The Createdness or Uncreatedness of the Quran

I was inspired to finally release this piece, although I think it is incredibly flawed in many ways, and will likely confuse those unfamiliar with the debate and anger those erudite enough to follow it. I was also inspired by Valerie Hoffman's excellent translation of the Ibadhi scholar Nasser bin Salim al-Rawahi's classic text of Ibadhi fiqh: "al-Aqeeda al-Wahbiyya". Inshallah, I will review Dr. Hoffman's efforts in a later post. The text was inspiring because traditionally Ibadhis argued (I believe correctly) for the createdness of the Quran. At a time, when Sunni lecturers and theologians frequently equate this view with unbelief, it is refreshing to see a scholarly non-Sunni take on the subject. My own views are neither Ibadhi nor Sunni. I hope you learn something from them, nevertheless.

In seeking the truth, the believer in most Abrahamic religions is forced to reckon with the authority of a canon or urtext which purports to be the final moral authority for the conduct and direction of the believer.

Islam is no exception and is indeed the first revelation to be "canonized" so quickly after the inception of the original revelation. By canonized I mean, both actually written down, and preserved in the disposition of the righteous Companions of the Prophet Muhammad (SAW). The congealing of reverence for this revelation and the consistency by which it was preserved is remarkable. It also makes the Qur'an unique among Abrahamic spiritual revelations in having to wrestle quite early on in the tradition's history with the issue of whether the Qur'an was created or eternal and thus uncreated.

Indeed this is a difficult question! It is made even more difficult by the triumph of so-called orthodoxy on the matter, to the point where people frequently dismiss the opposing view without wrestling with its theological implications. Since the Abbasid caliphs who were Mutazilite and believed in a created Qur'an were at one point implicated in a rather nasty coercive project against the "Traditionalists" (forcing them on pain of death to recant their belief in the Qur'an's eternity), it is often enough to dismiss them by questioning their sincerity as believers. This is unfortunate as it short-circuits the brain cells of many a contemporary believer and leads to unproblematic acceptance of a very problematic concept.

The traditional Sunni view on this difficult philosophical problem is that the Qur'an is an uncreated document. It is eternal and co-existent. Although I disagree with this view, both from the point of view of tawhid and human reason (which I will explore shortly) it is worth exploring why Imam Shafi'i, Imam Abu Hanifa, Imam Ahmad, Imam Malik, to say nothing of the many scholars before and after them AGGRESSIVELY insisted on the UNCREATEDNESS of the Quran. As imam al-Ghazzali said in his "Foundations of Islamic Belief" (Qawa`id al-`Aqa'id):

    "The Qur'an is read by tongues, written in books, and remembered in the heart, yet it is, nevertheless, uncreated and without beginning, subsisting in the Essence of Allah, not subject to division and or separation through its transmission to the heart and paper. Musa - upon him peace - heard the Speech of Allah without sound and without letter, just as the righteous see the Essence of Allah Most High in the Hereafter, without substance or its quality."

Although I disagree with al-Ghazali, he has illuminated the issue with characteristic subtlety and grace, touching on the Qur'an's Existence vs. its Essence. (We shall return to this point).

Understandably, the average believer is loath to disagree with leading lights of the deen, whose personal adhab was impeccable and whose scholarship was massively important in providing guidance down through the generations. Nevertheless, it is worth noting two things: 1) There was an important (and NOT marginal) group of Muslims in the past who believed the Qur'an WAS created. 2) One could in the past debate this issue and still be considered a believer.

The original doctrine of the 'createdness' of the Qur'an was propagated by several of the Abbasid caliphs and the 'ulama surrounding them from their Baghdad capital. Islam in the one hundred years after the Prophet had developed into a global cosmopolitan civilization of enormous diversity and tremendous wealth. It was a long way (materially, if not necessarily theologically) away from its origins in the desert community of Medina. Its encounter with the plural religious environment of the Near East inspired the development of kalam (speculative theology) in which Muslim philosophers debated their Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian counterparts. The Prophet Muhammad (SAW) focused his energies on expanding and strengthening the religion in its material aspect, as well as increasing the unity of all Muslims in the early community and breaking down status barriers. For The Prophet, the strength and power of the Revelation he had received directly from Allah was self evident! There was little need to engage in elaborate cross-cultural translation, dialogue, or theological polemic. This was patently NOT the case at the Abbasid court.

The createdness of the Qur'an was especially a response by the Mutazilites to charges by the Christians that making the Qur'an eternal meant that it was co-existent with God. This meant that the Qur'an was similar to the person of Jesus Christ. If the word of God is eternal and Jesus is the word of God, then Jesus is also eternal. A fictional exchange from Hanging Nodes blog captures it well:

    Arab Muslim: What is your belief regarding Jesus Christ?

    Christian Missionary: He is the word of God. What does your Quran states about him?

    Arab Muslim: [hesitates for a moment and after thinking a lot recites a part of this verse]… “Christ Jesus the son of Mary was a messenger of Allah, and His Word, which He bestowed on Mary, and a spirit proceeding from Him…” [al-Quran 4: 171]

    Christian Missionary: What is the word of Allah, and what is ‘spirit’ and are these created or not created?

If all these are uncreated, we now have not one, but three eternally co-existent 'ideas': Allah, the Qur'an, and Jesus. From a strict tawhid perspective, this is totally unacceptable. There can be only one thing that is eternally existent and that is Allah; all else is contingent on the existence of Allah.

On the other hand, those who asserted the eternity of the Qur'an believed that denying its eternity meant denying the divinity of the revelation and thus its eternal validity. If the Qur'an was a created revelation, this meant that it was contingent upon the cultural matrix it emerged into, and if that cultural matrix disappeared, it would lose its validity. They thus saw the doctrine of Qur'an-createdness as undermining the foundation for a sound aqeedah among the believers and eroding the authority of the Revelation that had elevated Islam to the forefront of world civilization in such a short time.

Contemporary critics of this doctrine typically invoke the argument of the slippery slope when it comes to the Qur'an's created-ness. If the Qur'an is created then Allah can change his mind, which is a denial of Allah's divinity. If you deny Allah's divinity then you are not only a heretic, you are an atheist. The "uncreated-ness-crowd" believed that those who believed in the Qur'an as a created document were denying the special quality of the revelation and instead relying on human reason. It is true that the Mutazilites trusted human reason, partly because it was a reflection of the Divine Creation. Yet contrary to the polemical distortions of their opponents, the Mutazilites in their actual writings actually stress that reason alone is insufficient to grasp the Truth.

Now in a religious environment as polarized as the modern world, where - state projects devoted to demonizing these views are all too common (ahem, France, ahem Turkey, ahem, Sudan), I believe the above argument is an obvious case of not believing the best about the arguments of your opponent. Clearly one can live a moral and God-centered life while believing in the created-ness of the Qur'an. One can even uphold the Islamic tradition while doing so.

These statements have important implications we should explore, especially as it relates to an unwillingness by most Muslim traditionalists to question the viability of aspects of their tradition in the modern world. Muslims have a right to be upset over Western Orientalist critiques of certain theoretically acceptable fiqh practices in Islam (such as the permissibility of slavery, the permissibility of sex with slave girls without their consent, or the punishment of stoning for adultery), since these practices do not define Muslim identity. There is no "Muslim mind" and Islam (as much as the Wahhabis would like it to be) is not a Borg-like belief system.  It is entirely possible for someone to be a good moral and upright person, and indeed to never practice slavery, while believing that slavery is theoretically permissible according to God's law. And certainly people have a right to practice their religion as they see fit. But it would help the larger umma's moral authenticity to acknowledge that these and other fiqh issues I mentioned are both morally problematic from the standpoint of human ethics and human reason AND a part of what constitutes acceptable practice in the theoretical structure of sharia. Acknowledging this gap would help us eliminate double-think from our core-belief system.

My point is this: Billions of people in this world, indeed the majority of people on the planet today engage in some form of double-think. I define double-think as the ability to pledge a specific creed, without full knowledge of its logical specifics, and live according to its wisdom while glossing over its inconsistencies. Christians, Muslims, Hindus, even atheists all do it. Here I am specifically addressing the kinds of double-think that pervade the mind of the Muslim believer. Keep in mind this is not necessarily a moral accusation. It is an observation based on a preference (rooted in tawhid) for struggling to eliminate forms of double-think. One can have logically inconsistent beliefs and still lead a righteous life. And the modern Wahhabi movement has shown us the opposite is true: one can take beliefs to their logical conclusion in an attempt to recover a pristine essence of Truth, and end up reproducing a kind of violent religious fascism characterized by incredible hypocrisy. Nevertheless, a true pursuit of tawhid demands we take up the ontological challenge of ongoing interpretation of revelation (both in the sense of ijtihad and in the sense of wujub al-nazar—the obligation of reason), and not merely dismiss it with such platitudes as "Islam is the answer to every human problem" and "all we need is Quran and Sunna." Such statements, although intended to steer the believer away from problematic and distracting ideas, actually encourage an intensification of double-think.

The idea of double-think helps us to think about why the question of whether the Qur'an is created or uncreated is so complicated. In some sense, the argument I am about to present is incredibly reductive. For a deeper theological viewpoint, I would recommend that anyone pick up two books by Sherman Jackson: Islam and the BlackAmerican and Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering, for an extremely erudite, yet easy to understand introduction to the problems of speculative theology in the Islamic tradition.

What is the Qur'an? It has simultaneously an empirical/historical existence and an eternal reality. The Qur'an itself, insofar as its empirical existence is concerned, is created. It is made from paper or parchment and reproduced in modern times between pieces of leather, wood, cardboard, or more paper. What about the recitation of the Qur'an? Again, from an empirical perspective, the sounds produced during recitation are human creations, emanating from someone's vocal chords. They last for a given duration of time. Even if one believes Allah is the ultimate originator of human speech, it still does not negate the Qur'an's createdness, since the Allah (in a way unknown to us) also spoke the Qur'an and thus gave it existence. Even if the Qur'an refers to the actual auditory/sensory experience that the Prophet Muhammad had in the years in which he received the revelation, then I am still forced to conclude that the rational empirical evidence suggests that the Quran is created and occurred to a finite person in a finite time.

But if we leave the empirical plane of existence, I believe that there was and is an eternal dimension to the Quranic revelation, expressed in the spiritual quality of its audition, which is able to transport the mind of a believer to a higher, eternal spiritual plane, the plane of Allah. This is what happened to the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) during his revelations. But it is not the mere audition of the Quran itself that is eternal, but the station to which it elevates the true believer through that experience of recitation. And Allahu 'alim. May Allah forgive me for any errors into which I have fallen.

by Nate Mathews 2010

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In Defense of True Religion: A Response to "Universal Validity of All Religions"

A Response to “Universal validity of all religions”
http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/nuh/amat.htm
by Nathaniel Mathews

This is meant to be a response to Shaykh Nuh Hah Mim Keller's “On the validity of all religions in the thought of ibn Al-'Arabi and Emir 'Abd al-Qadir: a letter to `Abd al-Matin”. It is not a point-by-point rebuttal, but a recasting of the debate itself. I decided to write such a response after reading and discussing with a number of Muslims about other spiritual paths to truth, and finding out that in many cases Muslims made ignorant claims about other religions without fully understanding them; this despite the fact that these same people would constantly bring attention to how Muslim thought and theology was distorted and misunderstood.

I also feel there has been a lot of abusive language, hostility and fitna directed towards those who claim to be “perennialists” within the Muslim tradition. Those who are inclined can easily find a lot of good web resources on perennialism. The basic belief of perennialists is that all religions have within them a path to the truth that is valid and acceptable. Notice that the perennialists do not believe that all roads lead to the truth. Muslim perennialists remain within the Islamic spiritual tradition and use its resources to work towards higher spiritual truths and common ground with other religions.

Let me begin by speaking of the respect I hold for the teaching of Shaykh Nuh. His commitment and dedication to the path of tasawwuf is evident, as is his erudition in the Islamic sciences. However, I believe that on the issue of the validity of other religions, his evidence is insufficient to support his conclusion. In what follows I will try to show how, using several different avenues of proof. I will be appealing to 1) Human intellect 2) Human humility—i.e. The limited knowledge we possess of the world and 3) The highest values in Islam itself.

Let us first examine what Shaykh Nuh's refutation of the universal validity of other religions rests on. Shaykh Nuh writes, “As for the abrogation of all religions by Islam, many of us know Muslims who believe the opposite of orthodox Islam, perhaps due to a literary and intellectual environment in which any and every notion about this world and the next can be expressed, in which novelty is highly valued, and in which tradition has little authority.” This is essentially an argument from tradition; Shaykh Nuh claims that many of todays Muslims are unfit to judge this issue because they have been too corrupted by an 'anything goes' argument in the West. It is important to note that this is not an argument at all, but a subtle suggestion that those Muslims who hold this belief (perennialism) are really not Muslims at all, or somehow weak in their faith. It is important to note this because the article is filled with such reliance on the unreliability of personal experience.

The arguments of Shaykh Nuh essentially rest on the supposed inability of the average person to question the tradition which was constructed by learned scholars. Again this is a rhetorical strategy designed to weaken the confidence of those who argue by placing them implicitly outside the fold of the learned. Shaykh Nuh writes, “Orthodoxy exists, it is unanimously agreed upon by the scholars of Muslims, and we have conveyed in Nawawi's words above that to believe anything else is unbelief. .. Who else said it before? And if no one did, and everyone else considers it kufr, on what basis should it be accepted?”

Notwithstanding Shaykh Nuh's dismissal, the perennialists understanding of Islam and other religions is quite sophisticated—recognizing that in order obtain the truths of a particular religious path, one had to follow the dicates of its religious law. Their view is hardly anti-orthodox! Yet Shaykh Nuh, arguing from tradition, claims that perennialists are not advancing insights into Islamic spirituality based on spiritual realization, but rather using their personal ideas of Islam as an element to fit into their own private worldview. This argument like the others in the essay, rests on tradition. It asks: “who are these guys to question centuries of scholarship?” Shaykh Nuh, without analyzing their ideas at all, or bothering to quote from them, dismisses them as self-indulgent crackpots. This is hardly a compelling rebuttal! Shaykh Nuh's burning question—who are you to question tradition?—can and should be vigorously answered: “They, like me, were residents of their contemporary reality, with an unprecedented access to knowledge of other religions and the freedom to search and ask questions that was denied to many previous generations. They like me, and like the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) valued spiritual searching free from persecution, exile, imprisonment or execution or dogmatic statements of spiritual reality.

There can be no doubt that orthodoxy exists, and that there is good reason to pay attention to it and to engage with its arguments. But orthodoxy is not the same as Islam, and the guardians of orthodoxy are not necessarily the guardians of Islam. To Shaykh Nuh's question of “why should the universal validity of religions be accepted?” I would argue that in addition to being the most epistemologically compelling position for rational thinkers, it is urgently needed to prevent 1) inflated self conceptions of nationalistic righteousness and 2) The persecution and abuse of minority religious communities in contemporary Muslim countries (Bahai in Pakistan, Shia in Saudia Arabia, Christians in Egypt). In what follows I assume a compelling link between acceptance of different beliefs within a tradition and accepting the validity of other religions. I also assume that tolerance is an inadequate social value for intellectual engagement with the other. By acceptance I mean a basic validation that other religions are the embodied historical practices of other human beings with their own 'truths', and that believers from those religions deserve our respect, love and attention to as great a degree as we would show to a Muslim brother or sister.

The first point needs little introduction. One need only witness the acrimonious infighting of the Companions in the hundred years after the Prophet's death to understand the danger of refusing to coexist in the presence of massive doctrinal disagreements. The second point has also been well-documented, though it is typically either morally dodged as having “nothing to do with Islam” (it has everything to do with a nationalistic view of Islam) or justified because these communities are unbelievers, disloyal or subversive. (the role of modern Western nationalism in contributing to these ideas cannot be underestimated either, a point missed by many "capture the state for Islam" arguments).

Finally, in what follows I want to argue against the idea, perpetuated by Shaykh Nuh, that religions can be divided into hermetically sealed units whereby Islam and Muslims can be easily identitied by correct belief or a laundry list of traits. I want to argue against a prevailing form of religious nationalism all too prevalent in contemporary Islamic discourse. Such nationalism is ultimately self defeating in the struggle for truth and justice. Islam is not a nation oversweeping the globe, but a series of embodied interpretations of the legacy of a prophetic reformer, who saw himself as bringing the monotheistic message to a community previously deprived of revelation.

Islam, if it is truly a universal religion (and not merely some kind of glorified nationalism), cannot elevate to universality every value from its tribal origins (the cultural context which the law and rulings of Prophet Muhammad were largely rooted in). Islam, if it is to be universal, cannot be a tribe or nation. Yet far too many Muslims treat Islam as some form of nationalism. Examples of this are too numerous to cite here, and need not concern us. I am concerned that if the ultimate intention of the Prophet's message was to transcend the religious nationalism of the Christians and Jews, then the solution for our contemporary times cannot be for Muslims to reproduce their rank nationalistic pseudo-religious exclusivity. Those who are familiar enough with the doctrinal disputes and logic whereby the exclusivity of Christianity is constructed will recognize the Muslim version.

Shaykh Nuh brings forth evidence from Quran that every community had a messenger sent to them, and that one should not differentiate between those messengers because they all brought the same message. He writes, “Though the Sacred Law of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) superseded all previously valid religious laws, it was identical with them in beliefs, such as tawhid or "oneness of God.” Such a belief can only be true ( the Prophet confirming all previous messages) if two other conditions are met: 1) We restrict our study of religion to the Abrahamic tradition and 2) The sacred law Shaykh Nuh is referring to as identical to previous revelation is restricted to an overall ethical impulse, rather than any outward manifestation.
What are the consequences of these two conditions? One, if Shaykh Nuh restricts the scope of religion to the Abrahamic tradition (as do the majority of Muslim scholars), then what he is arguing is that God sent messengers to only a tiny section of humanity, in a tiny geographical area of the world, in just two or three languages, quite late in its history! But this makes a mockery of God's omnipotence, mercy and justice! Furthermore, history itself, properly understood, contradicts the assertion that God will punish any people who are not “Muslims”. If, as the Quran repeatedly says, God will punish those people who don't believe in him by destroying them, then what do we say of some of the most successful civilizations to have ever existed? After all, the Egyptian and Chinese civilizations seem to have prospered for thousands of years longer than any Jewish, Muslim or Christian government or empire without an exclusive concept of ONE GOD (although they did have some concept of an Organic Oneness or Unity similar to the Islamic concept of La Ilaha Illa Allah).

We must also ask ourselves: what is meant by “Islam” in each of the passages Shaykh Nuh quotes? If by Islam all these passages mean a unified ideology, complete with a developed law code, theology, and 5 pillars, then our position is certainly weaker. But if by Islam, at least some of these passages mean a deeper spiritual impulse that motivated all the prophets (and not the formalized religion as we have come to know it) then such a statement cannot be used to refute other religious paths, since according to this vision of Islam, many people may actually be Muslims according to a very broad understanding of what that means. For more on this idea, one should consult Farid Esack's work in Quran, Liberation and Pluralism. Too often Muslims assume that when we speak of Islam we are speaking of one unitary idea stretching back through eons. Other times we assume it is something that the Prophet Muhammad brought to his community. In apologetics and theology, Muslims “switch” between these two different, both orthodox conceptions, often without realizing the important differences between the two ideas. It is the difference between the two ideas that contains the key to a radical reappraisal of tradition that is absolutely necessary to avoid the kind of nationalistic hubris I am writing against.
The consequences of conflating the two ideas are intellectual schizophrenia and a poverty of ideas. Muslims are largely failing to convince others why the sacred law of Islam is so important, largely because the view they have of this sacred law is so narrowly culturally defined by orthodox consensus. When intelligent people ask why, for example, a sharia compliant inheritance or women wearing jilbab or hijab is so necessary to human progress, moral sanity and a just society, they are unable to give a compelling rational answer beyond, “Allah says so in the Quran.”

This is a circular argument, not to mention an anti-intellectual one that echoes a similar conundrum in Christianity. It makes the authority of the revelation do too much work, as if because you accept the Quran to be a miracle you must accept the whole package of orthodoxy. This is not merely a fiqh question (reinterpreting the law), as those defenders of traditional Islam argue, but a question of false equivalency that leads to outmoded nationalistic thinking. The sharia is no longer (if it ever was) equivalent to the practices of the early Muslim community under the Prophet Muhammad's leadership. In constantly emphasizing that it should be, Muslims have to “fit” it, often awkwardly into a worldview largely defined by Western style modernity. They are thus faced with a series of logical and moral absurdities, which they largely navigate through “double-think”. This double think can easily be seen in the realm of contemporary Muslim theological apologetics. It is also observable in the zealotry of new converts who become highly self-righteous, the nitpicking over details (i.e. wearing a beard) or the debates over the lawfulness of slavery (witness what just occurred in Mauritania). All these things are consequences of this false equivalency, of equating a finite historical community with God's infinite favor.

I believe a critical stance towards orthodoxy is much more compelling intellectual position to be in—and perennialism provides a way to meet the new knowledge we have about other religions without sacrificing too much of the essentials of the Islamic tradition. To give an example, we might refer to Quranic ayats about the Jews and Christians, not to mention other religious people, attaining salvation. We would present heaven and hell in Islam as important ideas in creating ethical orientation in the believer—similar to the Buddhist metaphor of the Burning House. In fact, the very idea of a heaven and a hell ought to be understood by the spiritually mature as metaphors designed to point humans in the right direction, not spatially bounded places where we condemn those incovenient to our 'truth'.

For anyone in these times to speak as if ONLY "orthodox" Islamic belief points the way to paradise is a dangerously hubristic viewpoint, as it implicity invalidates the spiritual attainments of hundreds of thousands of contemporary seekers of all stripes: Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists, and Jews, not to mention other Muslims (even to the extent of forcing some to twist history to somehow paint successful ancient civilizations as having been “Muslim”, which merely perpetuates a hubristic fantasy of manifest destiny). It short-circuits the intellectual possibilities of inter-religious dialogue and the expansion of our knowledge of the world. Finally, there is not enough experiental evidence to boldly make such a claim. Better to say, like in many matters of so-called orthodoxy in modern times, “Allah 3lim”--God knows—and try to live the best we can according to our chosen path.

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Islamic Liberation Theology (Book Review)

This is an ambitious and frusturating book which tries to chart a course for an "Islamic liberation theology" just as Gustavo Gutteriez and James Cone did for Christianity. Dabashi argues that the ideological division of "Islam and the West" no longer has any meaning for contemporary Islamic praxis. In fact this binary division has produced an Islamic politics of opposition to Western modernity, forcing Islamic ideologues and ideology into anti-democratic stances and revolutionary excesses which mirror or even at times outdo the worst totalitarian impulses of Western thought.

I found Dabashi's narrative interventions provocative, especially his exegesis of the life and work of Malcolm X (see his chapter "Malcolm X as a Muslim Revolutionary"), placing him into dialectical interplay with religious currents within Shi'a Islam. He also helpfully draws on Gutierrez's notion of a "historical pilgrimage" of religion in an effort to re-historicize Islamic heritage.

Unfortunately the book suffers from a lack of judicious editing and and all too often a-historic approach to contemporary issues. He inscribes categories like "the West" and "modernity", equating them at times with global capitalism, at times with the European Enlightenment, at times with the foreign policy aims of the US government collapsing hundreds of years of history into categorical oppositions. Perhaps it is the historian in me, but I found this weakened Dabashi's important arguments overall, making them far too easy to dismiss because there is insufficent attention given to problematizing the ideological weight they are asked to hold in his argument. Dabashi also veers randomly between theorization and historicization, getting sidetracked in a kind of academic word-goop which obfuscates the potential of his points. As soon as you think he is going to make a good, potentially transformative point, he veers off into generalities and post-modern language of a particularly useless nature. For example, he writes, "a whole new mode of resistance movement, neither ethnically nationalist nor religiously nativist, is now needed to confront the predicament of Muslim peoples at large." (164) The reader anticipates a description of what Dabashi thinks this mode might look like, but instead is treated to agnosticism: "It is useless to speculate what precisely the particular disposition of these modes of post-national and post-nativist resistance would be. A total distrust of ideological meta-narratives is by far the most critical feature of this emerging mode of resistance." (164)

So why is it useless to speculate on a mode of resistance that is already emerging?! I interpreted Dabashi's ambivalence and slippery language, as evidence of his desire that a transnational movement for Islamically based justice and liberation to emerge. (Malcolm X is very important in Dabashi's formulation of this and Dabashi's comparison between Malcolm X and Sayd Qutb is intriguing) But Dabashi cannot theorize about this supposedly emerging global movement because its actual existence as a historical trend is much more a matter of personal perspective than Dabashi cares to admit. The world may be global and Islam may be a global religion, but there are thousands of "imagined communities" within the global umma, and the ties which bind Muslims together are not necessarily any stronger than those which tie nations or cultures together. Furthermore, don't the bin Laden's and other globally wanted "jihadists" (whom Dabashi rejects as reactionaries) view themselves as instituting precisely the kind of transnational movement he claims Muslims need (minus that skepticism of meta-narratives bit)? Dabashi dreams of a global justice movement which will simultaneously resist global capitalism, Western modernity, and Islamist totalitarianism. But isn't this a bit much to ask of any one movement?

The tension the reader observes in Dabashi's stance is symptomatic of the gap between a "skepticism of ideological meta-narratives" and the will to power necessary to carry out any project of justice and reform in the real world. Dabashi like many intellectuals is skeptical of that will to power, seeing in it the seeds of the demise of both revolution and reform-minded projects. Yet without it, the impulse for Dabashi's "new geography of liberation" remain words on a page.

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(ISLAM ONLINE) Malaysian Muslims denounce church firebombings

CAIRO - Muslim groups in Malaysia are offering their help to prevent any further attacks on Christian places of worship amid a spree of attacks on churches in the multi-ethnic, Muslim-majority Asian country, The Star reported on Sunday, January 10.

"This is an offer of peace and goodwill," Nadzim Johan, the executive secretary of the Muslim Consumers Association of Malaysia (PPIM), told a news conference.

"We don’t want our Christian brothers to be in danger."

PPIM is one of 130 Muslim NGOs that vowed to become the "eyes and ears" of the government to shield churches against attacks.

Seven churches have been fire-bombed or vandalized since Friday in an escalating row over a court ruling allowing Christians to use the word "Allah" as a translation for God in their publications.

The High Court overturned two weeks ago a government ban on the use of the word "Allah," stirring protests by many Malay Muslims.

The NGOs would be offer volunteers who would be on the look out for any suspicious behaviors and alert the authorities.

"What is important that these people know that they are watched," insisted Nadzim.

"This has got to stop."

The initiative would begin in the capital Kuala Lumpur and the state of Selangor, but could be expanded to other states with the help of more NGOs.

Christians make up around 9.1 percent of the population in Muslim-majority Malaysia, including a Catholic population of nearly 800,000.

The church attacks were condemned by all sections of society.

Dialogue

Seeking to quell the tensions, the government will be sponsoring an interfaith dialogue, reported the Malaysian Insider.

"My department would be holding closed-door interfaith dialogues or discussion," Koh Tsu Koon, Minister in the Prime Minister's Department, told reporters.

The government had already met religious groups separately but will soon hold a meeting with the different leaders privately.

"We will hold closed-door meetings among the leaders first because it is important to arrive at certain common denominators of understanding."

Apart from the government efforts, other faith groups like the Institut Kefahaman Islam Malaysia (Ikim) led by former premier Abdullah Badawi has already started a religious dialogue of its own.

The government said the vehement condemnation the church attacks drew from all sections of society showed they do not represent the majority of Malaysians.

"The way that the vast majority of Malaysians [have] responded actually gives us great hope," Koh said.

"It is very often in the times of trial like these that we discover our true commitment."

Controversy over the use of the word Allah in Malaysian churches
Muslims denounce church attacks

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Saba Mahmood interviews Talal Asad (excerpts)

full interview here.
Asad discusses modernity, religion, what agency is, Islamic reform, the difference between dependency theory and postcolonialism, and much much more. This is one of the best 'summations' of the various nature of Asad's intellectual pursuits and it maps out a great 'space' for scholars to follow up on his work in local contexts. Although its from 1996, over ten years ago, it is still a great read.

Talal Asad
modern power and the reconfiguration of religious traditions
Saba Mahmood

Contemporary politico-religious movements, such as Islamism, are often understood by social scientists as expressions of tradition hampering the progress of modernity. But given the recent intellectual challenges posed against dualistic and static conceptions of modernity/tradition, and calls for parochializing Western European experiences of modernity, do you think the religio-political movements (such as Islamism) force us to rethink our conceptions of modernity? If so, how?

Well, I think they should force us to rethink many things. There has been a certain amount of response from people in Western universities who are interested in analyzing these movements. But many of them still make assumptions that prevent them from questioning aspects of Western modernity. For example, they call these movements "reactionary" or "invented," making the assumption that Western modernity is not only the standard by which all contemporary developments must be judged, but also the only authentic trajectory for every tradition. One of the things the existence of such movements ought to bring into question is the old opposition between modernity and tradition, which is still fashionable. For example, many writers describe the movements in Iran and Egypt as only partly modern and suggest that its their mixing of tradition and modernity that accounts for their "pathological" character. This kind of description paints Islamic movements as being somehow inauthentically traditional on the assumption that "real tradition" is unchanging, repetitive, and non-rational. In this way, these movements cannot be understood on their own terms as being at once modern and traditional, both authentic and creative at the same time. The development of politico-religious movements ought to force people to rethink the uniquely Western model of secular modernity. One may want to challenge aspects of these movements, but this ought to be done on specific grounds. It won't do to measure everything by grand conceptions of authentic modernity. But that's precisely the kind of a priori thinking that many people indulge in when analyzing contemporary religious movements.

It has often been argued that the tradition of liberalism is based upon principles of pluralism and tolerance in ways that Islamic tradition is not, and that the concept of plurality remains foreign to Islam. How would you respond to that?

Well, I would say that it is certainly not a modern, liberal invention. The plurality of individual interests is what the liberal tradition has theorized best of all. On the other hand, the attempt to get some kind of representation for ethnic groups and minorities in Western countries has been difficult for liberalism to theorize. Liberalism has theories of tolerance by which spaces can be created for individuals to do what they wish, so long as they don't obstruct the ability of others to do likewise. But these aren't theories of pluralism in the sense we are beginning to understand the term today. Liberalism has theories of multiple "interests," interests which can be equalized, aggregated, and calculated through the electoral process and then negotiated in the process of formulating and applying governmental policies. But that is a very different kind of pluralism from the different ways of life which are (a) the preconditions and not the objects of individual interests, and which are, (b) in the final analysis, incommensurable.

Now the Islamic tradition, like many other non-liberal traditions, is based on the notion of plural social groupings and plural religious traditions--especially (but not only) of the Abrahamic traditions [ahl al-kitab]. And, of course, it has always accommodated a plurality of scriptural interpretations. There is a well- known dictum in the shari`a: ikhtilaf al-umma rahma [difference within the Islamic tradition is a blessing]. This is where the notions of ijtihad and ijm`a come in. As modes of developing and sustaining the Islamic tradition, they authorize the construction of coherent differences, not the imposition of homogeneity.

Of course there are always limits to difference if coherence is to be aimed at. If tolerance is not merely another name for indifference, there comes a point in every tradition beyond which difference cannot be tolerated. That simply means that there are differences which can't be accommodated within the tradition without threatening its very coherence. But there are, of course, many moments and conditions of such intolerance. One must not, therefore, equate intolerance with violence and cruelty.

On the whole, Muslim societies in the past have been much more accommodating of pluralism in the sense I have tried to outline than have European societies. It does not follow that they are therefore necessarily better. And I certainly don't wish to imply that Muslim rulers and populations were never prejudiced, that they never persecuted non-Muslims in their midst. My point is only that "the concept of plurality," as you put it, is not foreign to Islam.

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Secularism, hegemony, and fullness (Talal Asad)

I've posted some stuff from Talal Asad before, from his book Geneaologies of Religion. The link below will take you to a link where he critiques secularism in a very trenchant and incisive way.

Secularism, hegemony, and fullness

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Hizbu'llah and Terrorism: Dispelling the Misconceptions

Sura al-Qasas (28) :5 (English): And we wished to be gracious to those who were being oppressed in the land, to make them leaders and make them heirs.

The above verse constitutes one of the foundational beliefs on which the organization of Hizbu'llah draw. There is an all too common misconception, perpetrated by so-called journalists--who write copy using the worst sort of cliches to lock certain mental images into their readers' minds, that Hizbu'llah is a fundamentalist sectarian and terrorist organization. Two relatively recent books help to dispel this notion by placing Hizbu'llah's accomplishments within the framework of Shi'ite political mobilization, the political opportunities offered by the civil war, and the heteregenous nature of Lebanese society. Each book shows the development of Hizbu'llah from a guerilla movement who at times engaged in what the international community deemed as acts of 'terror' into a full-fledged political party with a stake in Lebanese politics.

The first book, by former U.N. observer Augustus Richard Norton, is a short but authoritative account of Hizbu'llah's development in the context of recent Lebanese history. It has the advantage of including some analysis of the 2006 war with Israel, in which Hizbu'llah emerged from a devastating bombardment organizationally intact.

The second book is an older account by a Lebanese insider, based on interviews, televised speeches, and an excellent review and critique of the secondary literature about the organization. Amal Saad Ghorayeb analyzes Hizbu'llah through the paradigm of 'oppression' and sees Hizbu'llah as a theologically flexible, guerilla movement which stands ideologically on the side of the oppressed. This is a helpful paradigm, because it sees Hizbu'llah as basically responding to opportunities to organize people against oppression, using Islam as an idiom, not as an Islamic movement to 'Islamisize' Lebanon and the world.

Hizbu'llah's mission (if not always its tactics) stand in the best traditions of Islamic liberation theology, and are fundamentally consistent with Biblical teaching about God's special concern for the poor (see Matthew 5:5 for the Biblical precursor to the Islamic idea).

One thing both authors stress is the evolution of the party, from a entity existing outside of the system, to a major player on the Lebanese political scene. Hizbu'llah's challenge will be to remain relevant to its mass base and yet manuever within the convulutions of Lebanese politics without being corrupted by the alliances it forges.

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Symbolism and Allegory in the Quran

This is from The Message of The Quran
Translated and Explained by Muhammad Asad, a Jewish convert to Islam and one of the great Islamic scholars of the twentieth century, in my humble opinion. This relates to several earlier conversations I was having with different groups of people. This is a really amazing essay and I think is relevant to the methodology of scriptural iinterpretation in other contexts as well.

When studying the Quran, one frequently encounters what may be described as
"key­- phrases" - that is to say, statements which provide a clear, concise indication of the idea underlying a particular passage or passages: for instance, the many references to the creation of man "out of dust" and "out of a drop of sperm", pointing to the lowly biological origin of the human species; or the statement in the ninety-ninth surah (Az-Zalzalah) that on Resurrection Day "he who shall have done an atom's weight of good, shall behold it; and he who shall have done an atom's weight of evil, shall behold it" - indicating the inelucctible afterlife consequences of, and the responsibility for, all that man consciously does in this world; or the divine declaration (in 38:27), "We have not created heaven and earth and all that is between them without meaning and purpose (baatilan), as is the surmise of those who are bent on denying the truth."



Instances of such Quranic key-phrases can be quoted almost ad infinitum, and in many varying formulations. But there is one fundamental statement in the Quran which occurs only once, and which may be qualified as "the key-phrase of all its key-phrases": the statement in verse 3:7 to the effect that the Quran "contains messages that are clear in and by themselves (ayat-e-muhkamaat) as well as others that are allegorical (mutashabihaat)". It is this verse which represents, in an absolute sense, a key to the understanding of the Qur'anic message and makes the whole of it accessible to "people who think" (li-qawmin yatafakkarUn).



In my notes on the above-mentioned verse I have tried to elucidate the meaning of the expression ayaat muhkimaat as well as the general purport of what is termed mutashabih ("allegorical" or "symbolic"). Without a proper grasp of what is implied by this latter term, much of the Qur~an is liable to be - and, in fact, has often been - grossly misunderstood both by believers and by such as refuse to believe in its divinely-inspired origin. However, an appreciation of what is meant by "allegory" or "symbolism" in the context of the Quran is, by itself, not enough to make one fully understand its world-view: in order to achieve this we must relate the Quranic use of these terms to a concept touched upon almost at the very beginning of the divine writ - namely, the existence of "a realm which is beyond the reach of human perception" (aI-ghayb). It is this concept that constitutes the basic premise for an understanding of the call of the Quran, and, indeed, of the principle of religion - every religion - as such: for all truly religious cognition arises from and is based on the fact that only a small segment of reality is open to man's perception and imagination, and that by far the larger part of it escapes his comprehension altogether.



However, side by side with this clear-cut metaphysical concept we have a not less clear-cut finding of a psychological nature: namely, the finding that the human mind (in which term we comprise conscious thinking, imagination, dream-life, intuition, memory, etc.) can operate only on the basis of perceptions previously experienced by that very mind either in their entirety or in some of their constituent elements: that is to say, it cannot visualize, or form an idea of, something that lies entirely outside the realm of previously realized experiences. Hence, whenever we arrive at a seemingly "new" mental image or idea, we find, on closer examination, that even if it is new as a composite entity, it is not really new as regards its component elements, for these are invariably derived from previous - and sometimes quite disparate - mental experiences which are now but brought together in a new combination or series of new combinations.



Now as soon as we realize that the human mind cannot operate otherwise than on the basis of previous experiences - that is to say, on the basis of apperceptions and cognitions already recorded in that mind - we are faced by a weighty question: Since the metaphysical ideas of religion relate, by virtue of their nature, to a realm beyond the reach of human perception or experience - how can they be successfully conveyed too us? How can we he expected to grasp ideas which have no counterpart, not even a fractional one, in any of the apperceptions which we have arrived at empirically?



The answer is self-evident: By means of loan-images derived from our actual - physical or mental - experiences; or, as Zamakhshari phrases it in his commentary on 13:35, "through a parabolic illustration, by means of something which we know from our experience, of something that is beyond the reach of our perception" (tamtheelan li-ma ghaaba anna bi-ma nushaahid). And this is the innermost purport of the term and concept of al-mutashaabihaat as used in the Quran.



Thus, the Qur~an tells us clearly that many of its passages and expressions must be understood in an allegorical sense for the simple reason that, being intended for human understanding, they could not have been conveyed to us in any other way.. It follows, therefore, that if we were to take every Quranic passage, statement or expression in its outward, literal sense and disregard the possibility of its being an allegory, a metaphor or a parable, we would be offending against the very spirit of the divine writ.



Consider, for instance, some of the Quranic references to God's Being - Being indefinable, infinite in time and space, and utterly beyond any creature's comprehension. Far from being able to imagine Him, we can only realize what He is not: namely, not limited in either time or space, not definable in terms of comparison, and not to be comprised within any category of human thought. Hence, only very generalized metaphors can convey to us, though most inadequately, the idea of His existence and activity.



And so, when the Quran speaks of Him as being "in the heavens" or "established on His throne (al-arsh)", we cannot possibly take these phrases in their literal senses, since then they would imply, however vaguely, that God is limited in space: and since such a limitation would contradict the concept of an Infinite Being, we know immediately, without the least doubt that the "heavens" and the "throne" and God's being "established" on it are but linguistic vehicles meant to convey an idea which is outside all human experience, namely, the idea of God's almightiness and absolute sway over all that exists. Similarly, whenever He is described as "all-seeing", "all-hearing" or "all-aware", we know that these descriptions have nothing to do with the phenomena of physical seeing or hearing hut simply circumscribe, in terms understandable to man, the fact of God's eternal Presence in all that is or happens. And since "no human vision can encompass Him" (Quran 6:103), man is not expected to realize His existence otherwise than through observing the effects of His unceasing activity within and upon the universe created by Him.



But whereas our belief in God's existence does not - and, indeed, could not - depend on our grasping the unfathomable "how" of His Being, the same is not the case with problems connected with man's own existence, and, in particular, with the idea of a life in the hereafter: for, man's psyche is so constituted that it cannot accept any proposition relating to himself without being given a clear exposition of its purport.



The Quran tells us that man's life in this world is but the first stage - a very short stage - of a life that continues beyond the hiatus called "death" ; and the same Quran stresses again and again the principle of man's moral responsibility for all his conscious actions and his behaviour, and of the continuation of this responsibility, in the shape of inescapable consequences, good or bad, in a person's life in the hereafter. But how could man be made to understand the nature of these consequences and, thus, of the quality of the life that awaits him'? - for, obviously, inasmuch as man's resurrection will be the result of what the Quran describes as "a new act of creation", the life that will follow upon it must be entirely different from anything that man can and does experience in this world.



This being so, it is not enough for man to be told, "If you behave righteously in this world, you will attain to happiness in the life to come" , or, alternatively, "If you do wrong in this world, you will suffer for it in the hereafter". Such statements would be far too general and abstract to appeal to man's imagination and, thus, to influence his behaviour. What is needed is a more direct appeal to the intellect, resulting in a kind of "visualization" of the consequences of one's conscious acts and omissions: and such an appeal can be effectively produced by means of metaphors, allegories and parables, each of them stressing, on the one hand, the absolute dissimilarity of all that man will experience after resurrection from whatever he did or could experience in this world; and, on the other hand, establishing means of comparison between these two categories of experience.



Thus, explaining the reference to the bliss of paradise in 32:17, the Prophet indicated the essential difference between man's life in this world and in the hereafter in these words: "God says, 'I have readied for My righteous servants what no eye has ever seen, and no ear has ever heard, and no heart of man has ever conceived"' (Bukhãri, Muslim, Tirmidhi). On the other hand, in 2:25 the Quran speaks thus of the blessed in paradise: "Whenever they are granted fruits therefrom as their appointed sustenance, they will say, 'It is this that in days of yore was granted to us as our sustenance' - for they shall be given something which will recall that

[past]": and so we have the image of gardens through which running waters flow, blissful shade, spouses of indescribable beauty, and many other delights infinitely varied and unending, and yet somehow comparable to what may be conceived of as most delightful in this world.



However, this possibility of an intellectual comparison between the two stages of human existence is to a large extent limited by the fact that all our thinking and imagining is indissolubly connected with the concepts of finite time and finite space: in other words, we cannot imagine infinity in either time or space - and therefore cannot imagine a state of existence independent of time and space - or, as the Qur'~n phrases it with reference to a state of happiness in afterlife, "a paradise as vast as the heavens and the earth" (3:133): which expression is the Qur'anic synonym for the entire created universe. On the other hand, we know that every Qur'anic statement is directed to man's reason and must, therefore, be comprehensible either in its literal sense (as in the case of the dyãt muhkamdt) or allegorically (as in the ayat-e-mutashaabihaat); and since, owing to the constitution of the human mind, neither infinity nor eternity are comprehensible to us, it follows that the reference to the infinite "vastness" of paradise cannot relate to anything but the intensity of sensation which it will offer to the blest.



By obvious analogy, the principle of a "comparison through allegory" applied in the Qur~ãn to all references to paradise - i.e., a state of unimaginable happiness in afterlife - must be extended to all descriptions of otherworldly suffering - i.e., hell - in respect of its utter dissimilarity from all earthly experiences as well as its unmeasurable intensity. In both cases the descriptive method of the Qur'ãn is the same. We are told, as it

were: "Imagine the most joyous sensations, bodily as well as emotional, accessible to man: indescribable beauty, love physical and spiritual, conscious­ness of fulfilment, perfect peace and harmony; and imagine these sensations intensified beyond anything imaginable in this world - and at the same time entirely different from anything imaginable: and you have an inkling, however vague, of what is meant by 'paradise'." And, on the other

hand: "Imagine the greatest suffering, bodily as well as spiritual, which man may experience: burning by fire, utter loneliness and bitter desolation, the torment of unceasing frustration, a condition of neither living nor dying; and imagine this pain, this darkness and this despair intensified beyond anything imaginable in this world - and at the same time entirely different from anything imaginable: and you will know, however vaguely, what is meant by 'hell'."



Side by side with these allegories relating to man's life after death we find in the Qur'ãn many symbolical expressions referring to the evidence of God's activity. Owing to the limitations of human language - which, in their turn, arise from the inborn limitations of the human mind - this activity can only be circumscribed and never really described. Just as it is impossible for us to imagine or define God's Being, so the true nature of His creativeness - and, therefore, of His plan of creation - must remain beyond our grasp. But since the Quran aims at conveying to us an ethical teaching based, precisely, on the concept of God's purposeful creativeness, the latter must be, as it were, "translated" into categories of thought accessible to man. Hence the use of expressions which at first sight have an almost anthropomorphic hue, for instance, God's "wrath" (ghadab) or "condemnation"; His "pleasure" at good deeds or "love" for His creatures; or His being "oblivious" of a sinner who was oblivious of Him; or "asking" a wrongdoer on Resurrection Day about his wrongdoing; and so forth. All such verbal "translations" of God's activity into human terminology are unavoidable as long as we are expected to conform to ethical principles revealed to us by means of a human language; but there can be no greater mistake than to think that these "translations" could ever enable us to define the Undefinable.



And, as the Quran makes it clear in the seventh verse 3:7, only "those whose hearts are given to swerving from the truth go after that part of the divine writ which has been expressed in allegory, seeking out [what is bound to create] confusion, and seeking [to arrive at] its final meaning [in an arbitrary manner]: but none save God knows its final meaning."

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Can You See My Voice: A Modest Manifesto

Received this over the Facebook from a sister in the struggle; it addresses the issue of conceding reason and the mind in religious belief, and it does so not from the perspective of an 'insider' so to speak, a believer. This relates to my conversations with my brother the follower of Ahlus al-Sunnah. What place can reason have at all if one does not trust it to make basic ethical decisions? We were driving to class the other day, and this same brother brought up the Palestinians as a people who were "being judged by Allah." As I pointed out that the Palestinians suffering was due mainly to being dispossessed by militant Zionists, he kept pointing out how the Palestinians brought moral degeneracy wherever they went in the world. I was totally disgusted. How can one attribute a people's suffering to Allah without considering the logical, historical reasons behind their suffering? Can one presume to know the mind of Allah such that one knows when She is punishing her creation? Anyway, the article is primarily about hijab, another practice mistakenly deemed "compulsory" in Islam.

Can You See My Voice? A 'Modest' Manifesto
By Inas Younis

Although I am typically cloaked in full hijab, when it comes to writing, I am always naked in both spirit and understanding. I prefer neither to cater to the vulnerability of those who approach every Islamic initiative with a defensive posture, nor to those who come equipped with preconceived and borrowed ideas, and for whom spiritual conviction is precluded by a state of chronic ignorance and religious constipation.

I am addressing readers who have an absolute confidence in their ability to think.

Fifteen years ago, I attended a Muslim youth conference where I was persuaded to yield to the anguish of an entire Umma (nation) by submitting in full blind faith to a strain of Islam championed by the Afghani rebels (pre-Taliban), who had been invited to motivate us into religious compliance. They appealed to our sentiments by way of an original anthem, exhorting us to hear the weeping of Afghanistan's most innocent victims – the orphans. But words and songs were not required when their paralyzed and amputated bodies served as the most powerful testament to the sacrifice they had made in the name of Islam.

A seed of guilt was planted by the suggestion that our Islamic Umma was reaping punishment because of our religious apathy. And as a condition to our collective survival, we were beckoned to atone for our shortcomings by submitting ourselves to the "cause." The nature of that cause was masked with a generic plea to vindicate the suffering of Muslims by volunteering to amputate something less valuable to a teenager than bodily limbs—our infantile minds. We were called to commit practically, to that which we had been taught to embrace ideologically. It was hardly a sacrifice considering that at fifteen my mind was practically and ideologically constrained by only one thought: the boys on the other side of our segregated lecture hall. But before I could surrender my moral autonomy, I had to extinguish a few reservations.

And so in a public forum I asked the visiting scholar to explain the significance of polygamy. And he replied that "it is a social solution for a social problem." Then I questioned him about hijab , the Islamic headcovering. He pronounced that it is a fard , a religious obligation, on all women. So although I had come in wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, I left in full modest regalia, head scarf and all.

I knew almost nothing of religion, but it did not matter, because knowledge was a minor technicality in light of the precedence that crying orphans commanded. I knew that I must act before I think, because as even the ancient Christians proclaimed, lex orandi, lex credendi , action precedes faith. Now I am thirty years old and a little more difficult to satisfy, and although I still believe that action precedes faith, I am convinced that it is the action of the mind, not the body, which precedes not only faith, but the physical action itself. Fifteen years have passed, and my commitment to faith has not betrayed the cries of the orphans in Afghanistan. In fact, it has only become aggravated by the cries of routinely overlooked victims of persecution—Muslim women. Women's voices are being used, with or without their consent, to wage a resistance movement designed to use them as props in counteracting western colonialism.

Observe the concrete example of this onslaught on women as embodied by the person whom I shall dub "the heart surgeon." I cannot name her, or describe her, because the person who related his recent interaction with this gifted female surgeon, who had saved his life after he suffered a heart attack, has never "seen" her voice. She was clad in black from head to toe and had but two slits in her face veil to allow her a restricted view of a world that was prepared to capitalize on the brilliance of her mind, as if it were a public commodity, without acknowledging her person. A world where she is told to allow her talents to be plundered for the benefit of her intellectual inferiors without the incentive of recognition and respect. A world which insists that her orthodoxy is a testament of her elevated status instead of what it has really become—a visual manifestation of her subjugation.

But what the world of the female surgeon has imposed through physical coercion, ours has sanctioned through the psychological coercion inherent in the decree made by the consensus of those scholars who insist that the peripheral custom of veiling is mandated in Islam. A claim which, I have come to discover, is grounded less on theological evidence than on the religious vulnerability which seeks to use the visual imagery of women as an antidote to the helplessness we are experiencing at the hands of western dominance.

Frustrated by all these visual and intellectual contradictions in my faith, I sought out that very scholar who had satisfied my questions some fifteen years ago. Although he did not remember me, one peek into his lowered gaze and I was satisfied with the purity of his heart.

This time however, I had no mercy on him and started at the very beginning, by concerning him with the question of God. He replied that there are some things you cannot understand or explain. And after I felt hammered by that realization a few more times, I elected to dispose of the esoteric questions and get down to concretes. And so I asked him concerning the modern value of enforcing the hijab. He said that it is his opinion that it is obligatory, but of course a woman can choose.

But where is the choice when her salvation and love for God is contingent on her willingness to comply with those opinions you deem compulsory to circumventing a grievous penalty? So he wisely resorted to the same answers I received from the many
other people whose counsel I sought and finally said, "There are some things you just have to accept, and Allah has commanded it so." I asked him what he thinks I ought to do with my inconsolable mind. He declared, "Where your mind ends, revelation begins." Hence I was left without answers, but I was content nonetheless by the reassurance that answers are not always possible and I should finally take consolation in faith—thus god, thus divine law, thus salvation.

I was prepared to accept matters as they are decreed even if they did not appeal to my intellect. But before I could take one day's comfort in that realization, another irksome question demanded to be asked. What of those matters that contradict human intellect? For even if I succumb to intellectual apathy and blind faith I could not ignore the visual contradiction embodied in that female surgeon. Dumb was one thing, but dumb and blind was more than I could bear to sustain. If I drive myself to accept that my common sense, my intellect, is extraneous in matters of faith, then I must not only accept the corollary of that assertion, but also its remedy—dogma and literalism.

If I am not permitted to exercise my uniquely human capacity to integrate and conceptualize reality as I experience it then I too would be bound to the same prescriptions which compel that female surgeon to apply religious mandates across every situation no matter what her circumstances dictate. Some environments are innately devoid of any sexual context, where notions of modesty or vanity, female vs. male are completely immaterial, as would be the case in an operating room.. Hijab in the context of some environments, much less extreme than hospitals, does the exact opposite of its intended purpose—it injects the notion of sexuality where none exists. But before we even bother about arguments on the letter vs. spirit of the law, we have to be aware of an even greater, more insidious danger to the natural progression of literal thinking and that first axiom of blind obedience which we have been called to embrace.


THE INTELLECT vs. ISLAMIC LAW

If the things we cannot explain and do not understand are the means by which we seek to reinforce our belief in God's presence, if accepting religious law submissively without question, laws and fatwas which are not grounded in intellect but on vague interpretations of revelation, are the greatest reinforcement we have of the validity of any religious claim, then the measure of faith in God becomes contingent on the degree to which one is willing to forgo logic.

What happens when one is able to intellectualize the rigidity of dogma out of existence, is that then tantamount to intellectualizing god out of existence? Is the God who demands adherence in defiance of logic and reason, not the God of superstition? If we accept what we are told, that static laws are moral truths, and then allow others to attach our adherence to them as a testament of our commitment to God, then ask yourself if you are willing to act on it, without just applying it to others and then using repentance as a scapegoat to exempt yourself.

Ask yourself if you are willing to live according to the dictates of the faith-minus-logic world of that female surgeon. Or will you continue to rely on the luxury that a free society permits you by evading the very real and more pertinent question here: do you believe that you have a right not to believe, and still be a believer?

Are you prepared in the name of the God who granted you free will to renounce the attitude towards faith that relies on your ability to not justify things, to not understand, and worse, to resist the temptation to know them, making renunciation of the mind a qualification of faith in God.

If you can't bring yourself to do it, then you are not alone. Countless doctors, scientists, and professionals at the height of their academic fields become absolute numbskull idiots when it comes to matters of religion.

Observe the man who needs confirmation on whether or not he should divorce the woman he loves, should it please his mother, or if he can be alone in an exam room with his female patients? Here is a man who is trained to make life and death judgment calls but cannot make the simplest decisions when it comes to his personal life or work.

Or notice the woman who asks if dancing is permitted if only for her husband. But what is even more absurd than the questions are the answers they were given, which were—yes, divorce her; no you can't be alone with your patient; and yes, you can dance for your husband as long as you do not imitate that infidel Brittany Spears. For more comical examples of the intellectual liquidation of our Umma I refer you to www.sunnipath.com, a site I was referred to by an even more mainstream organization, the Zaytoona Institute.

What is not so comical is the sense of urgency which is driving Muslims to abdicate their commitment to a rational faith in the interest of the anti-rational dogma of legalism according to and championed by our leadership, the abstraction of which can be embodied by a scattered collection of voices who have been eulogizing the merits of an Islamic state, all the while ignoring the reality and corruption which is our Islamic "state."

But here is the secret fear of our leadership, of our mullahs, from which all their irrational decrees are designed to hold back and deflect. It is the deep down realization that the literal materialization of everything they have been preaching has already been actualized in one of the most loyal, literal and failed experiments in Islamic history, Saudi Arabia, the land that is the logical conclusion of our illogical approach to religion. They will of course go into a diatribe about how that sham of a kingdom is not an Islamic ideal but rather its corruption, but they will not be able to tell you why. Not because they do not know why, but because to answer the question why, you have to be prepared to follow through with the answer and its subsequent implication—making public that which you have already painfully conceded in private, proclaiming your independence from every authority that up and till now has held us all emotionally detained and united under a philosophically flimsy banner of blind compliance to Islamic laws which are intellectually indefensible.

Proclaim your independence from laws which have kept women physically or psychologically gagged and men spiritually impotent. Say your farewell to edicts which are supposed to reinforce revelation, but have in essence denied its most fundamental premise, the premise where your mind ends and revelation does indeed begin. Your mind ends at the very beginning, with the most fundamental question and answer from which every other question and answer should stem. Are humans inherently good or evil?

It is with this question that Revelation kicks in with undeniable force and tells me what my intellect cannot, which is that humans are inherently good, a premise which not only makes my faith unique, but which is also one of the firmest of my religious beliefs.

Since our revelation stresses our inherent goodness, our fitra, then it stands to reason that the letter of the law is a superfluous mechanism in harnessing our nature, which revelation says is predisposed to goodness. No legalism or holy spirits are required for guidance if and when our natural proclivity is allowed to serve as our most qualified guide. But our natural inclination is not a given; it is a product of a soul that is under no compulsion, a soul which is completely free. Natural inclinations can only find representation in a world that is free of every variety of coercion and intimidation, making a free society the organic expression and incarnation of an Islamic state, and the more free the society, the more Islamic it becomes.

No amount of rationalizations or explanations can convince any thinking person that a stricter adherence to the codification of our traditions will cure our current crisis. We must stop insisting that ideological unity is measured by uniformity in practice and recognize that ideals are abstract and timeless and their implementation and will have different expressions depending on time, culture, place and circumstance. We should also recognize that pity and loyalty to the feeble minded and spirited of society who seek security through unity and uniformity is a betrayal and a crime against the intellectually gifted members of our society, who will either, in an effort to alleviate their anguish, use their intellectual prowess to become the most destructive force in the trend towards fundamentalism, or leave religion for the masses, and become either disgruntled atheists or mystics.

If uniformity in practice continues to become the standard by which we derive and uphold religious law, instead of reality and intellect, then we will forever be compelled to yield to the lowest common unifying denominator where the exceptions become the rules, the hypotheticals become the standard, and the what ifs become the what should be. And in order to insure uniformity in practice, scholars will be forced to spend their lives making concessions for every single legal contingency. And Islamic scholarship, philosophy, and art will have to be sacrificed in order to relieve the constipation which results from questions like: What if it rains in the morning, can I join my prayers? What if my shorts are one eighth of an inch above my knee? What if my wife kisses me before I had the chance to stop her, should I repeat my wudu?

These sorts of questions become completely legitimate when reason is isolated from religion.

You have only to look at the reality which is our present state to recognize that where there is impotence of the mind and spirit, there is subjugation of the body, specifically women's bodies. If man is the metaphor for the material world, the world of progress and development, then woman is his spiritual counterpart. Man's spirit is bound by his capacity to produce, and whenever man feels he has no power to effect change or to produce material goods, woman becomes the mirror of his castrated spirit. In an effort to alleviate his paralysis in the physical world, he will seek to bind and gag the spirit which demands he fight for it, the spirit which is woman, the spirit whose movements he seeks to control to compensate himself for the tyrannical politics of bigger men who seek to control him.

To resuscitate men's minds, I would like to propose that we initiate a movement to liberate the male spirit by psychologically and physically liberating women from the impositions of religious mandates that are no longer relevant or sanctioned either in letter or spirit. We should do this one scarf at a time, by reevaluating the directive imposed on women to cover their hair and demanding that our scholars publicly declare their confidence in our capacity to think abstractly and redefine ideals of modesty according to the customs and sanctions of current mores. We should acknowledge that anything exceeding those expectations is a testament to a woman's personal desire to hold herself accountable to an individual standard not to be imposed collectively on the entire female population.


DECONSTRUCTING THE VEIL-AS-OBLIGATION MYTH

In advocating for personal ijtihad (independent reasoning), I am imploring that we rediscover, not eradicate, the Islamic sciences. (For an intelligible book on Sharia, I refer you to Islam: A Sacred Law, by Imam Feisal Abdul-Rauf.)

Here, I will examine only one example from Islamic law, which is the command made, through consensus of the scholars, that women must cover their hair. Let us examine the legitimacy of this directive based upon our Islamic sources of guidance minus their entirely male interpretations.

Historically, the custom of veiling and secluding women was not common in the Islamic world until about three generations after the Prophet's death. This form of dress was adopted from earlier pre-Islamic Near Eastern societies. Jews and Christians also covered their hair. And even
then, the veil was not worn by all women. It was a mark of status worn by women of the upper classes, not by peasants or slaves. It was never a unique or essential practice in Islam, and the Quran did not command all women to cover their heads. The primary source of evidence for its implementation is obtained from Surah an-Nur, which says:

And say to the believing women to lower their gaze and
guard their modesty; that they should not display
their Beauty and ornaments except what (must
ordinarily) appear thereof; that they should draw
their veils over their bosoms and not display their
beauty…." (24:31, Abdullah Yusef Ali)

The noun khimar, which is translated here as "veil," was worn in pre-Islamic times either as an ornament let down loosely over the wearer's back, or as a protection from the desert climate. Not covering your head was considered a bad practice, as was shaving the beard. Your reliability was questioned when either custom was not followed, in the same way that our current culture questions the reliability of those who don body piercings or tattoos. In accordance with the fashion prevalent at the time of the Prophet, the upper part of a woman's dress had a wide opening in the front, leaving her breasts exposed. Hence the injunction to cover the bosom by means of a khimar is intended to make it clear that a woman's breasts are not included in the concept of "what may decently be apparent" of her body and should be covered.

The significance of the verse is concerned with covering the breast area, juyubihinna, as the verse has also reinforced. There is also no sanction or punishment for failing to observe Islamic dress, as there are punishments for adultery and murder.

The interpretation of the phrase illa ma zahara minha by several of the earliest Islamic scholars is what a human being may openly show in accordance with prevailing custom. Although the traditional interpreters of Islamic law have been disposed to restrict the definition of "what may (decently) be apparent" to a woman's face, hands and feet, the meaning of illa ma zahara minha is really much wider. The intentional ambiguity of this phrase is to allow for variability in practice according to customs and personal interpretations of modesty.

However there are also other verses which can be taken into consideration when deciding on appropriate dress, such as the specific commands about seclusion (al-Ahzab 33:32-33) which apply only to the Prophet's wives who, as the Qur'an asserts, are unlike any other women. Keep in mind that in traditional Arab society a sexual scandal was a very serious matter that could have been used to discredit the Prophet's mission. The hijab or curtain that was imposed on the Prophet's wives was a measure used to curtail the possibility of false accusations against the Prophet's family. There is a reference to the generality of Muslim women in another verse which states:

O Prophet! Tell thy wives and thy daughters, as well
as all (other) believing women, that they should draw
over themselves some of their outer garments (when in
public): this will be more conducive to their being
recognized (as decent women) and not annoyed. But
(withal,) God is indeed much-forgiving, a dispenser of
grace! (al-Ahzab 33:59, Asad transl.).

The context of this verse is that some of the hypocrites were molesting women in the street. Accordingly, Muslim women were ordered to dress in a manner that would distinguish them as modest and chaste and not to be assaulted. One could argue that this command is bound b context and time, and as such, dress is used to indicate a Muslim's identity and not necessarily as a measure of the moral status of the woman herself. It would of course also be socially preferable to raise men to respect women and not think that a woman's dress can serve as an invitation or license to assault her.

When the objective of a decree is stated in the Quran, then it is the objective, not the decree, which should take precedence in one's interpretation. One can claim that in light of the current situation we are facing, wearing the hijab has rendered women more of a target for the ill intentioned, and as a precautionary measure, one should not wear the hijab. I would never suggest that this is a good argument, but it certainly will quiet those who imply that the aim of hijab is to protect women.

The final verse with respect to veiling says: As for your women past the age of bearing children, who have no hope of marriage, there is no harm if they take off their outer garments, but in such a way that they do not display their charms; yet if they avoid this it would be better for them. God is all-hearing, all-knowing. (an-Nur 24:60)

Not one of these verses commands a woman to cover her hair explicitly. Even implicitly the emphasis is not on suppressing a woman's natural inclination to be feminine but rather to emphasize that a woman should not dress in a manner that is sexually suggestive.

The other source of guidance we have on the matter of veiling are two hadiths, reported sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. The first of which is narrated below where Aisha said:

Asthma', daughter of Abu Bakr, entered upon the
Apostle of Allah (may peace be upon him) wearing thin
clothes. The Apostle of Allah (peace be upon him)
turned his attention from her. He said: O Asthma',
when a woman reaches the age of menstruation, it does
not suit her that she displays her parts of the body
except this and this, and he pointed to her face and
hands.

Very few Muslims know that this is in Sunan Abu Dawud. The English translation of Sunan Abu Dawud is in three volumes. This hadith is in Volume 3, Book XXVII, Chapter 1535, and Hadith number 4092, titled: "How Much Beauty Can a Woman Display?"

Abu Dawud reports that this is a mursal tradition (i.e. the narrator who transmitted it from 'Aisha is missing), making this hadith a weak one. Few veiling advocates ever point out that this is a weak hadith and therefore should not be used to obtain Islamic
injunctions.

The other hadith, which is sahih (considered authentic), states:

My Lord agreed with me ('Umar) in three things... (2)
And as regards the veiling of women, I said 'O Allah's
Apostle! I wish you ordered your wives to cover
themselves from the men because good and bad ones talk
to them.' So the verse of the veiling of the women was
revealed (Bukhari, v1, bk 8, sunnah 395).

But again this was in reference to the Prophet's wives who were the target of insults and accusations by the "hypocrites." The majority of those who have attempted to interpret the Qur'an to mandate the hijab argue that the vernacular "beauty" includes hair, and its exposure is
therefore forbidden. But the term "ordinary'," means ordinary to the prevailing social customs. How is hair not "ordinary"?

The word "Hijab" itself is derived from hajaba, that is, to hide or conceal. Hijab/hajaba is mentioned eight times in the Quran. But Hijab is never used in the context of a woman's head covering. Even the word khimar really signifies any covering, such as a blanket, dress, or shawl.

What is clear, even after an analysis of various translations and even if one uses the word veil in translation, is an order that the woman's bosom be covered, not that the woman's head be covered. This is not to say that covering the hair does not carry noble connotations. My objective is not to destroy what I believe would be a beautiful custom if it were not marred by the decree that it is obligatory, depriving a woman from the sense of joy that she would derive from choosing it as a genuine expression of her interior state of purity and transcendent beauty.

My objective is to liberate every woman, myself included, who has only adopted the Islamic dress because she was misled into believing that it is an obligation, and even more importantly to liberate all the women who do not wear it from the unearned guiltthey harbor, for what they have been told is spiritual weakness on their part.

I got the impression from the many people I have spoken with that they would secretly agree with me but would rather not rock the boat over what they have, without our permission, deemed a minor issue. I pray that they will evolve the courage to forgo political correctness and stop hiding behind the pretense that it's the woman who is making the choice. Fear, of eternal damnation no less, nullifies the impression that it is a choice.

But my greatest motivation in seeking guidance on this issue was to speak on behalf of those who do not have the luxury to make an independent decision regarding their religious expression. For while I can take off my hijab, I know that the ramifications I, a mere housewife, will suffer in the hands of a few back biters and name callers will be negligible in comparison to the jail time and humiliation a female surgeon in Saudi Arabia would have to endure to assert her right to unveil.

When my friend was lying at the operating table, vulnerable and exposed, he was asked by the thoughtless man who was there to assist in the surgery to furnish some proof that he can pay for the superior quality heart tube which he demanded. The female surgeon terminated his coarseness by giving him her assurance that she would pay for it if my friend could not, proving that she is not only his superior in intellect but also in compassion.

My friend not knowing in what manner he would thank this angel of mercy, in what way he can make her feel singled out, without being rebuked for transgressing any social bounds, elected to do it by means of a poetic note of thanks. She took it from him as if it were a charge slip, only to rush back to plead with him to sign the note. In that act, she expressed both her nature and personality, for while she remains
nameless and faceless and claims no credit for her efforts, she insists that he be given credit for his.

And so in gratitude to the female surgeon who has healed and touched many hearts both literally and figuratively, I in a last literal and symbolic act of faith would like to take my hat off, or rather scarf off to you, my sister in Islam. For tomorrow I will go out unveiled for the first time in the hopes that the world will see you and me with new eyes and, more importantly, with enlightened hearts. And I am hoping
they will join me in public opposition to the veiling of your elegant mind and compassionate voice. A voice which, if it were allowed to sing freely, would triumph over the voices of those who either in their silent resignation or blatant endorsement have contributed to the horrors that will make September 11th both a day of awakening and tragedy for Muslims everywhere.

Inas Younis is a freelance writer residing in the
state of Kansas.

Copyright © 2003-2004 Muslim WakeUp! Inc.

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