The Gertrude Bell Jar

The Struggle of Muslim Women/Dr. Kaukab Siddique

The Struggle of Muslim Women by Dr. Kaukab Siddique.

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.

Hijab/Mohammad Ismail Memon Madani

Hijab: the Islamic Commandments of Hijab by Dr. Mohammad Ismail Memon Madani.

This is from the cache of English-translation books from Pakistan for expat or converted Muslims in the West that my husband brought back for me from Manchester. The author attempts to demonstrate that the Koran calls for the burqa and gloves, though face veiling that reveals only the eyes is also acceptable "in an emergency." It's about as convincing as you want it to be, I suppose. The argument centers on disproving the theory that the two sets of Koranic verses that have been interpreted as calling for hijab were directed only at the wives of the Prophet, mainly by pointing out how in these and other verses of the Koran the wives of the Prophet are enjoined to do things that are indeed expected of all Muslims. The author prefers to ignore the fact that one set of verses also calls on wives of the Prophet never to remarry after his death, a requirement that has never been imposed on other Muslim women, while the other begins with the phrase "You are not like other women." He does supply a chain of interpretation from various commentators on the Koran that allows him to ascribe his highly specific meaning to the somewhat vague original verses, in a way which would tend to confirm Zubaida's theory that much of the Sharia is a formalization of Arab cultural practice, if only one could be certain the citation of authorities isn't too selective to be meaningful. The fact of the matter is that there has never been a single standard for hijab for Muslim women across all of the nations and cultures in which Islam has flourished, so the history of interpretation cited here must be partial at best.

Islam, Liberalism and Human Rights/Katerina Dalacoura

Islam, Liberalism and Human Rights: Implications for International Relations by Katerina Dalacoura.

An attempt to defend the notion of human rights and democracy from cultural essentialism, to locate sources for human rights theory within Islamic texts, and to demonstrate how these ideas have already been inducted into political discourse and change in Muslim nations. Dalacoura begins with a concise discussion of the philosophical problems underlying human rights theory and the attempt to apply it cross-culturally, then moves on to present three examples of partial democratization in Muslim nations and to carefully recount the actual history of how and why these movements failed. Her purpose is to refute the notion that some unidentified but immutable aspect of Arab or Islamic character makes democratization impossible, by locating the precise historical and political reasons for failure, which naturally suggest ways that democratization might have succeeded instead. Her project is undercut a bit by her decision to just skip the Nasser era in Egypt; Egyptian history 1920s-1930s and 1970s-1980s are treated as two of her three examples, with the intervening fascist rule of Nasser treated as a "lacuna," despite her fleeting acknowledgement of the vast popularity of his rule, and his continuing status as an Arab hero. The example of Nasser is precisely the sort of thing people point to as proof of some inherently authoritarian/servile speck in the Arab character, so her failure to account for him in some way is a disappointment. Her chapter on Tunisia 1970s-1990s however importantly demonstrates how a brief spell of political freedom in that nation ameliorated the Islamist tide that swept the entire Muslim world during that period, forcing Islamist leaders to moderate their ideology and tactics in order to both protect their own political legitimacy and seek electoral victory. I think it's an important book in many respects, so it's a shame that it's not written for a general audience, but instead assumes a great deal of background knowledge on the part of the reader (it is actually a revision of her doctoral thesis for the IR Dept. of the London School of Economics and Politics). I am expecting to get her paper on the same topic that she's published through the Brookings Institution from the library, so maybe I'll end up being able to recommend that to people.

Confused Now

From the new Iraqi interim constitution (full text here):

Article 7A: Islam is the official religion of the State and is to be considered a source of legislation. No law that contradicts the universally agreed tenets of Islam, the principles of democracy, or the rights cited in Chapter Two of this Law may be enacted during the transitional period. This Law respects the Islamic identity of the majority of the Iraqi people and guarantees the full religious rights of all individuals to freedom of religious belief and practice.

Gee, thanks for clearing that up folks. That’ll keep that new Supreme Court of yours busy and out of trouble!

Sarcasm is cheap, of course. I was discussing this with M. last night and we concluded that 1) Americans place way more importance on constitutional law than anyone else does anyway; 2) They’re going to redo the whole thing once they have an elected government; and 3) It’s not like there’s a simple answer to the state vs. religion question just lying around waiting to be picked up, and the IGC simply doesn't have the authority to present a final answer to that question even if they had one in theory.

The trouble is, secularization of the state and privatization of religion is not necessarily the full and complete answer for Iraq as it was for us. The theory of natural rights that underpins our particular version of democracy is actually an iteration of Christian theology, and none of the rights and freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution and Bill of Rights directly contradicted the Christian values of their signatories. However, many aspects of Islam as traditionally interpreted do directly contradict rights laid out in the interim constitution, most importantly those relating to the status of women and non-Muslims. As starkly undefined in the Article, we have the possibility of the courts emptying either the notion of democracy & human rights or Islam of meaning in order to harmonize the two, and the judiciary will be appointed by the legislature, which may ultimately make it a faction fight. But reaching a true consensus on the issue that can form a lasting foundation for a democratic Iraq will require a great deal of public discussion and compromise, i.e., democracy in action. What is needed to resolve the issue, in other words, is a political context that would be best guaranteed if the issue were already resolved. The conundrum is too many for me at the moment, I hope the Iraqis have better luck with it.

Clarification in response to some reader comments: Well, yes, I do believe human rights are a universal value. The operative phrase, and perhaps I should have been more clear, is "traditional interpretation" of Islam. Islam at the level of the text contains many currents, including language that can be construed to support both the notion of the dignity of the person as a person, and as conferring a positive obligation on Muslims to contribute to the evolution of human institutions in the direction of the spirit (rather than the letter) of the Koran. It is a short jump to point to the demonstrable advantages of political freedom and human rights as providing the obvious path, and many Muslims who live in democratic countries have done so. However, orthodox Islamic theology has unfolded within a specific history and under forms of political domination that have tended to suppress these possibilities at every turn. How to transition from the latter to the former, and how to formulate democratic institutions in Islamic countries in a way that allows citizens to be confident that those institutions will authentically express their own (rather than a foreign power's) values within a human rights framework, is the issue here.

I'm not even pretending to know how that will or might be done, btw. But I do think the current debate we're having over gay marriage demonstrates how divergently moral or religious values can inform human rights interpretations. Is it possible to simply require people to abondon their previous beliefs in order to make democracy work, when these are the same people who must uphold democratic institutions to keep them working? The political reality is: This is as dominated by the U.S. as Iraqi lawmakers are ever going to be, and this is what they written. It does seem as if a fairly serious issue with huge stumbling-block potential has been put off for another day.

Some More Reader Discussion:

M. (who is a LAWYER) said: One thing that struck me about the phrasing when I was reading it last night:

No law that contradicts the universally agreed tenets of Islam, the principles of democracy, or the rights cited in Chapter Two of this Law may be enacted during the transitional period.

(Italics added.) If a court can be constituted that can be either depended on to interpret that "universally agreed" bit strictly, or that has members with enough conflict on what's universally agreed to be Islamic, there's at least a built-in brake on invalidating laws because they're inconsistent with Islam (and, conversely, on upholding laws solely on the basis of their Islamic character). The principles of democracy and the bill of rights don't have to be universally agreed upon to be enforceable, but the Islamic elements do. Also, Islamic law is at best coequal with the other constitutional provisions, which means that it can't (in principle) trump the constitutional provisions regarding search and seizure, trials, and criminal punishment.

Granted, I don't hold out a lot of hope based on constitutional phrasing, for the reasons we discussed. First the constitution has to be taken seriously enough not to be ignored or routinely modified according to the government's whims. Then, even if they reach the necessary sort of legal culture for it to matter much, they have to interpret the phrasing in a particular way; our own constitutional history is ample evidence that sentences that look plain and unambiguous to one person will be interpreted wholly differently by another. But for whatever it's worth, it's currently possible to minimize the relevance of Islamic law while still following the text of the Iraqi constitution, especially given the existence of wide varieties of Muslim opinion and practice within the country.

I replied: I noticed that too, and wondered how much of a wiggle word "universal" was meant to be. It could mean all Muslims everywhere, which would in effect make it meaningless, but it could also refer merely to agreement among the four schools of Islamic law, which is the definition of at least Sunni orthodoxy. (Insert uncertainty about what the definition of "universal" or orthodox means in a Shia context here). A lot depends on whether you have Islamic or secular judges parsing the text. And all the other factors you've mentioned.

M. replied: If I got to use the orbital mind control lasers in this context, I might stick in an early ruling requiring a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court to overturn a law because it's inconsistent with Islamic orthodoxy (since, after all, if they can't agree on it, it can't be "universally agreed-upon"), and likewise, if there's a perceived conflict between other constitutional principles and Islam, the latter wins only if they all think it should.

Granted, I don't think that's likely. But I see some hope in the fact that Iraq has such a Sunni/Shia split and that the rules are set up to push for geographic and ethnic diversity on the court. Each office gets three nominees agreed to by the Higher Juridical Council (which includes judges from all the major regional courts) one of whom is selected by the Presidency Council. That seems likely to force compromise and balancing acts in constituting the Court, rather than allowing any faction to pack the court with its sympathizers.

Of course, if there is broad consensus among the various groups favoring illiberal Islamic rulings, Iraq is probably stuck with them. But it's arguable that there's not much we can do about that. We have our own issues with the conflict between democracy and basic civil rights, which we're still dealing with imperfectly despite a two-and-a-quarter century track record. If the rights to free communication and petitioning for the redress of grievances remain intact, at least there's a mechanism for trying to fix the problems in the long run, and constitutional principles of equality and individual rights to counter them. If this constitution is applied seriously and succeeded by a reasonably similar permanent constitution,¹ they at least have a chance for a decent system.

¹If it is. The Federal Republic of Germany never got around to passing a constitution to supersede the "temporary" Basic Law enacted in 1949. (After reunification, they decided to officially make the Basic Law the constitution, but AFAIK that wasn't the original plan.)

And later, M. added: Other random interesting bits:

The anti-Second-Amendment ("It shall not be permitted to possess, bear, buy, or sell arms except on licensure issued in accordance with the law.")

Explicit legal equality regardless of "gender, sect, opinion, belief, nationality, religion, or origin" (which, again, will interact unpredictably with Islam as the state religion).

The right to "security, education, health care, and social security." One wonders how that will be implemented, if at all.

The ban on military participation in the government in any way other than voting.

Very limited parliamentary immunity. (Basically, you can't be arrested during a parliamentary session unless you're committing the crime during it, and you're immune from libel/slander charges for statements made in the assembly, but otherwise parliamentary office doesn't protect you from arrest.)

Requirement that National Assembly members have a high school diploma.

I note that there's nothing in the various constitutional provisions restoring citizenship and either property or compensation for it to emigrés that excludes Jews of Iraqi origin. (Though if I were one, I might wait a bit to exercise it till there was a body of precedent involving non-Jews, and a court system that appeared to be bound by precedent.)

Honestly, while there are unsatisfactory provisions, overall it looks fairly good to me. It at least has the potential to produce the sort of federal, separation-of-powers system that creates enough conflicting constituencies to make tyranny difficult. If it's implemented, and if it's not ignored or modified or interpreted into ineffectuality, or replaced by a much worse non-interim constitution in two years. (Huge ifs, certainly.) It would be difficult, I think, to give Iraq a seriously Islamist character without running roughshod over the rest of the constitution, which in turn suggests that the establishment of Islam as a state religion in the document isn't that important in and of itself.

BTW, for comparison, the 1970 Ba'athist Constitution of Iraq is also available on the web (via a Beirut law firm, apparently).

Islam in the News

A friend rather reluctantly emailed this to me this morning thinking I’d be interested in the topic if not the actual opinions of the author. But Mr. Bell Jar had already pointed out to me a Trib story on the same subject, which, while lacking the Telegraph article’s virtue of containing its own refutation of the implied superiority of all Westerners in such news items, does highlight the interesting news that they apparently don’t have free speech in Italy. (Nor freedom of religion in France, where Muslim headscarfs have been banned in schools). This has all been news to me, and I’m beginning to think there’s a lot I don’t know about what Europeans think democracy is.

FWIW, I think Mustafa’s reading of the wife-beating sura is pretty orthodox as far as it goes, apart from the weapon specs. I think Amina Wadud mentioned a hadith that has Muhammad advising husbands to beat their wives very lightly with slender reeds (or possibly feathers? I’ll have to look this up later, as it apparently is not in the online hadith collection, but I did find this one: “How does anyone of you beat his wife as he beats the stallion camel and then he may embrace (sleep with) her?”), but the point is supposed to be that they cannot inflict much pain or damage, rather than that they are good for hiding abuse from the police. Or so she would like to argue, the plain meaning of the sura itself being uncrackable, apparently. Unless you accept the notion of a trajectory towards social justice, in which Muhammad’s invention of prior steps before beating are meant to eventually move Muslims towards non-violence in domestic matters entirely. Or this argument that the sura has been mistranslated and doesn’t refer to beating at all.

In sum: the meaning of this sura is a matter of dispute among Muslims; Mustafa is presenting one fairly well-established interpretation so far as I know. The article didn’t quote the other parts of the book relating to women that the court found "intolerable and criminally reproachable," but I do have a notion of what the court might have been looking at, since I’ve been reading “fundamentalist” Mustlim tracts on the status of women lately, as the stomach permits. They’re pretty darned sexist all right.

Is it really possible to declare an entire form of religious belief illegal? If so, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to just declare Jerry Fallwell and the whole Christian Coalition out of order, and put them in jail, or at least confiscate their publications and shut down their websites? Why oh why haven't we thought of this sooner?

Just what the hell is going on over there anyway? I thought we were supposed to be the ones overreacting and oppressing Muslims and suspending civil liberties all over the place. Europeans are supposed to be the smart ones.

The Partly Cloudy Totalitarian

(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?)

Those Pesky Hadith

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!

Qur'an and Woman/Amina Wadud

Qur'an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text From a Woman's Perspective by Amina Wadud.

In an exceptionally defensive introduction, apparently written for this new edition in response to criticism garnered upon the book's initial publication in Malaysia, Wadud all but forbids non-Muslims to read her book, and further insists on her wholly apolitical motivation for undertaking the work:

The extent to which women are seen as distinct from men [in Islam], therefore, implies the necessity for a female-centered consideration of the Qur'an as the only means by which that distinctiveness will be justly considered in the formulas of basic Islamic identity … Responses to Qur'an and Woman since its publication have been far greater than I could ever have imagined--especially given my unawareness of gender politics during my initial research. I approached this research as if my life depended on the understanding I gained from studying the Qur'an. I have since been made aware that other Muslim women, also unaware of gender politics in the abstract sense of a particular intellectual discipline, respond most favorably to the work. I identify with these women: we share in the search for meaning within our own commitment to Islam, which is an essential aspect of our sense of self and a primary motivating factor in our public and private lives.

Her somewhat implausible claim of "unawareness" of gender politics, coming as it does from an American woman (Wadud is a convert of 30 years' standing) is undermined further by her tendency to quote frequently from the work of Sayyid Qutb, an intellectual father of extremist Islamism, to bolster her own methodology in reinterpreting women's role in the Qur'an (though at the outer limits of credulity I suppose this might have been done in innocence as well). Be all of that as it may, Wadud subjects those Qur'anic passages with an important bearing on women to very close textual and grammatical analysis, arguing for example that the creation story in the Qur'an is resolutely gender-neutral as to who came first, and that this neutrality is not an oversight but encodes other important theological points which she also discusses in some detail. The story of the tempting of Adam and Eve, the "man is one degree above woman" and "woman is half-a-witness" suras and many others which have accreted their misogynist interpretations over the years are similarly re-analyzed, with varying degrees of persuasiveness (her analysis of the sura on wife-beating being the least successful in my opinion). The greatest limitation of the work as theology from a traditional Muslim viewpoint is its confinement to Qur'anic text, when in Islamic theology hadith and are nearly as important and have consistently been used to amplify and inflect Qur'anic intepretation. A return to the basic text and overthrow of interpretive tradition seems to figure largely in the work of progressive Muslims in the West, but Wadud appears to prefer to avoid addressing that fight directly here.

Harem Years/Huda Shaarawi

Harem Years : the Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist by Huda Shaarawi, translated and introduced by Margot Badran.

Shaarawi is perhaps the best-known Middle Eastern feminist leader among Westerners, having made international headlines when she publicly removed her veil on a train platform in Cairo upon her return from an international women's conference in 1923. She became politically active through her male relatives' involvement with the Egyptian nationalist movement and eventually headed the women's branch of the Wafd Party; these memoirs are compiled from papers found after her death, and end just before her emergence as a feminist leader, detailing for the most part her personal life in what became the last decades of harem life for women in Egypt. Shaarawi is an ambiguous figure among contemporary Islamic feminists, accused of following too Westernized an approach to women's issues, a preoccupation with veiling and other issues that are in some respects considered to be of greatest concern to upper class women. And indeed, Huda is hard to love. The well-loved and indulged daughter of a wealthy and prominent family, she describes without a hint of disapproval the obsequiousness of the slaves at an uncle's home, or the lavish display of wealth at a charity event she helps to organize for a hospital fund. Permitted to return to live with her parents when she finds she does not like the marriage they arranged for her (her husband--a cousin--shows up periodically over the following 8 years to ask her to come back), Shaarawi scarcely seems aware of how much more burdensome life is for less privileged women in her society. The sole chapter in this memoir about the "Hard Life of a Woman" is really more of an adventure story about how a female acquaintance made her way home from Mecca unaccompanied by a male relative, having precipitously asked her husband to divorce her while they were making the Hajj together. Shaarawi's feminism seems to spring more from a sense of entitlement than of injustice. Not that there's anything wrong with that--I feel rather entitled to personal freedom myself--but it's not all that inspiring, in a cue-the-swelling orchestra sort of way.

In the Shadow of Islam/Tabari & Yeganeh

In the Shadow of Islam : the Women's Movement in Iran compiled by Azar Tabari and Nahid Yeganeh.

This is a collection of essays and documents relating to feminism in Iran, compiled and written largely by women who donned chador for anti-Shah demonstrations (Islamic dress for women was forbidden in the Shah's Iran), only to discover that they could not take it off again when the revolution succeeded. The book covers the history of women's participation in the revolution, as well as their initial rebellion in a large Women's Day demonstration against Khomeini's imposition of an Islamic dress code for women, the fragmentation of the women's movement after opposition to the veil had been dispersed by the government's canny temporary revision of the code (backpedalling initially to make it apply only to government workers, then expanding it bit by bit over the next year until it encompassed the whole society), and feminist theory in Iran from both Islamic and secularist/Marxist perspectives. The second half of the book is a collection of primary documents, including the sections of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic that deal with women's status and all of Khomeini's statements on women (up to 1982, the date of publication), and position papers and statements from various women's organizations and leaders. The book represents an effort to regroup and retheorize how the women's movement can become united and powerful again in post-revolutionary Iran, but, tellingly, is published in English by a British publisher.