempt to refute Ibn Rushd (aka Averroes), whom he labels as a “perverter of Peripatetic philosophy” and Ibn Sina (Avicenna), ends up quoting Abu Hamid al-Ghazali in support of his arguments against Ibn Rushd’s. Both al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd were medieval Muslim philosophers and jurists. Thomas Aquinas,
    On the Unity of the Intellect against the Averroists
    , trans. Beatrice Zedler (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1968), 46–7. For a collection of articles that demonstrate cross-intellectual influences, see John Inglis,
    Medieval Philosophy and the Classical Tradition: In Islam, Judaism, and Christianity
    (Richmond, U.K.: Curzon Press, 2002). For an awe-inspiring example of the contributions of medieval Muslim scholars to Greek philosophy, see Kwame Gyekye,
    Arabic Logic: Ibn al-Tayyib’s Commentary on Porphyry’s Eisagoge
    (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979).
    

12. Khaled Abou El Fadl, “Islam and the Theology of Power Islam,” 221
    Middle East Report
    , Winter 2001, 28–33.
    

13. On the hegemony of the United States and the West, and Muslim reaction, see Simon
    

    W. Murden,
    Islam, the Middle East and the New Global Hegemony
    (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002), esp. 43–128.
    

14. For a study on Muslims, the West, and the prevalence of siege mentalities, see Graham
    

    E. Fuller and Ian O. Lesser,
    A Sense of Siege: The Geopolitics of Islam and the West
    (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995).
    

15. Among the practices of Muslim puritans is to collect, publish, and disperse traditions, attributed to the Prophet or the Companions, that are demeaning to women. Such collections then act as a foundation for issuing deprecating determinations in regard to women. Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Wahhab, himself, under the subheading of “living with women,” collected a group of these women-deprecating traditions; see Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Wahhab,
    Mu’allafat al-Shaykh al-Imam Muhammad bin ‘Abd al-Wahhab: Qism al-Hadith
    (Riyadh: Jami‘at al-Imam Muhammad bin Sa‘ud al-Islamiyya, n.d.), part 4, 141–51.
    

16. This is often expressed in terms of describing women as the worst
    fitnah
    , and claiming that women will constitute the vast majority of the residents of hell-fire, and that most men in hell will be there because of women. For a systematic analysis of this issue, see Abou El Fadl
    , Speaking in God’s Name
    , 170–249.
    

17. The claim of the perfect religion is incomprehensible because it ignores human agency in the determination of the meaning of religion. Islam, as submission to God, could be a perfect act, and God could conceive of the prerequisites and conditions for submission in a perfect way. This, however, does not mean that Muslims have submitted perfectly, or that they perfectly understand the prerequisites and conditions of submission. Islam is perfect as a metaphysical reality in God’s mind, but this does not mean that there could be a perfect realization of God’s mind by the human mind.
    

18. For a critical, and similarly grim, assessment by a Muslim of the state of intellectual thought in the Islamic world, see Tariq Ramadan,
    Islam, the West and the Challenges of
    

    Modernity
    , trans. Said Amghar (Markefield, U.K.: Islamic Foundation, 2001), 286–90. For an insightful analysis of the role of apologetics in modern Islam, see Wilfred Cantwell Smith,
    Islam in Modern History
    (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).
    

19. The classic studies on orientalism and its effects remain those of Edward Said:
    Orientalism
    (New York: Random House, 1979) and
    Culture and Imperialism
    (New York: Vintage, 1994). For a probing survey of orientalism and its practices, see Bryan S. Turner,
    Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism
    (London: Routledge Press, 1994), 3–114. Also see Asaf Hussain, Robert Olson, and Jamil Qureshi (eds),
    Orientalism, Islam, and Islamists
    (Brattleboro, VT: Amana, 1984). For an informative survey of orientalism and its practices, see A.L. Macfie,
    Orientalism
    (London: Pearson Education, 2002). Roxanne L. Euben,
    Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism
    (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), argues, somewhat persuasively, that Islamic fundamentalism is a form of critique or protest against rationalist modernism.
    

20. One way to conceptualize this is to understand that if Islam had figured out all the major answers to the challenge of modernity at the time of the Prophet and his Companions, there would be no incentive to engage in any further thinking or analysis about the Islamic tradition or to engage Islam creatively and innovatively, save on the most marginal issues. It is no coincidence that puritans took this apologetic point to its logical extreme and constructed a discourse that is markedly hostile to innovations, or creative thinking (referred to as
    bid‘ah
    , sing., and
    bida
    ‘, pl.).
    

21. On the epistemology of Islamic law, see Wael Hallaq,
    Authority, Continuity and Change in Islamic Law
    (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Wael Hallaq,
    A History of Islamic Legal Theories
    (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
    

22. On this subject, see George Makdisi,
    The Rise of Colleges in Islam
    (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981).
    

23. Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, “The Ulama of Cairo in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century,” in
    Scholars, Saints, and Sufis
    , ed. Nikki Keddi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 149–65, esp. 162–3.
    

24. Allan Christelow,
    Muslim Law Courts and the French Colonial State in Algeria
    (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); J.N.D. Anderson, “Modern Trends in Islam: Legal Reform and Modernisation in the Middle East,”
    International and Comparative Law Quarterly
    , 20, 1971, 1–21, reprinted in
    Islamic Law and Legal Theory
    , ed. Ian Edge (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 547–67; William L. Cleveland,
    A History of the Modern Middle East
    (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), 61–98; Jasper Yeates Brinton,
    The Mixed Courts of Egypt
    , rev. edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968); Ruth Mitchell, “Family Law in Algeria before and after the 1404/1984 Family Code,” in
    Islamic Law
    :
    Theory and Practice
    , ed. R. Gleave and E. Kermeli (London: I.B. Tauris, 1997), 194–204, esp. 194–6. Of course, at times, colonial powers took over the implementation of Islamic law, as in the case of the Anglo-Muhammadan law experience in India. Syed Ameer Ali,
    Muhammadan Law
    (New Delhi: Kitab Bhavan, 1986), 1–4; Joseph Schacht,
    An Introduction to Islamic Law
    (London: Oxford University Press, 1964; reprinted, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 94–7; N.J. Coulson,
    A History of Islamic Law
    (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1964), 164–72. On the impact of colonialism on the institutions of Islamic law in India, see Radhika Singha,
    A Despotism of Law
    :
    Crime & Justice in Early Colonial India
    (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 52–3, 60–70, 294–6, 300.
    

25. For an example of this in Muhammad Ali’s (r. 1805–48) Egypt, see Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot,
    Women and Men in Late Eighteenth-Century Egypt
    (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 136, 141–2.
    

26. See, J.N.D. Anderson,
    Islamic Law in the Modern World
    (New York: New York University Press, 1959); J.N.D. Anderson,
    Law Reform in the Muslim World
    (London: Athlone Press, 1976); Wael Hallaq,
    A History of Islamic Legal Theories,
    207–11.
    

27. This byproduct of the colonial experience made Islamic law lose credibility as a sophisticated and technical field. Interestingly, even non-Muslim Westerners internalized the attitude of Muslim apologists towards Islamic law, as a field ripe for pietistic fictions,
    

    rather than a technical tradition of complex linguistic practices and sophisticated methodologies of social and textual analysis. For instance, it became rather common to hear Westerners repeat the pietistic fiction that Islamic jurisprudence is largely based on the Qur’an. Furthermore, especially in American law schools, being a Muslim activist was deemed sufficient to qualify a person to teach Islamic law.
    

28. This was often justified by the argument that
    taqlid
    (imitation or following precedent) is reprehensible, and that adherence to the classical schools of thought in jurisprudence was unjustified. On
    taqlid
    , see N.J. Coulson,
    A History of Islamic Law
    (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1964), 182–201. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, motivated by a desire to break out of the shackles of outmoded traditions, a large number of scholars emphasized the importance of
    ijtihad
    (innovative and creative determinations), and severely criticized the practice of
    taqlid
    . Because of the influence of puritans upon the development of Muslim contemporary thought, this amounted to the deconstruction of the interpretive communities of the past, and their replacement with the determinations of the new, but intellectually inferior, interpretive communities of the modern age. See Muhammad ‘Ali al-Shawkani,
    al-Qawl al-Mufid fi Adillat al-Ijtihad wa al-Taqlid
    , ed. Abu Mus‘ab al-Badri (Cairo: Dar al-Kitab al-Misri, 1991); Abu al-Nasr Hasan Khan al-Qanuji,
    al-Qawl al-Sadid fi Adillat al-Ijtihad wa al-Taqlid
    , ed. Abu ‘Abd al-Rahman Mi‘shasha (Beirut: Dar Ibn Hazm, 2000). For a 1935 critique of this orientation, and an attempt to reclaim the importance of honoring and, at times, deferring to the interpretations of the past, see Yusuf bin Ahmad al-Dijawi, “Jawaz al-taqlid wa al-radd ‘ala mann yuharrimahu,” Nurr al-Islam (aka
    Majallat al-Azhar
    [
    Azhar University Journal
    ]), 10(5), 1935, 669–79.