I'm adding GetReligion to the blogroll today; it's a blog about press coverage of religious issues. The current entry is about a press report on U.S. Latina conversions to Islam, and links to other commentary by Muslim women on hijab and women's rights under Islam.
I encountered the claim that Muhammad was a pedophile (or "pedophile rapist" to be precise) again the other day in comments to a blog, and while it never seems quite worthwhile to answer this in blog comments, since the issue of Aisha’s age at marriage is complicated enough to take a bit of doing to discuss in full, and the person raising the issue rarely seems interested in hearing contradictory evidence anyway, I thought I would just do an entry here that I could link back to the next time the temptation to respond arises.
The Wikipedia article on Aisha has a good summary of the conflicting traditions and histories about Aisha’s age at marriage to Muhammad, and also of the difficulties resolution of this controversy pose to Islamic theological method. Another critic of the story that Aisha was married at the age of nine goes further and attacks the credibility of the narrator of the main hadith in question (the most important ones are attributed to Aisha, but hadith were preserved only as an oral tradition for about 170 years; M. Amir Ali is challenging the credibility of the transmitter of traditions attributed to Aisha and others, which were in turn collected and authenticated by al-Bukhari et al), finding also a few more hadith in addition to the historical sources cited in the Wikipedia article that seem to conflict with the marriage at nine story.
So that’s about as clear as mud. Whatever the truth of the matter may have been, the story clearly has been garbled in the transmission one way or the other. Why has 9 prevailed over the more customary marriage age of 13 or post-puberty for Arabs, which some sources also support as the marriage age for Aisha, in Muslim historiography? I think a partial answer may be found in D.A. Spellberg’s Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of A’isha bint Abi Bakr.
Spellberg relates two lists of attributes supposedly recited by Aisha herself in the works of medieval Muslim historian Ibn Sa’d. They are both related in the first person; the first is introduced with the words: I was preferred above the [other] wives of the Prophet by ten [attributes]:
1. He [Muhammad] married no other wife as a virgin except me.
2. He didn’t marry anyone else whose mother and father were both emigrants.
3. Allah sent down my innocence from heaven.
4. Gabriel brought him [Muhammad] my likeness in silk from heaven saying, "Marry her for she is your wife."
5. He and I used to wash from a single vessel and he didn’t do that with any of his wives except me.
6. He used to pray when I was in his presence. He did that with none of his wives except me.
7. He received revelation while he was with me. This didn’t happen when he was with any of his other wives.
8. He [Muhammad] died in my arms.
9. He died on a night which had been turned over to me.
10. He was buried under my house.
1. The Prophet of Allah took me as his wife when I was a girl of seven.
2. The angel brought Muhammad my likeness in the palm of his hand.
3. He [Muhammad] consummated the marriage when I was nine.
4. I saw Gabriel and no other wife saw him except me.
5. I was the most beloved of his wives.
6. My father was the most beloved of his companions.
7. The Prophet of Allah fell ill in my house.
8. I nursed him.
9. Muhammad died and no one witnessed it except myself and the angels.
Four factors found in the two lists of Ibn Sa'd make specific mention of A'isha's marriage. In the first list, A'isha states that she was the only woman the Prophet married "as a virgin." (Ibn Sa'd, Tabaqat, 8:58, 63; ibn Hisham, Kitab sirat rasul Allah, v.1 pt.2: 1001). This obviously prized though fleeting physical asset allowed A'isha to remind her husband that all his other wives, as widows, had been physically intimate with other men. Reference to her unique virginity, narrated on A'isha's authority, caused the Prophet to smile (Ibn Sa'd, 8:80). A'isha's virginity, defined as a special attribute, emphasizes her sexuality as the Prophet's marital prize, a mark of distinction which supports male definition and control of female honor and chastity. Unlike the Prophet's daughter Fatima, whose designation in later medieval sources as al-Batul, "the virgin," will allow her transcend aspects of more mundane female biology, not in the conception of her children but in matters of menstruation and parturition, A'isha's virginity merits no honorary epithet, but remains part of her sensual legacy as the Prophet's spouse.The second list confirms the particulars of the marriage by explaining that A'isha was seven when she married the Prophet and nine when the union was consummated. A'isha's age is a major preoccupation in Ibn Sa'd where her marriage age varies between six and seven; nine seems constant as her age at the marriage's consummation. (Ibn Sa'd, 8: 58-62, where hadith concerning her age are repeated more than ten times. (Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, 4: 71.; Ibn Hanbal, Musnad, 6: 118. Both al-Bukhari and Ibn Hanbal maintain the ages as six and nine.) Only Ibn Hisham's biography of the Prophet mentions that A'isha may have been ten years old when the Prophet consummated the marriage (Ibn Hisham, v.1 pt.2: 1001). All of these specific references to the bride's age reinforce A'isha's pre-menarcheal status and, implicitly, her virginity. They also suggest the variability of A'isha's age in the historical record. (For disputed date of birth, see al-Tabari, Ta'rikh, 4: 2135 and its contradiction within the same chronicle, 4: 1262. For her death date at sixty-seven, not sixty-six, see Ibn Khallikan, Wafayat al-a'yan, 3: 16).
So firstly it seems that a pre-menarchal age was always attributed to Aisha in early sources; it is only where this indirectly trips up other methods of historical dating linked to Aisha that we see any real disagreement. Secondly, her young age and therefore indisputable virginity were seen by her biographers (and perhaps Aisha herself if we can trust the sources) as evidence of her specialness to the Prophet.
And why is the specialness of Aisha important in Muslim history? Spellberg notes that Ibn Sa’d and the other medieval historians she quotes were writing just around the time when the ongoing dispute among Muslims about the status of Ali had finally been formalized into a sectarian split between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims. Muhammad had died leaving no male children who survived into adulthood. Community leaders chose Abu Bakr, Aisha’s father, as the first successor to Muhammad. Some members of the community thought that Ali, the husband of Fatima, Muhammad’s daughter, should have been chosen instead. However, Ali was passed over two more times, in favor of Umar and Uthmann. When Ali was finally chosen as the fourth caliph to succeed Muhammad, Aisha led part of the community into a battle to prevent his succession. The battle was a bloodbath, but more so for Aisha’s side, and Ali assumed the Caliphate (but was soon thereafter assassinated, and the Umayyad dynasty began its rule of the Ummah).
Aisha’s presumed special status is understood by Sunni Muslims as evidence for the legitimacy of Abu Bakr as Caliph, and therefore implicitly the whole chain of succession after him, since the subsequent decisions of the leaders of the community are implicitly validated by the legitimacy of the first one. And Aisha herself was deeply involved in these controversies, and may have exaggerated some aspects of her history in order to legitimate herself (according to a standard that "supports male definition and control of female honor and chastity" to be sure) following her instigation of a battle that nearly destroyed the Ummah.
Or maybe Aisha really was nine when she married Muhammad. In a discussion on the islamicfeminist community (which unfortunately has since been deleted, and was also where I found the links above) at LiveJournal, one commenter noted that it was probably time for Muslims to begin taking a more anthropological view of Muhammad and the original Muslim community, viewing them as products of a very different society from ours in the far past, instead of treating every single thing they did as exemplary, and falling into the "trap" of trying to justify every aspect of their history, good or bad. This is probably easier said than done, since so much Islamic theology and jurisprudence uses the details of the lives of the Prophet and the Companions as guides to law and ethics. But it would simplify more than a few things, too.
I’ve added a new item to the “Readings” sidebar, ”Islamic Feminism and its Discontents: Toward a Resolution of the Debate” by Valentine M. Moghadem (from Signs, v.27 no.24, 2002). It’s largely a response to Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern Analysis by Haideh Moghissi (which I reviewed here). It’s a good and concise overview of scholarship in the field from a more sympathetic perspective to Islamic feminism than in Moghissi’s treatment (although it’s a bit harsh on Moghissi, whose position is I think more nuanced than Moghadem acknowledges here. Although Moghadem’s work was criticized in Moghissi’s book and it’s clear Moghadem felt pretty attacked by that, so there ya go.) It’s also well worth a read for the summary of what Islamic feminists have managed to accomplish within the Islamic Republic of Iran.
But above all, I love an academic paper that comes with its own punchline. Because in the end, Moghadem's “resolution” to the debate between Islamic and secularist feminists is basically that everyone just adopt her own Marxist-feminist perspective, which is that of course we should talk nice about Islamic feminism but still posit complete secularization of the state as the only effective route to women’s empowerment. Except still keep the Islamic injunction against usury as state law, we like that part since it’s anti-capitalist. Problem solved!
Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern Analysis
I’ve mentioned this book before, with a long quote from the introduction. Moghissi is an Iranian ex-pat dismayed by what she sees as Western academic apologism for the misogynist aspects of the wave of Islamization that swept Muslim countries generally in the 80s and 90s, as well as for the low status of women in revolutionary Islamist states themselves (particularly Iran). She challenges the notion that secularist democracy and equalitarian feminism should be seen as culturally inappropriate or for Middle Eastern peoples, and attempts to map out a method for critiqueing the status of women in Muslim nations without playing into Orientalist imagery or anti-Muslim bigotry. Moghissi is especially skeptical of the enthusiasm for Islamic feminism when it is treated not as a necessary resistance strategy for women living in Islamist states, but as the only appropriate mode of feminist consciousness for women in Muslim nations in general. Moghissi herself sees strict limits on how much the status of women can be improved from within Islamic tradition, and so favors secularization as the best method of accomplishing feminist goals. It’s an interesting read and serves as a good introduction to the range of thought among Muslim and ex-Muslim women on feminism and Islam.
Wow, a pretty raucous reception of Amina Wadud in Toronto. The article delves mostly into racial divisions in the Muslim community, but what interested me most was the "Say no to the Qu’ran" idea in her lecture. This sounds like a major shift in her thinking and probably has as much to do with the heckling as the race issue. Or rather the combination of the two is pretty explosive:
Ahmed Bayoumi, an Egyptian-Canadian Physician who sat through the entire lecture, reacting to the heckling said, "I find it fascinating that people would question Wadud’s ability to speak Arabic because she has moved from an interpretative understanding of the Qur’an to a literalist one. The argument seems to be that if she can explain away troublesome verses by resorting to nuance or obscurantism, her Arabic must be fine, but if she accepts the meanings of the text at face value, well she must have lost her previous fluency."
Describing Amina Wadud's lecture as "revolutionary and liberating," Bayoumi said, "I think Wadud is absolutely right. It's wonderful if you can live with legalistic or interpretive explanations. I cannot. It was liberating for me to hear somebody of Amina Wadud's stature say that she also cannot, not as an excuse for wanting to perform bad acts, but from a perspective of trying to be a true moral being and God's agent."
The knee-jerk reaction to being reminded of our internalized racism is predictable: complete denial. Racism governs our behavior, yet we are oblivious to our own prejudices and tribalism. With noted exceptions, I saw this in action on Sunday. I heard repeatedly from Arabs in the audience that Amina Wadud does not understand Arabic. Instead of debating the merits of her argument, many invoked and sought refuge in their ethnic and linguistic superiority.
Wadud's treatment of the Qur'anic verse on wife-beating in her Qur'an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective was indeed just such a nuanced and legalistic explaining-away, and I thought one of the least persuasive arguments in the book. It's not surprising that she decided she couldn't really live with it, but going out and lecturing about it is pretty risky.
I’d love to see a copy of that speech. Or I hope she publishes something about this soon.
(Link swiped from Islamicfeminist.)
Most of the Koran has multiple potential meanings like the sura I quoted in the previous post, which makes recommending a single source about any aspect of Islam kind of a touchy issue. A while back, a friend asked me to recommend a book that would give a good introduction to Islamism. I wanted to say Jansen’s The Neglected Duty, which contains an English translation of Muhammad 'Abdus Salam Faraj's Al-Faridah al-Gha’ibah along with a lot of background and discussion from other Muslims. (There are some quotes from it and a link to a bookstore where you can buy just the Faridah at the Islamist Watch website--the title is translated as The Absent Obligation there.) But Jansen’s book is out of print and scarce, so it seemed a bit beside the point to recommend it. I’d say, just poke through some of the documents on the Islamist Watch site, but the problem is, no context is provided, and especially no information that lets you understand both how perverse this particular interpretation of Islam is, yet also how compelling. I think maybe I want to recommend The Veil and the Male Elite by Fatima Mernissi for starters. It’s a feminist reinterpration of the Koran and Hadith and a vivid recounting of early Islamic history. She is always clear about what the tradition has been, and which parts are her own interpretation, so although it is a heterodox text, it’s nonetheless a good, memorable introduction to the subject matter. Maybe read that, and read some of the stuff on the site linked above, and you’ll probably be able to see how everything resonates. Also, see Emmanuel Sivan’s Radical Islam, for important context about Ibn Taymiyya (a medieval Islamic jurist, and an important legitimating source for Wahhabism and Islamist thought in general) and the history of the Islamist movement.
Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: the Legacy of A'isha bint Abi Bakr
Aisha is a pivotal figure in the Sunni/Shia split in Islam; a wife of Muhammad, her father was the first of the four Rightly Guided Caliphs in the Sunni version of Islamic history, and she later took the field to lead the opposition to Ali, the Shia candidate for legitimate successor to Muhammad. This book is a careful review of the treatment of Aisha in Medieval Islamic sources, tracing how the legacy of Aisha, with respect to the Shia/Sunni divide, Islamic notions of the feminine ideal, and theological positions on the role of women in society and politics, was shaped by the editing of and commentary on hadith literature relating to Aisha by both Sunni and Shia scholars. A good example of how interpretation of Islamic texts has been contingent on changing social and political contexts, in relatively lucid prose for an academic work.
The Struggle of Muslim Women
Another one from the Manchester haul. I've written about this book before, but I don't think I got around to mentioning the collection of contributions from other writers at the end. The one that jumps off the pile is from a Muslim woman who works in social services in New York City, complaining that Muslim women who go on welfare rather than give up their face veils are making everybody look bad, and are probably kinda lazy too. Curioser and curioser.
(Note: I started this entry back in October, and just got around to finishing it this morning. I was putting it off because I was going to go into the role of anti-Semitism in Islamist and Arab politics, but wandered so far off course that I've decided it would just be easier to do a separate entry about that sometime).
So the other night I read Dr. Kaukab Siddique’s The Struggle of Muslim Women, and it was being all wonderful, pitched to the level of an ordinary Muslim and with all the relevant authorities persuasively cited in the cause of Islamic feminism, and doing, I might add, an excellent job of smacking down the alleged wife-beating sura that gave Amina Wadud such a problem. His argument was so good that I was reflecting on how, if they had freedom of speech in most Islamic countries, the feminist interpretation of the Koran could win so easily in a fair fight; it’s all there in black and white, after all, straight from the mouth of the Prophet, crystal clear. And what a beautiful religion Islam is, really, when you understand it properly, and how much more auspicious for women the Koran was, in the beginning, than the Old and New Testaments were, and how all of this really can be put right, eventually.
Then I got to a collection of essays at the end, apparently articles from the New Trend magazine for American Muslims that Dr. Siddique publishes (the book itself was published in 1982), and the little drips and drabs of ignorable hints, scattered throughout the text, that he is something of an Islamist suddenly coalesced in a rather chilling interview (1979) with Azam Taleghani "on Women’s Role after the Islamic Revolution in Iran." The money quote:
Tell the Iranian students in America that this is part of the struggle against Zionism and Imperialism … Tell them also that we want to get hold of Mahnaz Abkhani of the so-called "Voice of Iranian Women" (under the Shah). She escaped to the U.S. They should help us to put her on trial.
For "trial" read "execution," if I’ve got the time period pegged correctly. Taleghani is the daughter of Ayatollah Taleghani, whose defense of the re-imposition of htjab is one of the primary documents included in the book on the women’s movement in Iran I reviewed earlier. When women were protesting the new hijab requirement just after the Revolution, he said:
The question of hejab is one of the manifestations of this movement and of this Revolution. No one forced women to come with hejab on demonstrations … But they themselves felt an Islamic responsibility to make this dress one of their Islamic and Iranian slogans, to show their genuine feelings and to show it to the world. And the world marvelled at them. And now whether they want to wear a scarf or not, no one is forcing them, we are requesting it. Ayatollah Khomeini has not expressed it in terms of imposition and force either. But we want to show that there has been a Revolution, a profound change, in our offices and ministries. For this reason I ask of our women not to be played upon by others, not to make such a hue and cry. And I repeat again and again that in Islam, and in Islamic Republic all their rights will be protected.
This being the initial "oh, no, it’s only for government workers" line the Ayatollahs adopted in the face of large protests, gradually extending the requirement to women in all spheres of life over the next year, failure of women to dress Islamically becoming punishable by 30 lashes in due course of time.
In a second interview, conducted in 1982, Azam asks Dr. Siddique what he thinks of the progress of the revolution, and he says, in part:
By and large the developments are positive. The Islamic militancy and general mobilization of the people seems to be at a qualitatively much higher level. Islam has become much more important. There are, however, certain negative trends which can prove very damaging in the future. 1. The MKO has created a situation where criticism of the government has become very difficult. Any criticism can arouse suspicion. The revolution is winning the war with Iraq, alhamdulillah, but after the war the government officials will be the heroes of the revolution and it will be even more difficult to criticize them. Unless the revolutionary institutions work hard to open channels for expression of genuine criticism, freedom, which was one of the three planks of the revolutionary platform, will be stifled permanently. Freedom has never survived the stages of counterrevolutionary terror and war in any revolution previous to this.
He goes on to complain also of the apparent evolution of a state Shi’ism, as opposed to unification of Sunni and Shia Muslims through the Revolutionary apparatus. Azam ignores the point about freedom, but acknowledges the influence of Shi’ism, concluding "However, you should know that Sunni in Iran are cooperating more and more with the revolution." For a given value of "cooperating," no doubt.
Many well-intentioned people clung to the idea that the Islamic Revolution in Iran was something other than what it was for a surprisingly long time. Reading progressives and feminists commenting on it through the early 1980s, I never know whether to condemn their apologism, or break my heart for their naivete and wishful thinking.
So what does Dr. Siddique think of the Islamic Revolution now? A Google search turns up a mostly unremarkable 9/11/03 interview in The Final Call, in which he voices opposition to U.S. policy re: Iraq and Israel and the imprisonment of certain Muslim activists by the U.S., but those sentiments appear to be nearly universal among politically active (and non-Iraqi) Muslim expats, so little may be deduced from it. The current web address of New Trend magazine, however, is given at the end of the article (www.newtrendmag.org) The web page of Jamaat al-Muslimeen, the organization Siddique endorses throughout his book, appears to have stopped updating early in 2001, and most of the links are dead, but the New Trend site is still very much alive. On this site, the "boycott" page turns out to be about Israel only (and what was I expecting, Amina Lawal? Well, yes, actually.) At the top of the page, an "in memoriam" photo of the mother of Wafa Idriss (the first female Palestinian suicide bomber--woo, feminism) holding a photo of her daughter. Beneath that, a large graphic illustrating the Blood Libel (a mutilated Palestinian baby between two halves of a hamburger bun, his/her blood draining into Coke and Pepsi bottles; bloody American and Israeli hands reaching into the frame to menace the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Ka’ba in the background). The Links page includes, nestled among links to al-Jazeera and this quite nice page about Arab contributions to the arts & sciences throughout history, a link to "Taliban & Mujahideen News," at www.allahuakhbar.com, no longer working, go figure. I don’t find any specific references to Iran at the New Trend site, but I think my question has been answered anyway.
So, is there really any such thing as a "moderate Islamist?" And by Islamist, I mean one who believes in instituting Islam as government and politics, not just one who adopts that perverse interpretation of Islam which has come to be known as "fundamentalist" (a very bad misnomer, given how far away from the Book it really is) or "conservative" (another misnomer, given how far away from actual Islamic tradition it really is). The two are frequently related, but theoretically separable. The Taliban and Khomeini were both; Dr. Siddique is the former only. Fatima says "no," and I am inclined to agree, not because I think all Islamists are lying about their real purpose or intentions--I have no reason to think Siddique is not perfectly sincere, for example--but because I think political Islam will inevitably trend towards the despotic and repressive no matter how it is begun.
(And actually if your definition of "moderate Islamist" is only "one who does not endorse the use of terrorism in pursuing Islamist political aims," I believe we may stop wondering about whether or not Dr. Siddique is one right now).
I have never made a particular study of Marxism, or Soviet politics and history. But obviously there is something about Communism as a political system that produces, like clockwork, in every instance, the killing of people in numbers that strain human capacity to even conceptualize them. I used to wonder why that was, exactly, since obviously the agenda of socialism doesn’t kill people. You have all these democratic European countries, they have socialist parties that get elected from time to time, and the socialists tend to do a lot of wealth redistribution through taxes and welfare programs and work regulations and whatnot. It seems to cause economic stagnation, but if you prioritize the equality of the slices over the size of the pie, it’s all good, and anyway they are still free people who may change course whenever they want. So the problem is in the structure of power in a country that has constituted itself as a Communist state. And I think the X Factor of Evil there is the very notion of a government that, in itself, is supposed to always already embody the unitary will of the people, as the very basis of its legitimacy, because this is of course impossible. It would be impossible in a group of 20 people let alone 20 million. My old boyfriend, known as "anthro boy" to some of my friends, told me once that in every single tribe or group of people on the face of the earth, there is always at least one person who doesn’t buy the religion or general worldview of the group. You could be talking to some little bunch of people in the depths of the Amazonian jungle whose only contact with the outside world is through anthropologists, and there will always be one guy who takes the anthropologist aside and says "You know what they were saying to you earlier, about the river god? That’s all a load of crap that somebody made up a long time ago."
Since the government cannot actually be made to match "the people," "the people" must somehow be made to match the government that supposedly automatically embodies its will. Hence, some trimming is in order from time to time. The citizenry learns to attend the rallies, get the voting card stamped, keep its head down. Or else.
How does a government that is supposed to be enacting the will of God work, exactly? Well, it cannot really be democratic, for one thing, since obviously human beings cannot write the law better than God can. And obviously the selection of persons most qualified to discern the will of God cannot be left to the caprices of election politics, those popularity contests between scheming political parties and self-serving politicians. Instead they must be chosen from among the community of religious scholars, and their decisions may not be second-guessed by any secular human authority. Not that anyone would try to second-guess the will of God. As Ayatollah Taleghani explained, it is not that anyone would force Muslim women to wear hijab; it is that Muslim women want to wear hijab. If there are non-Muslims, apparently, in the Islamic Republic, then that is a separate issue altogether and will be dealt with in due course.
In traditional Islam, the concept of the Ummah lies, in Western terms, somewhere between "flock" and "nation." In political Islam, it becomes analogous to "Volk" or "proletariat," as well it might do, given the tremendous influence of Nazism and Marxism on Islamist intellectuals. The theory is that properly Islamic institutions will unleash the power of the Ummah, allowing it to unite politically and rule the word as God intended. Ultimately, then, the Islamist state derives its political authority from its supposed stewardship of the Ummah; its basis in God's law is both the justification and the proof of this stewardship. The role of force in maintaining political power, however, places the burden of maintaining this relationship on the ruled rather than the ruler. The Ummah must be the kind of Ummah that justifies the rule of the Mullahs, just as Hitler needed the Volk to be his kind of Volk and the proletariat had to act like the proletariat as theorized.
The centrality of personal status and sex laws in Islam make it an excellent instrument of totalitarian power, authorizing a limitless surveillance of private life by the state, or, more likely, by one's neighbors seeking favor from the state. Wielding this instrument is always job one in an Islamist state; doing so both places the citizenry in a permanent state of disadvantage and susceptibility to persecution by the state, and enacts the state's Islamic "authenticity," not only through the supposedly divinely ordained oppression of women and denial of personal freedom, but also through the resolutely and self-consciously anti-Western character of the revisionist "conservative" version of Shari'ah law. Dr. Siddique appears to believe that there would be some room for disagreement about what the law is in an Islamist state; I think this is naïve, and more importantly, ahistorical, as we now know what an Islamist state looks like in Shia (Iran), Sunni (the Taliban's Afghanistan) and even Sufi (Sudan) hands. Basically, all the goddamn same, at least as measured by the status of women. An actual Islamist revolution would transform Dr. Siddique from an ally in the Islamist cause into a dissident within its ranks, and he would likely be among the first to swing.
C. said: ...obviously there is something about Communism as a political system that produces, like clockwork, in every instance, the killing of people in numbers that strain human capacity to even conceptualize them. I used to wonder why that was, exactly, since obviously the agenda of socialism doesn’t kill people.... So the problem is in the structure of power in a country that has constituted itself as a Communist state. And I think the X Factor of Evil there is the very notion of a government that, in itself, is supposed to always already embody the unitary will of the people, as the very basis of its legitimacy, because this is of course impossible.
I don't disagree with this, I just don't think there's only one X Factor of Evil. One of the things I took away from Arendt on totalitarians is the idea that they disregard mere human laws in favor of a superior source of law and morality -- History, for communists; Nature, for fascists. This tendency is in tension with the idea of representing The People, and it fairly often ends up dominating. For communism, boilerplate about false consciousness, objective class interests and so forth is the bridge I remember seeing. God, of course, outranks even History and Nature.
There are probably other X Factors, too. The ordinary corrupting influence of power, for starters.
How does a government that is supposed to be enacting the will of God work, exactly? Well, it cannot really be democratic, for one thing, since obviously human beings cannot write the law better than God can.
This is the political legitimacy problem that has plagued Islam for pretty much its entire history -- if God is the legislator, where does that leave human-made laws?
You will commonly see talk of how Islamic civilization hasn't really had any generally-accepted idea of legitimate government since the Caliphate fell. I actually think it's worse than that: in my reading, the Caliphate had legitimacy problems too.
I replied: You will commonly see talk of how Islamic civilization hasn't really had any generally-accepted idea of legitimate government since the Caliphate fell. I actually think it's worse than that: in my reading, the Caliphate had legitimacy problems too.
That seems quite true to me; it was certainly implied in the historical review of the relationship between religion and political authority in the lands of Islam in that Zubaidi book that was ripped from my hands the other day.
And you know, really, even the Four Rightly-Guided Caliphs had legitimacy problems, or so one may gather from all the assassinations and whatnot. I've read a few sources who consider the assassins from this period (and specifically the Khawarij (sp?)) the ancestors of Islamism and Islamic fundamentalism (but I'm not sure if I completely agree with that; it seems a little pigeon-holey). And Zubaidi was arguing that the Umayyads regarded themselves as properly Islamic Caliphs as well, and perhaps were only denounced as usurpers by later generations (perhaps, I speculate, as a way of fixing blame on someone for the Shia/Sunni split? Or for some other reason I can't even fathom right now?)
So I'm reading along in one of the "fundamentalist" tracts Mr. Bell Jar brought back for me from England (Hijab by Dr. Mohammad Ismail Memon Madani, insisting on full purdah, and burqa and gloves, blah blah blah bullshit revisionist-cakes) and I come across this startling hadith, containing the only tiny shred of anything that could possibly be construed as Islamic support for honor killing I've encountered thus far:
In one hadith, it has been said that no one has a better sense of honor than Allah which is why he has forbidden lewdness. (Bukhari)
Once Sa'd Ibn 'Ubadah (Radhi Allahu Ta'ala' Anha) said "I will not hesitate killing my wife with my sword if I see her with a strange man." The Prophet (Sallallahu 'alaihi wa Sallam) said to his audience, "Are you surprised at Sa'd's (Radhi Allahu Ta'ala' Anha) sense of honor? I have a higher sense of honor than Sa'd (Radhi Allahu Ta'ala' Anha) and Allah (Subhanahu wa Ta'ala) has it even higher than me.
Oh, that can't be right. And it isn't. It so happens there is an online searchable database of al-Bukhari's hadith collection, along with that of Muslim and partial collections of a few others. (Bukhari and Muslim are the considered the most authoritative sources of ahadith). Here's what I found:
Sahih Bukhari
Volume 8, Book 82, Number 829:
Narrated Al-Mughira:
Sa'd bin Ubada said, "If I found a man with my wife, I would kill him with the sharp side of my sword." When the Prophet heard that he said, "Do you wonder at Sa'd's sense of ghira (self-respect)? Verily, I have more sense of ghira than Sa'd, and Allah has more sense of ghira than I."
Sahih Muslim
Book 009, Number 3571:
Abu Huraira (Allah be pleased with him) reported that Sa'd b. Ubada (Allah be pleased with him) said: Messenger of Allah, if I were to find with my wife a man, should I not touch him before bringing four witnesses? Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) said: Yes. He said: By no means. By Him Who has sent you with the Truth, I would hasten with my sword to him before that. Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) said: Listen to what your chief says. He is jealous of his honour, I am more jealous than he (is) and God is more jealous than I.
Book 009, Number 3572:
AI-Mughira b. Shu'ba (Allah be pleased with him) reported that Sa'd b. 'Ubada (Allah be pleased with him) said: If I were to see a man with my wife, I would have struck him with the sword, and not with the flat part (side) of it. When Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) heard of that, he said: Are you surprised at Sa'd's jealousy of his honour? By Allah, I am more jealous of my honour than he, and Allah is more jealous than I. Because of His jealousy Allah has prohibited abomination, both open and secret And no person is more jealous of his honour than Allah, and no persons, is more fond of accepting an excuse than Allah, on account of which He has sent messengers, announcers of glad tidings and warners; and no one is more fond of praise than Allah on account of which Allah has promised Paradise.
Partial Sunan Abu Dawud
Book 38, Number 4403:
Narrated Ubadah ibn as-Samit:
The tradition mentioned above (No. 4401) has also been transmitted by Ubadah ibn as-Samit through a different chain of narrators. This version has: The people said to Sa'd ibn Ubadah: AbuThabit, the prescribed punishments have been revealed: if you find a man with your wife, what will you do? He said: I shall strike them with a sword so much that they become silent (i.e. die). Should I go and gather four witnesses? Until that (time) the need would be fulfilled.
So they went away and gathered with the Apostle of Allah (peace_be_upon_him) and said: Apostle of Allah! did you not see AbuThabit. He said so-and-so.
The Apostle of Allah (peace_be_upon_him) said: The sword is a sufficient witness. He then said: No, no, a furious and a jealous man may follow this course. [no,. 4401 not found in this online collection]
Hijab is a translation of a Pakistani publication intended for the edification of Anglophone Muslims; switching the sex of the person a companion of the Prophet has announced he will kill to defend his honor, to the apparent approval of the Prophet, is a cute kind of error to make in a book published in a country with one of the highest rates of honor killing in the Islamic world. Of course the hadith has been presented to make a different point; if Dr. Memon has drawn any further conclusions about the application of this hadith, it has somehow not been translated into English so far as I know, or perhaps further interpretation is left as an exercise for the reader.
Of course the fact that Ubadah really states that he will kill his wife's lover, or both of them, instead of just his wife is not really much of an improvement in the apparent meaning of the hadith. But this collection of different versions of evidently the same event points up some of the problems posed by hadith. Most hadith were collected as oral reports passed from one generation to the next, about 150 years after the death of the Prophet. The purpose of this collection was to elaborate the Shari'ah. The Koran itself is mighty short on actual laws, except for a small handful dealing mostly with marriage, inheritance, and personal status. Muslim progressives like Mernissi and Ahmed argue that the process of collecting hadith often had the effect of writing pre-existing Arab cultural practices and biases over the message of Islam (and indeed, according to what I've been reading lately, the Shari'ah was actually formed first out of the raw material of standard Arab cultural practice, then out of the example of the Companions of the Prophet and the Prophet as presented in hadith, and then finally from the teachings of the Koran).
Offhand, this appears to be an excellent example of this type of cultural revision or supplanting of Koranic message. One of the most detailed laws in the Koran involves the requirement of four witnesses to bring a charge of adultery, and persons bearing false witness of adultery or bringing the charge in insufficient numbers are to be whipped (80 lashes; the punishment for adultery being 100 lashes for both the man and the woman). (I've discussed the Koranic law on adultery and the much milder actual sunna of the Prophet earlier here and here). If honor killing really is part of urf (traditional Arab cultural practice), than surely the entire point of stipulating detailed evidentiary requirements for charging anyone with adultery and a highly specific punishment for same is to forbid or replace the old practice. Yet here someone has the Prophet saying that the sword is sufficient witness in one version, and the requirement of four witnesses for just punishment is mentioned only to be dismissed in two versions. In the Koran, conversely, a sura in which the Prophet advises a man to shut his adulterous wife up in the house and go away so that she starves to death was revealed earlier than the verse calling for four witnesses and lashings and is considered by all Islamic authorities to be utterly abrogated by it, the later sura being the final and authoritative word on the subject.
A central goal of hadith authenticators like Bukhari and Muslim was to assess the character and likely veracity of each witness in the chain of transmission of each hadith, and I see no reason to assume that any given speaker was not faithfully trying to reproduce the actual words and deeds of the Muhammad and his companions. But no doubt whatever any given individual considered to be the kernel of meaning in each hadith would naturally influence how the hadith is remembered. It is striking that Bukhari and Muslim have different versions from the same reporter, al-Mughira. Whether Bukhari edited the hadith for reasons of his own, or al-Mughira told the story two different ways, I couldn't say. But in three of the four versions, the central emphasis is on the righteousness of the husband's sense of honor, and on how much more finely-honed than that is God's own honor; it is presented primarily as a form of praise of Allah, in terms which make sense in pre-Islamic Arab cultural. But in the longer al-Mughira version collected by Muslim, the final words change the meaning substantially. In that case the sense is, Ubadah boasts of his honor as demonstrated by his will to revenge, in contravention of the revealed will of God, and the Prophet replies that God's honor is greater than Ubadah's or even his own, AND God is merciful, AND has already told what you to do in that circumstance: "And no person is more jealous of his honour than Allah, and no person, is more fond of accepting an excuse than Allah, on account of which He has sent messengers, announcers of glad tidings and warners …" In that sense, it is another refutation of pre-Islamic practice in favor of God's law as given.
I have no way of knowing which version is the most accurate, but naturally I have a favorite, not least because the story of the life of Muhammad is chock full of instances in which the Prophet is challenged by followers unwilling to renounce many of their former practices, and must restate his version of God's law over and over again (or occasionally back down instead, of which more later when I get around to writing an entry on hijab). This is why inheritance law in the Koran is so detailed, for example; members of the community were unused to allowing women to inherit property and kept seeking exemptions from it in a wide variety of special circumstances. Nearly every sura on inheritance by women in the Koran is a response to an objection disguised as a question. Read within the overarching historical drama of trying to effect a cultural transformation among sometimes recalcitrant converts, the longer al-Mughira version seems like just another instance of the Prophet attempting to deflect his community away from its old ways in favor of the new.
But if that particular alternate version had not survived, there would not be any trace of this meaning left amongst the other three. Given the natural and persistent biases of their reporters, it is not surprising that hadith tend to form the backbone of misogynist readings of Islam.
Update: In reponse to a reader who seemed to be putting an alarming amount of stock into what I've been writing about things like the forgoing, I wrote:
I'm glad to hear that you're enjoying the Islam stuff, but do bear firmly in mind that I could be totally wrong about anything at any given moment. It occurred to me after looking up the hadith that absolutely anyone could be lying to me about anything, since I generally don't look things like that up, and most of what is written about Islam in English is highly politicized and agenda-driven. I have taken the side that suits me and see everything through that lens, which amounts to a critical bias in its own right.
I've been noticing, for example, that I seem to approach all of this from a fairly firm Christian perspective about what God can and cannot be, and can and cannot have possibly said, as a result of my having been raised as a Christian, or perhaps simply as a Westerner. But at the same time, if I were a committed Christian, I would not be able to regard the Koran as an authentic expression of the word of God, so that there would be no reason for the God in that book to match up with the God in mine. And for a non-believer, why should God in one tradition match with God in another when it is all human invention anyway? Curious!
