Swahili in the Arabic script: part 5, the Script

         Traditional Swahili script has developed an unmistakable ductus (shape) of its own. It is usually marked by a well-rounded f, q, and w. It has neither the reduced scribbly shapes of modern Arabic writing, nor the oblique angularity of Persian. It resembles most the old-fashioned Indian and Malay forms of Arabic script, and is quite distinct from Urdu writing, except that during the last half century some attempts have been made to introduce Urdu conventions for aspiratives and retroflex phonemes which curiously fit the Swahili phonemic system. This will be discussed further below. One thing sets Swahili writing apart quite conspicuously from all other forms of Arabic script: the vowels have to be marked.

            There are about half a dozen different conventions for writing Swahili as it developed over the centuries showing how they have struggled for the perfection of their writing system.

1.     The 17^th century: the Hamziya

2.     The 18^th century: the Epic

3.     The 19^th century: the introduction of ch and p.

4.     The 20^th century

a.     The representation of e and o

b.     The representation of homorganic nasals.

c.      The representation of g, ng, and v.

d.     The representation of alveolars.

e.     The representation of aspirates.

From the first period only one text survives, the Hamziya., which I have described in an article in African Language Studies (see note 23). In the middle of the 17^th century the Swahili language was still in an older period of its evolution and so was as different from modern Swahili as 16^th-century Portuguese is from the modern language. We may therefore omit a discussion of its orthography, since no continuous tradition can be traced from that time to the present, except in the metre of the poem[1].

It is the 18^th-century epic that stands clearly at the inception of the continuous tradition of Swahili poetry. The spelling in these epics suggests that those MSS were used only as aide-memoires for the reciters; they were not intended for solitary reading and enjoyment. The principle of the orthography could be called ‘herufian’, i.e. syllabic, in the sense that every herufi, i.e. consonant-character, represents a syllable, never more nor less, so that every line has exactly eight herufis. It is possible that the system was invented by Mwengo bin Asumani himself in the great MS that is now in Hamburg, and which I have always suspected was written by his own hand, since it seems to be contemporary and is completely consistent, in spelling, orthography, dialect and other aspects of presentation. His system works well provided the reader knows the language and the writer makes no mistakes in spelling or in prosody. The basic principle is the syllabic system of the Swahili morphophonemic structure, on which the grid of the Semitic consonant system is superimposed.

The result is that a number of letters are given more than one phonetic value. There are only three vowels in Arabic which serve for the five Swahili vowels. F has to represent f and v, d has to represent both dental and alveolar d, as well as nd, i.e. d with preceding homorganic nasal. B represents b, mb, p and aspirated p, as well as bw and mbw[2]. Ghain represents gh in Arabid words, and in Swahili words g, ng, and ngw. K represents k and aspirated k’ as well as kw. M and n can represent labialized mw and nw, but unsyllabic prenasalisation is not shown. Y reads as y or ny or yw. T represents alveolar and dental t, both of which can be aspirated.

However, in practice the options are severely restricted by actual occurrence. To give a few illustrations: a word spelled bibi can be read as bibi, ‘grandparent’, or pembe, ‘horn(s)’. None of the other potential permutations could normally be met with in this language. Mutu normally reads moto, ‘fire’. Muyu normally reads moya, ‘one’. Bini normally reads mbwene, “I have seen”. Biti normally reads p’ete, “I have received.”

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Swahili in the Arabic Script part 4: the book

The book

            To make a book the sheets may be glued together on one side, but in the tropics there are insects that eat this glue and the paper with it, so it is better to sew the sheets together.  However, the sheets are often placed loosely together in a leather case or wrapper, called chuo as distinct from kitabu, which refers to the written text. Waraka, pl. nyaraka, is a sheet of paper[i]. Jilidi is also sometimes used for the leather binding. The binding is sometimes made of cloth, on which the scribe may write the title, the author’s name, the date and the town, followed by praises to God and the Holy Prophet. This cloth is called dibaji, and is often beautifully decorated with a gate-motif, for a book is regarded symbolically as a house of wisdom, and each chapter is a babu or mlango, a gate or door through which the avid reader may enter another store-room of wisdom. Later the word was used simply for ‘preface’[ii].

            Not every work was considered worthy of immortality; on the contrary, fables and fairy tales, songs and riddles were not written down by the Swahili scribes until European scholars such as Edward Steere and Carl Velten, came along in the 1890s and persuaded them that it was worth preserving their national heritage[iii]. Traditionally, as we have seen, the art of writing was associated with religion. The result is that almost all the Swahili writings from before that period are of a religious kind. There are histories of the life of the Prophet Muhammad and his Companions and of the Koranic prophets of the past (‘Biblical history’); many of these legends are in verse. There are liturgies, prayers and recitations, hymns and litanies. There are contracts of marriage and deeds of property[iv].

            As the vehicle of the Koran, that is, the miraculous characters in which the sacred word of God’s own book are fixed, visible for human eyes, the Arabic script has travelled with the Arab conquerors and the traders, the merchant captains and the wandering scholars, to the ends of the old world. It is taught from Dakar in West Africa to the Sulu Islands in the Philippines, from Afghanistan to Zanzibar[v]. As a result it links all the peoples who live in between those places by a common form of expression and communication. It must be appreciated that the teaching of reading and writing in all Islamic countries is done by means of and with the purpose of reading and reciting the Koran. Young boys memorize whole chapters and learn to write these down on pieces of paper for the personal use of others. For this activity is in itself God-pleasing and the product can be sold: in many countries the text of certain chapters is used as a talisman for the protection of its wearer against diseases and disasters. God’s word protects those who have faith in it against all afflictions.

            Not only letters, but entire words were adopted from the Koranic text into the languages whose speakers were drawn into the circle of Islamic culture. The result is that languages as far apart (7,000 km) as Swahili and Malay have almost four thousand Arabic (and a few hundred Persian) words in common. Not all these words are Koranic expressions, some are taken from the colloquial Arabic of the sailors. The result is that Malay and Swahili travellers, if they meet, can converse in limited Arabic[vi]. If they are both scholars, they will, of course, converse in the classical Arabic of the Koranic text, and correspond in it. This communicability is, of course, a strong incentive to retain the use of Arabic script. Many literate Muslims nowadays, in countries where the Roman alphabet has become predominant, such as North Nigeria, Turkey and Indonesia, can read and write their language in two alphabets, like Yugoslavs or Indians[vii]. They will use on alphabet(the Roman) for official business and the Arabic script for religious writing, for decorative purposes and their personal correspondence[viii]. The modernists in such countries, especially in Turkey, condemn the Arabic script as old-fashioned and a symbol of inflexible isolationism.

            However, for millions of Muslims, the Arabic script is still the most noble and beautiful representation for human words in visible form. Even though it is often called unsuitable for most languages, it has been shown to possess a remarkable capacity for adaptation. It is or has been used for the following languages (apart from Arabic): Afrikaans, Achenese, Beluch, Bengali, Berber, Dinka, Dyula, Fulani, Gujerati, Hausa, Harari, Javanese, Kituba (Congo), Makua, Malagasy, Malay, Malayalam, Manding, Nubian, Panjabi, Pashto, Persian, Somali, Sudanese, Swahili, Tamil, Tartar, Turkish, Urdu, Uzbek, Yao, and Yoruba. Fifteen of these thirty-two language are spoken in Africa, sixteen if we count Malagasy, which makes it half of the total. This shows how Islamic culture spread to the far corners of Africa. Writings in these languages range from a few letters or contracts in some language to extensive literatures of poetry, literary and historical works in others, notably Hausa and Swahili[ix].

            Those Islamicized peoples for whom Arabic script became a major aspect of their culture developed a style of their own, so that, e.g. Swahili Arabic characters can be recognized at a glance. The scribes usually take great pride and pleasure in writing flowing, well-shaped characters, drawing each letter with great skill and care. In a culture where the visible arts such as painting and sculpture are not developed in a European sense, the art of calligraphy takes their place so that every known artists of the Swahili tradition of decorative arabesques was also a calligrapher.

            Two Persian letters, the ch and the p, were adopted by the Indians, the Turks and the Swahili. The formidable cultural and literary influence of Iran merits a separate chapter in the history of Islamic culture. Although many Swahili families claim descent from Iran (the Shirazis), the culture of Iran has left only sporadic traces in the Swahili language (some three hundred Persian words), the culture (the calendar) and the literature (some Persian epic tales)[x].

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Swahili in Arabic Script part 3: the ink

 The ink

            Ink was prepared from scorched rice which was pounded into powder and then mixed with water and Arabic gum to make it sticky, otherwise it would run too quickly and make stains. Red ink, which was commonly used by Islamic scribes to insert passages from the Koran into their Swahili works, and also for ornamental flowers and arabesques, was prepared by means of zingifuri, cinnabar or red mercuric sulfide, known already to the ancient Greeks. The Swahili poet often begins his invocation by addressing his assistant thus:

            “Brother bring me a good black ink, and red ink too, the best, from Egypt[i].”

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Swahili in Arabic Script, part 2, the pen

The pen

            The Swahili writers of the Islamic tradition often mention the pens with which they write their works. These pens are said to have been imported from as far away as Syria, and some are made of gold, or so we are led to believe by one anonymous poet, who begins his work addressing his scribe thus:

            “Ahi, patie kasabu kwa kalamu ya dhahabu”

            My brother, find me a reed for a golden pen.”

            Here kalamu is obviously intended to mean ‘penholder’ a metal cylinder in which a reed writing-piece fit. The Swahili kalamu comes ultimately from the Latin calamus, which itself means a read (botanically unrelated to modern calamus, which is a rattan palm). The reed writing-piece was at one end sliced obliquely or slightly concavely, after which the resulting point was slit vertically through the middle, a fifth of an inch or a little more, to permit the ink to run down slowly and evenly. Cutting the nib (jilifa) was a great art in which one had to be a specialist. The left side (insi, i.e. the side held toward the writer, for no one was allowed to write with the left hand) was cut half a millimeter shorter than the right side (wasihi), and slightly softer. The best reeds for writing were found near Basra and in the Nile Delta, from where they were dispatched directly to the cities for use, since the reeds must not be dry, for that would make them stiff and brittle. Reeds found at the seashore (bahari) could also be used. Cutting a good pen was considered so important that Islamic scholars used to say: “Good cutting is half of good writing.” Every type of writing required its own special method of cutting the pen. Every Islamic nation has developed its own typical variant of Arabic script, so that connoisseurs can see at a glance whether a page of writing is in Persian, Hausa, Malay, Urdu, or Swahili, without knowing those languages, simply by recognizing the shape of the letters. Pens are so precious that they have to be kept in a special container (mkilama) a long flat, wooden box often beautifully ornamented with inscriptions of proverbs like ‘allama bi’l-kalami[i] “He taught mankind by means of the Pen”. Attached to it one often finds an inkwell (dawati or dawaya, sometimes used for the ink itself). The word kalamu is often used in the meaning of “Man’s destiny”, since God created a gigantic pen to write down the future events until Judgement Day[ii].

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Swahili Literature in the Arabic Script, part 1

(Editors note: this is an old article from a journal called Manuscripts of the Middle East, which I transcribed for the blog, as it contains a lot of useful information unavailable elsewhere on the web. I will continue to publish snippets of it in future posts. The article was written by Jan Knappert, a well known scholar of Swahili poetry, with several books to his name on the subject. In the interest of space, I have not included all the relevant citations, although should anyone want to consult them, I will be happy to provide them; simply leave a comment on the posting.)

In this article, some aspects of the vast subject of Swahili documents in Arabic script and their contents will be discussed. I have published seven books on the subject, during 36 years of study, but much more remains to be done. In spite of the enormous losses through neglect, vermin, floods and fire, there are still hundreds of Swahili manuscripts in Arabic script in private collections in Barawa, Lamu, Pate, Malindi, Mombasa, Tanga, Bagamoyo, and Zanzibar. Together, these texts comprise the content of Swahili culture: there are texts on theology, law, medicine and many other subjects. Many of the texts are in verse; there are seventy-two known epic poems in Swahili. Three unknown epics have come to light in Mozambique, about which I will report in a later publication. This article will deal mainly with the exterior form of the manuscripts and how they are made.

We do not know when writing on the East African Coast was first practiced. On the basis of archaeological discoveries it has been established that there was contact between the Kenya Coast and Mesopotamia as of c. 750 AD.[i] The oldest known mosques date from the late eleventh century.[ii] Swahili was spoken on the East African Coast when al-Mas’uudi visited it.[iii] Structurally, Swahili is a Bantu language.[iv] Swahili literature has been written in the Arabic script for three centuries[v] until the colonial period when Roman script and printing were introduced.[vi] Still in AD 1900 the German scholar Dr. Seidel could write[vii]: ‘The Swahili language is written in Arabic letters’. We do not know when the Swahili poets first began to write down their works, but the oldest surviving Swahili manuscript is dated with the equivalent year of AD 1652.[viii] From that time onwards there is a steadily increasing stream of manuscripts in the Arabic script. In the library of the University of Dar es Salaam, there are almost a thousand Swahili manuscripts; other collections comprising a few hundred MSS each are to be found in Mombasa, Lamu and London.[ix]

The term literature here includes the complete writings known in a given language. Manuscripts may be handwritten poems, letters, contracts, deeds, and other documents of just one or a few pages each, like some of the long epic poems with over three hundred pages per text.[x] The interest of this literature is in the first place its historical importance: the Swahili are the only people in tropical Africa who possess a written literature going back more than two hundred years.[xi] Many historical data could be gleaned from these MSS.[xii] Secondly, there is an interest for students of culture, in particular Islamic culture, of which the Swahili people have developed their own typical variant.[xiii] Thirdly, students of literature, philologists[xiv], will find some unique works especially in the more than sixty epic poems, many of which have never been published. Some of these are extant only in one manuscript, so that it is fortunate that the Library of SOAS has acquired photostatic copies of many of the MSS in Dar es Salaam, which are now available for study in London, bound in eleven volumes. Many manuscripts are still in private hands in the towns and villages along Africa’s east coast. Not all of them are kept under ideal conditions: the climate is too hot and damp, the houses are not free of insects. But many Swahili manuscripts are part of a family heirloom which owners will not readily part with.[xv]

The tradition of writing Swahili in Arabic script is very much alive today. Poets still write verse in it, including long poems, and letters of all kinds are written in Arabic script, business as well as personal letters. Some enterprising people have begun to print manuscripts by photographic methods and make books from them that are distributed.[xvi]

Originally Arabic script was not very suitable to represent the Swahili sounds, but over the years Swahili scholars have improved it by adding signs, partly taken from the Persian and Urdu traditions, so that today Arabic script is in many ways superior to Roman in showing phonemic features. There are two major conventions: the old ‘stenographic’ convention, in which the writing is clearly used as no more than an aid to refresh the reciter’s memory, and, at the other extreme, there is Mw. Yahya Ali’s perfected adaptations of Arabic script to the Swahili language, in which all the alveolar and aspirated consonants are carefully represented so that his method of orthography is in fact superior to the Roman alphabet without phonetic diacritics The first thing that young children in an Islamic culture are taught is the Arabic script. After this they are taught to read (not yet to understand, that will come later) the first chapter of the Koran. The major part of their primary education will be reading and memorizing this book, which for a Muslim is the literal word of God.

            This Holy Book is written (and now printed) in the Arabic script. Consequently, for all Muslims, the Arabic script is closely associated with the most revered thing on earth: the book that contains God’s own words. No wonder that Islamic peoples such as the Persians and the Pakistanis use the Arabic script to write their language even though it is quite unsuitable for Indo-European languages. They feel that it is the best script in the world. The nations which no longer use the Arabic script for their language, Turkey, Indonesia and Malaysia, have abolished it because they are now “secular” states, Westernized nations. Even in those countries there are large collections of manuscripts in Arabic script, waiting to be studied, edited and published.

            We cannot here go into any details of codicology, the science of manuscripts, which examines the paper, the ink, the writing and other details which can inform us regarding the time, the country and the culture of the writers of a given manuscript. Islamic scribes end the writing of manuscript with a “colophon”, usually in a curiously triangular shape in which they put their name, home-town, and the date. Not all writers are so accurate, unfortunately. Sometimes the owner will put his name in the colophon, but, of course, neither he nor the scribe, i.e. the copyist, is necessarily the author of the work. The poet (if it is a poem we are studying) sometimes names himself in the last few verses of his work, often with a pen name rather his patronymic; these pen names were known to all contemporary insiders, but later historians usually have great difficulty identifying the author, and dating him. Many uncertainties remain in Swahili literature.

            Since every person has his own unmistakable hand, and since some scholars made a living (or more often a small occasional fee) by copying manuscripts for collectors, several scribes hands are well known to the students of codicology. In Swahili, the best known scribes are Mw. Yahya Ali, Mw. Muhammad Sikujua and Muhammad Abu Bakari Kijumwa.[xvii]

            Writing is considered an art in Islamic culture, indeed it is the most Islamic of all arts. A calligrapher, a person with a fine hand-writing, is still held in high esteem by his fellow Muslims. He will be asked, for instance, to write out passage from the Koran, one-page chapters, which people wear on their persons, folded up, wrapped in a piece of cloth with a string round the neck. Many people believe that these hand-written passages have the power to protect their wearers against many of life’s dangers, diseases and disasters.[xviii] This may serve as an illustration of the faith people have in the Koran as the word of God, and the power of every hand-written copy of this divine text. No wonder that the art of writing is surrounded with a mysterious aura of spiritual sanctity, and the man (less often the woman) who can write is likewise revered.

            Many of these scribes are also scribes in the Biblical sense, i.e. they are interpreters of the Holy Book, and thus experts in Islamic law, juriconsults, whose social prestige is often measurable in terms of political power. The result was that Islamic scholars rose to the highest offices in the state, they became imamu (‘rector’ of a mosque)[xix], kadhi (judge), or even vizier (Swahili waziri[xx],  minister). The art of calligraphy was practiced by sultans and princes, as well as by the poorest students, who thus shared the same aesthetic ideals. Unlike Chinese, Arabic script is based entirely on abstract signs, each of which must form an aesthetically satisfying unit by itself. In Koranic and ornamental writing every consonant is accompanied by its vowel sign (see below) to make a complete syllable and fill the space between the lines. Since each of the twenty-eight characters of the Arabic script represents a consonant, the three (five in Swahili) vowel signs give each character syllabic value. In Swahili, the vowel signs are a necessary part of the script, since the language is syllabic; in Arabic poetry too, the vowels have to be written.

            Arabic letters have symbolic values as a result of their spiritual usage. For instance, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, called alif, is also the sign for the number one, a simple vertical stroke, the first letter of the word ahad, ‘one’, which in the Koran refers to God, who is the One next to Whom there is none. The word Allahu, ‘God’ also begins with that letter. Among the prophets, the letter alif symbolizes Adam, whose name also begins with alif, and who was the first prophet and the first human being The letter mim, the m of the Arabic alphabet is the 25^th letter. It symbolizes Muhammad, who was the 25^th prophet (after Isa (Jesus), who was the 24^th. One the numerical scale, the mim has the value 40, because Muhammad was 40 when God first revealed the Koran to him. In this way every letter has its own special set of meanings and values, some of which are known to God alone.[xxi] The text of the Koran is thus much more than a series of phonetic signs, much more than a collection of histories and exhortations. Every page is like a length of cloth, into which God has woven the destinies of men, the horizontal lines alternating with the vertical lines to form patterns of beauty like the alternating strings of days and nights in our lives. The text of the Koran is immutable, it has always existed and will always exist as the mother of Man’s destiny. It has meanings behind meanings which even the sages can only guess at.

The paper

            The Swahili word for paper, karatasi, is of Greek origin and initially meant ‘papyrus’. True paper was introduced in the world of Islam during the early Abbasid period, i.e. after 750 AD, by Chinese prisoners who taught their Muslim masters to make it from rags of linen. The use of paper was established in the Arab world before 800 AD., i.e. the time of Harun al-Rashid, the great Caliph, since he had ordered it to be used in all the offices of his government in Baghdad. There, paper soon completely replaced papyrus as well as parchment, especially since writings on paper could not as easily be scratched out, as was done with writing on parchment. Even the Egyptians no longer used papyrus, indeed Egyptian paper soon became highly valued for its softness, its smoothness, and its whiteness; yellow, red, pink, green and blue paper was also produced there.

            In East Africa the paper was mixed in a pulp-vat (kasiria) with starch (nashaa), laid out on a deckle (kalibu) and then hung on the walls to dry. We do not know for sure that paper is still made by the Swahili; so far as is known, most of their paper now comes from India, at least it did in the nineteenth century. Ruling was obtained by means of a net made of string which was pressed down on the paper giving it lines to write on (misitari) as well as vertical lines for margins and to make the half lines of poetry. For the utenzi form a special ‘net’ was used with five vertical strings to ‘hold’ the kipandes, that is, the four pieces of the stanza (ubeti)[xxii] so that the page showed great regularity and beauty. For a long poem or a long chronicle the sheets could be glued or bound together to make a book, or they could be attached in long sequences, one at the bottom of the other, to form a scroll. The oldest shairi poems, however, were written on long sheets, from right to left, so that four lines fit across the page. In this way the final rhyme of the stanza, which has to be identical throughout the poem, could be shown at the left side down the page, for both the utenzi and the shairi. Instead of calling for his pen, the poem might ask for his assistant or apprentice:

            Mbuya lete karatasi ya Misiri

            Iwe safi na nyeupe ahiyari

            ‘My friend, bring Egyptian paper,

            let it be the best: pure white.’

            Unfortunately, unlike in the dry lands of the Middle East, where written documents on paper have been preserved from the early Middle Ages (from the ninth century in Egypt), in the tropical regions paper perishes quickly as it has many enemies: humidity, white ants, cockroaches, moths and worms, so that only four Swahili MSS of the eighteenth century have survived, and only one of the seventeenth.[xxiii]

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Sohar: old fort and souq

Took a trip with the homie Mo to Sohar on this long weekend of Isra and Miraj. We walked around the old fort, which is currently under construction, and the brand new souq, which is finished, but as of yet, devoid of any tenants. Got some wonderful pics of some older guys playing hawalis, (Swahili: bao). In a couple years there the express road to Sohar should be complete, and you will no longer have to battle it out against trucks, roundabouts, construction, speeding motorists in the left lane and other inconveniences of the narrow two-lane road that runs from Muscat to Sohar. Also, it is almost time for ratb!

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Why Do Muslims Take Things at Face Value, or What If the Prophet Really Thought Women Were Deficient in Intelligence?

Recently, a friend of mine posed the question on Facebook: Why do Muslims take everything at face value? I must say, I had never thought that this trait was unique to Muslims. However, upon reflection, I realized that there are important ways in which our religious discourse explicitly encourages us to take things literally in a way that has the potential to sacrifice truth, objectivity and rational thinking to dogma. Why is this? Is it inherent in “Islam” itself, a brake on rationality? Is it a historical phenomenon? From where did it develop, this tendency towards scriptural literalism? I argue that Islam is neither inherently irrational nor inherently rational. But everyday Muslim discourse, in a variety of contexts, but especially among Muslims who are forced into defending aspects of their faith against the equally hegemonic assumptions of Western liberalism, is suffering from a serious absence of self-reflection and critical thinking.

I submit this is so not ONLY because of the usual suspects: deficiency in deen, or deficiency in iman, or Western interference. Rather it is a result of what Nietzche once called the “search for origins," the desire to establish a person or a book or a teaching as completely infallible and beyond doubt. Nietzche wrote, “The origin makes possible a field of knowledge whose function is to recover it, but always in a false recognition due to the excesses of its own speech.”

To Nietzche, the lofty origin is no more than “a metaphysical extension which arises from the belief that things are the most precious and essential at the moment of their birth." We tend to think that this is the moment of their greatest perfection, when they emerged dazzling from the hands of a creator. This origin creates a canon of writing and rhetoric that is bent on preserving these ideas. It makes it virtually impossible to contest the interpretation of pious ancestors who were “closer than we will ever be”, and thus know better. This assumption underlies much of orthodox thinking.

My overarching treatment will assume that many beliefs about the Quran and the Islamic tradition are part of beliefs and assumptions that prevailed at the time of the Prophet, and thus do not possess anywhere near the kind of metaphysical weight which was later attributed to them. I do not regard the opinions of scholars as sacrosanct just because those who held them were authoritative figures. Truth is judged by criteria that often is unrelated to the piety or devotion of those who propose such truth. Nor do I regard the discussion of such issues as symptoms of a “colonized mentality” or “liberal egalitarian nonsense poured into Muslim minds by white leftists.” 



What does this mean for the everyday discursive realm of apologetics among Muslims? Asad Abu Khalil provides us with a clue, “The logical fallacies and contradictions that characterize contemporary Islamic thought do not affect the political discourse among Muslims only, but they shape the individual Muslim's understanding of his/her religion. The need for a fresh review of the place of sharia-as well as the very meaning of sharia… requires a break from the transmitted version of Islamic history. The nostalgia of the Islamic past, which makes the future unappealing, can only be eliminated once the myths and taboos of Islamic history are discarded.”

My intention in what follows is to speak as directly as I can, using as plain of language as I can, to the intelligent Muslim layperson about his or her religion, encouraging him or her to reflect self-consciously on its meaning and the structure of certain common discourses within the community. This is by no means a scholarly article, since I am by no means a scholar of fiqh, or of Arabic. It is, however, an attempt to address at least some of the common sense “truisms” of the faith that we as Muslims use to construct our worldview.

The issue we will discuss most directly is a controversial hadith where the Prophet Muhammed said that women were “naqisaatul aql.” Scholars typically translate this as “deficient in intelligence.” We could just as easily take, say, the verse about (lightly) hitting one’s wife, but this will do to illustrate some of the dangers of the search for origins.

I have deliberately, indeed provocatively this hadith to illustrate a point about the kind of moral blindness that is one pitfall of orthodoxy. This should not necessarily be read as an argument for unlimited individualism, but rather a warning about the dangers of the kind of thinking all too prevalent in the circles I have travelled in over the years, both abroad and in America.

As Muslims, our religious integrity and identity is heavily in invested in the idea that our religion never needs to change, while at the same time implicitly living with the reality of living religion in a society that is ever changing, as norms and morals evolve. The point I wish to put forward is that people emphasize ideals from moral teachers based on what they already believe and value. This is how we get anachronistic statements from putative and well-meaning defenders of Islam, that “Islam has always promoted women’s rights.” A statement like this objectifies Islam while working it into contemporary moral priorities.

Another way we often see this working is in the phrase, “Islam is perfect, but I am not.” Or titles of talks like “Islam and Culture, Understanding the Difference.” Or as one commentator put it, in a sentiment often expressed in dawah and apologist literature: “Don't judge Islam based on the actions of its followers. Especially don't judge Islam based on the actions of Muslim countries. Those countries are corrupt and wrong in many ways. They don't follow the Qur'an or Hadith properly half the time.” Perhaps those familiar with the Christian religion will recognize the parallels to the trite phrase, “Christianity is great, but its followers are horrible.” Most Muslims assume that there a correspondence between “following the Quran and Hadith properly” and justice. This is an ideal they share (to varying degrees) with other religious traditions.

By way of example, let us examine the hadith about the Prophet and his comments on women’s intelligence:
 The Prophet, addressed a group of women in the mosque, saying:

 "I have not seen any one more deficient in intelligence and religion than you. A cautious, sensible man could be led astray by some of you." The women asked: "O Allah's Apostle, what is deficient in our intelligence and religion?" He said: "Is not the evidence of two women equal to the witness of one man?" They replied in the affirmative. He said: "This is the deficiency of your intelligence"... "Isn't it true that a woman can neither pray nor fast during her menses?" The women replied in the affirmative. He said:"This is the deficiency in your religion."

The problem with apologizing or explaining this hadith is that in defending it, one is drawn into the same set of assumptions of interpretation that traditional scholars decry in the progressive tent. That is, the unquestioned assumptions and values that pervade the thinking of orthodox interpreters are nearly the same: misogyny is bad, slavery is wrong universally, Islam is not inconsistent with contemporary moral priorities. Yet these assumptions themselves are uniquely modern, and almost totally unknown unknown in classical Islamic thinking. There was no such thing as misogyny, slavery had limits but was morally permitted, and the idea of modernity was not a going concern. The position of those who advocate for a progressive renewal by return to classical sources and classical knowledge suffers from the same incoherence as the progressives, but they are more strategic in their phrasing: they can still appeal to the authority of the text as their ultimate guide, concealing the very moral assumptions which shape their approach to the text. They too assume the text is self evident, since the text itself claims it is!

Now, first of all before we begin, let us establish that the story in question was actually transmitted and is accurate to impute to the Prophet. Muslim scholars developed a very sophisticated science to attempt to deal with this problem. The following hadith is found in the collection of al-Bukhari, generally considered to be one of two of the most authoritative hadith collections. It is a single chain hadith (ahad), which is what the vast majority of hadith relating to law are classified as. This doesn’t guarantee the hadith is accurate, but it is a probable assumption, time-tested by the scholars. We should try to determine if its true before we even begin to consider whether it is morally sensible.

If if this in fact a statement of the Prophet Muhammad, we are left with several alternatives: 
1. It has some non-literal alternative meaning 
2. It means what it says it means, it is not up to us to question the Prophet
3. it has to be understood in a moral context.”

I will come to 1 and 2 later. Regarding 3: Of course, few would dispute that things have to be understood in context. But the meaning of context here is so vague as to encompass nearly anything. It tells us little about what we should actually do when points of the tradition conflict with our own moral understanding. Will “understanding” how to hit your wife (light taps and only after all else has failed) somehow make the practice embody mercy and good moral values?

Let us examine how some scholars have looked at the hadith, “in context”:

G.F. Haddad, one of the most eminent Sunni scholars in today’s world, argues that the meaning of the hadith is not literal: “The hadith here uses two figures of speech: the first is hyperbole (mubalagha) meaning exaggeration in the words "even a prudent, sensible man might be led astray by some of you" i.e. a fortiori an ordinary man. The second figure is synechdoche (majaz mursal) consisting in using the whole for the part: intelligence to mean the specific legal testimony of a woman, and religion to mean the prayer and fast at the time of menses.” He says that the hadith was meant “to trigger among wealthy and sensible citizens acts of generosity for the greater good while reminding them that life is fleeting and thankfulness a surer way to Paradise than despair.”

This is a sensible interpretation, but it does beg the question as to why the Prophet saw fit to make women into a negative example in order to trigger an act of generosity. Haddad’s interpretation does not explore the issue of whether the Prophet believed women were deficient in intelligence. After all, exaggerations often contain a grain of truth.

And if it was not meant literally, why didn’t the prophet clarify precisely that, knowing the impact his words would have thousands of years from now? It seems a curious thing to have a literal and obvious meaning, and to somehow rhetorically blunt the force of the meaning while claiming to be faithful to the essence of the Prophetic example.

By far the more common interpretation of this hadith (and by common I mean advanced by scholars and laymen alike) is one that refuses to apologize for the Prophet’s statement and indeed takes it literally. I do not want to belabor this point, but suffice to say that scholars have interpreted this to mean that women’s physiological nature makes them weaker than men, that women are more ‘emotional’ than ‘intellectual’, that woman is prone to forgetting and too stressed out by motherhood and childbirth to be ‘objective.’ There are many many serious Muslim intellectuals who believe these gender stereotypes.

For example Ibn Kathir said the following about women when commenting on the verse in Surat al-Nisa: 34 “Men are the overseers of women because of what favor God has given to some over others and because of what they spend of their wealth.”
“...That is because men are superior to women, and man is better than woman. Because of this, prophethood was specific for men. Likewise, the most supreme [political] position of authority is specific for men, because of his (the Prophet’s) statement: “A people will never prosper who have given charge of their affair to a woman.”

Given these many statements from scholars about the general authority men have over women, why shouldn’t believers who sincerely study the deen take things at “face value”, when the presumptive meaning is clear and they are working from the understanding of orthodoxy which makes the Prophet Muhammad infallible and a perfect moral exemplar. To rely on one’s own “innate moral nature” or fitra is not absent from the Islamic tradition (indeed the idea of fitra seems to be enjoying a revival amongst my fellow American Muslims) but the idea of fitra always had to submit itself to the text and to the transmitter of the text. These are not new ideas.

When we as Muslims profess deep and abiding love for the Prophet, that is something noble worth preserving. But there is a darker side to this kind of adulation—an absolute refusal to discriminate moral events in the Prophet’s own life, using our own moral compass. We twist ourselves in knots over the controversial hadiths, trying to find ways to justify them to ourselves or to explain them as not literal. We do this, because we have been “disciplined” by orthodoxy to think that there are certain core assumptions that every Muslim must hold, of which one of the most important is the ultimate guidance and infallibility of the Prophet Muhammad.

These complex moral gyrations faced by progressives/liberals/feminists can be eliminated if clear and careful thinking is employed in the spirit of sincerity. Coming back to an earlier summation: Either we are naturally led by the restrictions of orthodoxy to the “face value” conclusion agreed upon by the scholars, or we have to reject their conclusions as being inconsistent with human rights, while at the same time acknowledging their fidelity to the witness of the Prophet as interpreted through the texts. This may mean that the Prophet himself envisioned a society where men always had authority over women. And that may well mean that the Prophet himself regarded women as deficient in intelligence.

The way premoderns, pre-literate folks dealt with these problems, or why they didn’t arise with such force, is that they were typically confined to an all-male scholarly class, and most of the population was illiterate in anything more than a basic knowledge of the Quran. Such issues simply didn’t arise, because most people didn’t know about them, and scholars generally did not see them as particularly important or morally sensitive.

Literacy has transformed people’s ideas of themselves in Muslims countries over the past 50-100 years. Instead unmediated access to the text has more forcibly implanted the idea of orthodoxy, previously more of a discursive abstraction, in people’s minds. And it is not as if these ideas are somehow new in the tradition.

When orthodox Muslims refuse to accept such the possibility that the Prophet could have been wrong on the subject of gender relations, they have all of tradition on their side. Those who argue for some notion of “liberatory hermeneutics” based on reinterpretation and “ijtihad” of established narrations or clear verses explicitly place themselves on weaker ground ontologically than those who argue from within the core assumptions of the system. Progressives, liberals, whatever you want to call them, who nevertheless claim to work within the assumptions of the system, cannot but be stymied by a variety of conclusions which their arguments force them reluctantly into but which they refuse to acknowledge:

1.     They somehow know better than the Prophet Muhammad
2.     The Quran and the rules laid down in it and by the Prophet are insufficient guides to modern life

These two notions directly contradict the teachings of orthodoxy, as understood by generations of scholars. This dooms the reformers/progressives/liberals/feminists to double talk: on the one hand they want to preserve the fidelity of the message, but they want to do that by reinterpreting a narration or verse away from its clear meaning. They lay themselves open to the charge that in fact what they wish for is to harmonize the message to their own desires and moral compass. Since the thrust of orthodoxy is to convince people that their desires are illegitimate if they conflict with the divine message, it follows that those who base their interpretation off what the Quran, or the majority of scholars have clearly stated regarding an interpretation will always be on firmer ground.

 The portrayal of the Islamic discursive tradition as a deeply flexible and tolerant tradition is neither true nor false, but just vague. Its flexibility was not unlimited, the philosophical contours of its moral compass were fairly clear, and there were well-defined limits beyond which philosophers dare not trespass. One of these “holy grails” was criticism of the lawgiver the Prophet Mohammed. Why is it so threatening to admit that Mohammed was an inspired prophet, while admitting he made some mistakes and propagated ideas that are out of date because erroneous? 

The question of why orthodoxy absolutely prevents reformists from making this seemingly small statement, and the question of what would happen if they did is a provocative one, which I will pose at a later date, inshallah. 

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