the state of "yiddishkeit" yesterday

anyway, it appears to be (you can download it from here) from one of the increasingly odd sub-groups of the breslover sect of hasidim, who you may have seen in the recent tv documentary partying at their annual jamboree at the sect founder’s tomb in the town of uman in the ukraine. they are regarded as somewhat odd even by other hasidim (in a kind of sufi high-on-G!D hippy kind of way) but they are rather obsessed with the kabbalistic aspects of correct sexual activity, the piece itself being extremely revealing of the attitudes that filter through in much of the discourse from the haredi world, particularly the hasidic bits, so i thought i’d share it, with some translation and commentary:

1. a “leshem yichud” is a kabbalistic formula meant to be recited before an action in order to concentrate the proper intention and mindfulness.
2. the “sita aher”, normally called the “sitra ahra”, is a kabbalistic term for, not to put too fine a point on it, the “dark side of the Force”.
3. “klipot” is a term referring to the “shells” that enclose the “sparks of holiness that were trapped in the lower worlds (including ours) during the cosmic catastrophe of the creation of evil in lurianic kabbalah.
4. “pogem enayim” means “defiler of one’s eyes” – a transgression of a Torah commandment; according to most interpretations, gazing at immodestly dressed women will constitute this transgression – haredi interpretations of “immodestly dressed” covers pretty much anything that doesn’t cover hair, elbows, knees, neckline or reveals the curves of the (female, of course) body.
5. a “lav doraysa” is a negative prohibition (thou shalt not) directly commanded in the Torah.
6. “lo sasuro achary levavchem vachari anachem” is a hasidishe transliteration of the hebrew phrase which refers to the commandment which is found in the third paragraph of the “shema”, numbers 15:37-41, to not “stray after your hearts”, in other words, follow impulses which might lead to idolatrous behavour.
7. “heshumer mkal dvar ra” is, again, a hasidishe transliteration of the hebrew phrase which refers to the commandment which is found deuteronomy 23:10, to “guard the camp when you go out against your enemies”, usually understood as “watch your back”, but easily reinterpreted to signify the protection of one’s home from evil influences; you will note the implicit attitude to the outside world.
8. a “deraysa” is a Torah commandment. to be “over a deraysa” (again, hasidishe transliteration, inconsistently done) one means to transgress the Torah commandment.
9. “poskim” are halakhic decisors, some of the important ones of whom are mentioned here; of course, it is by no means clear that the *way* in which these guys mean it is the same as the way in which these poskim mean it, certainly their decisions do refer explicitly to watching a film, but rather to other situations. however, if you want to take it that way, this is where you’d get the precedent from. of course, you can see “immodest” women (as these guys think of it) anywhere you like these days, you don’t need to be watching a film.
10. ” to be over on “Vehyisem Kedoshim” and “Kidoshim Tihyo”” means to transgress the Torah commandments to imitate G!D by being “holy” – leviticus 11:45 / 19:1-2 – which is taken by these guys to refer to refraining from illicit sexual acts, although ramban – nachmanides – has a big argument with rashi on this precise point, so clearly this isn’t as clear as it is made out to be.
11. “reshaim” – evil people; presumably this means the baddies.
12. “pogem habris” means “defiler of the covenant”, which is generally understood to be the misuse of the bit of you that the brit affects – in breslover thought i believe this is generally understood to be a euphemism for [male] masturbation, in any case they don’t half go on about it.
13. “see keri while i am asleep” – i.e. have sexual dreams.
14. “shmoneh esreis” – this refers to the “amidah”, the “18 benedictions” or standing prayer, which is of supreme importance in jewish prayer and is said three times daily; they’re worried that your mind will drift off during it.
15. “hiruray znus with my tefillin on” – a hasidishe transliteration of the hebrew phrase which can be translated as “thoughts of whoredom”, in other words, the contemplation of illicit sexual acts while wearing phylacteries during morning prayers, which they suppose will be much more likely; the preservation of proper mindfulness while wearing tefillin is of great importance.
16. “kfirot” – denial of the truth of Torah.
17. “tzadikim” – sages.
18. “holy Shemot” – the various Divine Names, the contemplation and manipulation of which are the practical structures on which many kabbalistic techniques are founded.
19. “azilut, briah, yitzirah and asiyah” – the kabbalistic names of the “four worlds”.
20. “nefesh, ruch, neshamah” – one schema describing the structure of the human soul.
21. “avodas haShem” – the service of G!D, which should of course be one’s primary consideration. the thought that watching a film might actually assist in this, or teach moral lessons, does not, of course, occur.
22. “moshiach” – the messiah.
23. “kedusha” – holiness.
24. “emunah” – belief / trust.
25. “chitzinim” – literally, “externalities”, which, kabbalistically speaking are elements of Creation that “act as a spiritual barrier” between humans and G!D, which are there effectively play “devil’s advocate” and be overcome in order to choose the way of Torah and commandments and closeness to G!D of our own free will.
26. “do teshuvah” – repent.
27. “find my zivug” – to locate and marry one’s destined wife.
28. “if i am married then i am willing to have my children considered semi mamzarim since i will not be able to control my thoughts.” – this, in my view is the most serious, as the prohibitions and disabilities associated with mamzerut (the offspring of Torah-prohibited intercourse such as an incestuous or adulterous liaison) are incredibly unpleasant, restrictive and persistent. this is pretty much tantamount to saying that they wouldn’t be able to get married (quite a penalty in the haredi world) because of your sins. to call this “overstated” barely covers it; there is no such halakhic status of being a “semi-mamzer”; the avoidance of potential mamzerut being a fundamental concern. raising it as a real possibility is, in my view, an outrageous piece of scaremongering based on the falsification of halakhah; it’s basically making up a new category of prohibition which can’t possibly be justified in intent, let alone determined in practice or policed; if having “impure thoughts” makes your kids “semi-mamzerim”, then nobody could possibly consider themselves free of these.

all in all, this would have been funny and mordant as a piece of swiftian satire – as a serious piece of moral exhortation, it is arrant nonsense and appallingly manipulative. if i find out who has been leaving this stuff lying around, i will have words.

i have for some time been aware of the powerful analytical frameworks for bio-psycho-social systems developed by the american psychologist dr clare graves and systematised for practical application by don beck and chris cowan in the excellent book “spiral dynamics” (i’m not affiliated with anyone concerned, incidentally). at the risk of sounding like somewhat of a “fanboy”, as i believe it is called on teh interwebs, i am convinced it constitutes an important piece of intellectual real estate for the understanding of complex socio-political systems, particularly in behavioural terms.

you can read more about the basics of spiral dynamics here and here - and i strongly encourage you to do so, but perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate its unique way of enabling insight into human nature is by a review of the various behaviours that have been exhibited during the riots. in the table below you will see a number of different types of responses and the messages associated with them, which you will have seen reflected by the proponents of these value systems in the various media channels. the vast majority of these types of response can present in either healthy or unhealthy forms – thus “C-P” (“red”) behaviours and messages were used both destructively (wanton destruction) and constructively (arresting looters) – in both cases, the behaviour was the demonstration of dominance and power, with corresponding public messages (a cartmanesque “RESPECT MY AUTHORITAAH!”) sent to the media.

you’ll see that whilst most of the operational trouble has functioned at C-P/red systems level, most of the discussion and analysis has been conducted by politicians and the media at blue (mostly “societal breakdown”, good-and-evil) orange (intellectual, opportunistic and tactical) and green (communitarian, progressive and inclusive) levels – and if the reactions are to be systematic, they will have to be a combination of green, blue and orange solutions appropriate to the situation, just as identifying looters using website photos (orange), communally organised clean-up squads (green) and attempts to strengthen traditional family structures (blue) have already been used. i note that ed miliband (who i usually have little time for) has supposedly come out against knee-jerk reactions and i think he’s correct in this at least; david cameron will not get very far if all his responses are couched in “blue” terms to appeal to the “respect for society must be restored” brigade and executed in “orange” technocratic action plans by community workers who are uncomfortable with anything which doesn’t take account of “green” inclusion. if he is serious about the “big society”, he will need to understand that the big society needs *all* these things, it is not a blue, orange or green concept, just as it needs “red” defences and alternative “purple” clan and kin affiliations than those of gang, patois and skin colour – and that includes the purple affiliations of the non-rioters, too! the “big society” could be second-order policy thinking and leadership, but that needs a shift in both our understanding of the situation and the strategies we use to manage it.

in all these cases i would say: if you want to find a constructive, insightful way of discussing the value systems that led to the events of the last couple of weeks, you would do worse than to look at how spiral dynamics sheds light on the tensions, relationships, structures and messages involved.

all comment and discussion welcome.

Also from the same series, Scientific Miracles in the Qur’an:

And, finally:

Refutations of these hadith, which have been sourced from a text by James M Arlandson, are welcome.

Before Muhammad’s Hijrah (Emigration from Mecca to Medina in 622), he used to sit in the assembly and invite the Meccans to Allah, citing the Quran and warning them of God’s punishment for mocking his prophets. Al-Nadr would then follow him and speak about heroes and kings of Persia, saying, “By God, Muhammad cannot tell a better story than I, and his talk is only of old fables which he has copied as I have.” Al-Nadr is referring to legends and opaque histories about Arabs of long ago and possibly to Bible stories about such figures as Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, which Muhammad told, but according to his own inaccurate versions. On other days al-Nadr would interrupt Muhammad until the prophet silenced him. In reply to al-Nadir’s harassment, it is possible (scholars sometimes have difficulties matching up Quranic verses with historical events) that Allah sent down these verses to Muhammad concerning him or certainly other mockers in Mecca, according to the account of Ibn Abbas, Muhammad’s cousin, who is considered a reliable transmitter of traditions:

25:6 Say [Prophet], “It was sent down by Him who knows the secrets of the heavens and earth. He is all forgiving and merciful.” (MAS Abdel Haleem, The Qur’an, Oxford UP, 2004)

83:13 … [W]hen Our revelations are recited to him, he says, “Ancient fables!” 14 No indeed! Their hearts are encrusted with what they have done. 15 No indeed! On that day they will be screened off from their Lord, 16 they will burn in Hell, 17 and they will be told, “This is what you call a lie.” (Haleem)

Muhammad did not take revenge on him—not yet—even though the verses in Sura 83 promise a dismal eternal future for mockers. Muhammad’s revenge was not long coming. It was al-Nadir’s bad fortune to join Mecca’s army, riding north to protect their caravan, which Muhammad attacked at the Battle of Badr in AD 624. The story-telling polytheist was captured, and on Muhammad’s return journey back to Medina, Ali, Muhammad’s son-in-law, at Muhammad’s order, beheaded him, instead of getting some possible ransom money. He was one of two prisoners who were executed and not allowed to be ransomed by their clans—all because they wrote poems and told stories critiquing Muhammad.

Source: Ibn Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, trans. A. Guillaume, (Oxford UP, 1955, 2004), pp. 136 (Arabic pages 191-92); 163 / 236; 181 / 262; 308 / 458. Reputable historians today consider Ibn Ishaq to be a good source of early Islam, though they may disagree on his chronology and miraculous elements.

March 624: Uqba bin Abu Muayt

A similar story as that of al-Nadir can be told about Uqba. He too harassed and mocked Muhammad in Mecca and wrote derogatory verses about him. He too was captured during the Battle of Badr, and Muhammad ordered him to be executed. “But who will look after my children, O Muhammad?” Uqba cried with anguish. “Hell,” retorted the prophet coldly. Then the sword of one of his followers cut through Uqba’s neck.

Source: Bukhari, vol. 4, no. 2934; Muslim, vol. 3, nos. 4422, 4424; Ibn Ishaq, p. 308 / 458. Bukhari and Muslim are reliable collectors and editors of the hadith (words and deeds of Muhammad outside of the Quran). These three passages from the hadith depict Muhammad calling on Allah for revenge on this poet.

March 624: Asma bint Marwan

Asma was a poetess who belonged to a tribe of Medinan pagans, and whose husband was named Yazid b. Zayd. She composed a poem blaming the Medinan pagans for obeying a stranger (Muhammad) and for not taking the initiative to attack him by surprise. When the Allah-inspired prophet heard what she had said, he asked, “Who will rid me of Marwan’s daughter?” A member of her husband’s tribe volunteered and crept into her house that night. She had five children, and the youngest was sleeping at her breast. The assassin gently removed the child, drew his sword, and plunged it into her, killing her in her sleep.

The following morning, the assassin defied anyone to take revenge. No one took him up on his challenge, not even her husband. In fact, Islam became powerful among his tribe. Previously, some members who had kept their conversion secret now became Muslims openly, “because they saw the power of Islam,” conjectures Ibn Ishaq.

Source: Ibn Ishaq, pp. 675-76 / 995-96.

April 624: Abu Afak

Abu Afak, a centenarian elder of Medina, belonging to a group of clans who were associated with the god Manat (though another account has him as a Jew), wrote a derogatory poem about Muhammad, extolling the ancestors of his tribe who were strong enough to overthrow mountains and to resist submitting to an outsider (Muhammad) who divides two large Medinan tribes with religious commands like “permitted” and “forbidden.” That is, the poet is referring to Muhammad’s legal decrees about things that are forbidden (e.g. pork and alcohol) and permitted (e.g. other meats like beef and camel). Before the Battle of Badr, Muhammad let him live.

After the battle, the prophet queried, “Who will deal with this rascal for me?” That night, Salim b. Umayr “went forth and killed him.” One of the Muslims wrote a poem in reply: “A hanif [monotheist or Muslim] gave you a thrust in the night saying / ‘Take that Abu Afak in spite of your age!’” Muhammad eliminated him, which shows religious violence. Islam is not the religion of peace.

Source: Ibn Ishaq p. 675 / 995.

September 624: Kab bin al-Ashraf

Kab b. al-Ashraf had a mixed ancestry. His father came from a nomadic Arab, but his mother was a Jewess from the powerful al-Nadr tribe in Medina. He lived as a member of his mother’s tribe. He heard about the Muslim victory at the battle of Badr, and he was disgusted, for he thought Muhammad the newcomer to Medina was a trouble-maker and divisive. Kab had the gift of poetry, and after the Battle of Badr he traveled down to Mecca, apparently stopping by Badr, since it was near a major trade route to Mecca, witnessing the aftermath. Arriving in Mecca, he wrote a widely circulated poem, a hostile lament, over the dead of Mecca. It is important to include most of the political lament to show whether the poem is a serious offence, meriting assassination, as Muslim apologists (defenders of Islam) argue.

… At events like Badr you should weep and cry.
The best of its people were slain round cisterns,
Don’t think it strange that the princes were left lying.
How many noble handsome men,
The refuge of the homeless were slain.

……………………………………..

Some people whose anger pleases me say,
“Kab b. al-Ashraf is utterly dejected.”
They are right. O that the earth when they were killed
Had split asunder and engulfed its people,
That he who spread the report had been thrust through
Or lived cowering blind and deaf.

……………………………………..

I was told that al-Harith ibn Hisham [a Meccan]
Is doing well and gathering troops
To visit Yathrib [pre-Islamic name of Medina] with armies,
For only the noble, handsome man protects the loftiest reputation.
(Translated by Guillaume, p. 365)

To us today this poem does not seem excessive, and other Arab poetry was worse, such as the poem celebrating the assassination of Abu Afak, cited above (no. 4). It seems to be a genuine lament that invokes the Arab concept of revenge. Also, the last four lines is not an explicit plea for the Meccans to exact vengeance because that was a foregone conclusion. Arab custom demanded a riposte against the humiliation of defeat. Rather, the lines seem to reflect reality. A Meccan leader is said to be gathering an army; Kab is not ordering him to do so.

Pro-Muslim poets answered Kab’s poem with ones of their own, and that was enough for his hosts in Mecca to turn him out. He returned to Medina, writing some amatory verses about Muslim women, a mistake compounded on a mistake, given the tense climate in Medina and Muhammad’s victory at Badr. For example, right after the battle Muhammad assembled a Jewish tribe, the Qaynuqa, and warned them as follows: “O Jews, beware lest God bring upon you the vengeance that He brought upon Quraysh [large Meccan tribe at Badr], and become Muslims.” … In late spring (April-June) Muhammad then expelled the Jewish tribe.

Angered by the poems and now able to strike back after Badr and the exile, Muhammad had had enough. He asked, “Who would rid me of [Kab]?” Five Muslims volunteered, one of whom was Kab’s foster-brother named Abu Naila. They informed him, “O apostle of God [Muhammad], we shall have to tell lies.” He answered, “Say what you like, for you are free in the matter.” They set upon a clever plan.

Abu Naila and another conspirator visited Kab, and they cited poetry together, the three appreciating the art, and chatted leisurely, so the two would not raise suspicions of their conspiracy. Then, after a long time, Abu-Naila lied just as he said he would. He said he was tired of Muhammad because “he was a very great trial for us.” Muhammad provoked the hostility of the Arabs, and they were all in league against the Medinans. Abu Naila complained that the roads had become impassable and trade was hampered, so that their families were in want, privation, and great distress. Kab, in effect, said to his foster brother, “I told you so.”

Then the foster-brother asked him for a loan of a camel load or two of food. Kab agreed, but only on the collateral of Abu-Naila’s sons. The foster-brother refused, and Kab asked for his women, but he again refused. Finally, Abu Naila offered his and his conspirators’ weapons. That arrangement provided the cover they needed to carry weapons right into Kab’s presence without alarm. Kab agreed, “Weapons are a good pledge.”

The two visitors departed, stopped by the other three, and told them of the plan. Not long afterwards, gathering their weapons, they went to Muhammad, who sent them off with this wish: “Go in God’s name; O God, help them.” They set out under a moonlit night until they made it to a fortress, one of several that the Jewish tribe had built in the rough environment of Arabia. In fact, the ruin of the fortress where Kab resided can be seen even today near Medina. They called out to him.

Kab had recently married, and his wife, hearing their yells, said, “You are at war, and those who are at war do not go out at this hour … I hear evil [or blood] in his voice.” But the custom of hospitality in the Arab world was strong. Her husband told her that they were only his foster-brother and his foster-brother’s partners, adding that “a generous man should respond to a call at night, even if invited to be killed.” Kab came down and greeted them. Abu Naila suggested they go for a walk. The signal to kill was as follows: Abu Naila would run his hand through Kab’s hair, complimenting him on his perfume, three times. This he did, yelling, “Smite the enemy of God!” Kab mounted a strong defense, so their swords were ineffective. Finally, one of the conspirators remembered his dagger, stabbed Kab in the belly, and then bore it down until it reached Kab’s genitals, killing him.

They made it back to Muhammad, but only after difficulty, since in the dark they had wounded one of their own. They saluted the prophet as he stood praying, and he came out to them. They told him that the mission was accomplished. He spat on their comrade’s wound, and they returned to their families. Their attack on Kab sent shock waves into the Jewish community, so that “there was no Jew in Medina who did not fear for his life,” reports Ibn Ishaq.

Muslim historian Tabari reports that the five Muslim thugs severed Kab’s head and brought it to Muhammad. How can the terrorists who are also thrilled to sever heads not be inspired by early Islam?

Sources: Bukhari vol. 5, no. 4037; Muslim vol. 3, no. 4436; Ibn Ishaq 364-69 / 548-53; Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, Vol. VII, trans. W. Montgomery Watt (SUNYP, 1987), pp. 94-98 / 1368-73. Reputable historians today consider Tabari to be a good source of data on early Islam, though they may not agree on his chronology or miraculous elements.

September (?) 624: Ibn Sunayna

It is on the heels of this assassination that Ibn Sunayna, a Jewish merchant, was assassinated. With the success of the five conspirators, Muhammad said, “Kill any Jew that falls into your power.” Shortly afterwards, Muhayyisa b. Masud leapt upon and killed Ibn Sunayna, with whom Muhayyisa had some social and business relations. However, Muhayyisa’s elder brother, not a Muslim at the time, beat the assassin, the younger brother, saying, “You enemy of God, did you kill him when much of the fat on your belly comes from his wealth?” Muhayyisa retorted that if Muhammad had ordered even the elder brother’s assassination, he would have carried it out. The elder was impressed: “By God, a religion which can bring you to this is marvelous!” And he became a Muslim. That is, the elder brother implies that Muhammad must be a great leader and worthy of devotion if he commands such lethal reverence and deadly obedience from his followers.

Then Muhayyisa wrote a poem that celebrates such obedience. “I would smite his [the elder brother’s] neck with a sharp sword, / A blade as white as salt from polishing. / My downward stroke never misses its mark.” Advancing religious violence, these lines in the poem show how deadly poetry could be, and they match the Muslim’s poem against Abu Afak (no. 4, above): “a hanif gave you a thrust in the night.” Kab’s poem, it should be recalled, was far milder. These poems that a Westerner reads in the early Islamic source are jarring. It seems the early Muslim authors of the documents relish inserting them into their books.

Source: Ibn Ishaq p. 369 / 534.

July-August 625: A One-eyed Bedouin

In revenge for an ambush on some Muslim missionaries, Muhammad sent Amr bin Umayya and a companion to assassinate Abu Sufyan, a leader of the Meccans. This shows that the prophet could get caught up in the cycle of violence that went on endlessly in seventh-century Arab culture. Umayyah failed in his attempt, and he had to flee under pursuit, hiding in a cave, murdering a man named Ibn Malik along the way. As the pursuit was dying down, a tall, one-eyed, unnamed Bedouin entered the cave, driving some sheep. Umayyah and the Bedouin introduced each other. After they settled down, the shepherd sang a simple two-line song in defiance of Muslims and Islam:

I will not be a Muslim as long as I live,
And will not believe in the faith of the Muslims.

[trans: Watt]

Another translation reads:

I won’t be a Muslim as long as I live,
Nor heed to their religion give.

[trans: Guillaume]

Unfortunately for this Bedouin, he was in the cave with a radical Muslim, who said: “You will soon see!” The Bedouin fell asleep, snoring. Umayyah recounts what he did:

… “I went to him and killed him in the most dreadful way that anybody has ever been killed. I leaned over him, stuck the end of my bow into his good eye, and thrust it down until it came out of the back of his neck.”

He fled back to Muhammad, who said, “Well done!” The account ends: The prophet “prayed for me [Umayyah] to be blessed.”

This poor shepherd’s only sin was to compose a little two-line ditty against Islam. Therefore, he was assassinated, with the blessing of Muhammad—the prophet did not arrest the assassin or even scold him for killing a man who had nothing to do with the ambush.

Source: Tabari, vol. 7, pp. 149-50 / 1440-41; A later editor incorporated some of Tabari’s account into Ibn Ishaq’s biography, pp. 674-75.

After January 630: close call for Abdullah bin Sad

Before 10,000 Muslim warriors entered Mecca in January 630, Muhammad ordered that they should kill only those who resisted, except a small number who should be hunted down even if they hid under the curtain of the Kabah stone. One of them was Abdullah, an original Emigrant with the prophet in 622. He had the high privilege of writing down some verses of the Quran, after Muhammad received them by revelation. Doubting, Abdullah on occasion would change the words around to see if Muhammad had noticed the changes, but he did not. W. Montgomery Watt provides an example: “When Muhammad dictated a phrase of the Quran such as sami‘ ‘alim, ‘Hearing, Knowing’ (with reference to God), he had written, for example, ‘alim hakim ‘Knowing, Wise,’ and Muhammad had not noticed the change” … (Muhammad at Medina, Oxford UP, 1956, p. 68). Abdullah therefore disbelieved Muhammad’s inspiration and apostatized (left Islam) and returned to Mecca a polytheist.

However, his foster-brother was Uthman b. Affan, one of Muhammad’s Companions, who hid Abdullah until calm settled on conquered Mecca and who interceded for Abdullah, in the presence of Muhammad. The prophet waited a long time before he granted the repentant apostate immunity. After Uthman left, Muhammad said to those sitting around him: “I kept silent so that one of you might get up and strike off his head!” One of them asked why Muhammad did not give them a signal. He answered that a prophet does not kill by pointing.

Though Abdullah escaped with his life, this story is included because it reveals Muhammad’s attitude toward apostates, because of the doubt of one of Muhammad’s followers – a literate scholar who was involved in writing down the revelations, and because Muhammad’s anger could be assuaged under the right conditions.

Source: Ibn Ishaq, p. 550 / 818.

After January 630: One of Abdullah bin Katal’s two singing-girls

On the list of those excluded from amnesty after the conquest of Mecca was not only Abdullah b. Katal, collector of legal alms, who had killed his slave for incompetence, apostatized, and took the money back to Mecca, but also his two singing-girls who sang satirical verses about Muhammad, which Abdullah had composed. He was killed, even though he was clinging to the curtain of the Kabah shrine. And one of the girls was also killed, but the other ran away until she asked for pardon from Muhammad, who forgave her.

Source: Bukhari vol. 4, 3044; Ibn Ishaq, pp. 550-51 / 819.

After February 630: close call for Kab bin Zuhayr

Confident with the victory over Mecca, Muhammad returned to Medina a hero and firmly in charge of the southwest of the Arabian Peninsula. In this context we come to another poet who satirized Muhammad and the Muslims, Kab bin Zuhayr (called Zuhayr to distinguish him from Kab bin al-Ashraf, above, no. 5). Zuhayr’s brother wrote him that Muhammad had killed a number of satirical poets during his conquest of Mecca, but that the prophet would forgive a poet who came to him in repentance, which really means becoming a Muslim. His brother told him that the poets who were left had fled in all directions. “If you have any use for your life, then come to the apostle [Muhammad] quickly, for he does not kill anyone who comes to him in repentance,” wrote the brother, continuing: “if you do not do that, then get to a safe place.”

However, Zuhayr responded with a poem that says their fathers and father had never held Islam dear, so why should he change? His brother replied with a poem of warning of his own; if he would not repent, then Zuhayr will be guilty on Judgment Day. Poetry penetrated deeply in Arab culture, and, receiving the letter, Zuhayr was distressed until finally he gave in. Finding no way out, he wrote a letter extolling Muhammad. Soon afterwards, he traveled up to Medina to ask for security as a Muslim. Muhammad was saying his morning prayers, and a friend took Zuhayr into Muhammad’s presence. “Would you accept him as such if he came to you?” his friend asked. The prophet said he would.

One of the Ansars (or helpers: native Medinans who offered help to Muhammad after his Hijrah) leaped upon Zuhayr and asked the prophet if he could behead the enemy of God, for some of Zuhayr’s verses mocked the Ansars, too. The apostle said to leave him alone, for Zuhayr was breaking free from his past. The implication is clear: if Muhammad had caught Zuhayr before his repentance, Muhammad would have allowed him to be beheaded. Either he converts or he dies—for writing derogatory poetry. What is remarkable about the anecdote is how the morning prayer provides the setting for a Muslim leaping on a poet and threatening to cut his head off, as if this is an ordinary day and act.

Source: Ibn Ishaq, pp. 597-602 / 887-93.

given that the board of deputies and, by the looks of it, the community as a whole, has withdrawn cooperation with the programme, as it was clearly interpreted as a hatchet job, the same way that “the root of all evil?” was – tendentiously edited and, wherever possible, using extreme examples as if they were the norm. of course whenever the jewish community was mentioned, it was invariably accompanied by a shot of someone strictly orthodox – small boys with giant peyot, or behatted, abundantly bearded, penguinish yeshiva bochurs staring through bottle-top glasses. as we all know, all jews look just like that.

the jewish community yesterday, apparently

a salient example was that of the british humanist society researcher pulling out the “shocking” example of the jewish school that does 8 hours of “religious education” a week compared to 6 hours of science. i wonder which school it was? they didn’t say if it was a mainstream united synagogue school or a strictly-orthodox school, of course.

what the anti-faith-schoolers don’t seem to get is that in this “8 hours of religious education”, they’re *not teaching theology* or “how to be unscientific” – they’re teaching practical skills of language, textual analysis and interpretation. in this sense, the correct analogy is not between a “faith school” and a “secular school”, but between a “specialist school” and a “generalist school” – i don’t see dawkins jumping all over sylvia young because her schools devote 10 hours+ a week to performing arts compared to 6 hours of national curriculum science. these kids need to PRACTICE – and so do religious kids, whether they’re learning Qu’ran or Torah or gita or granth. most religion – and this is an area where the preponderance of christianity in this country distorts the debate – requires considerable grasp of both practical techniques and core knowledge, in the same way that you’d expect a specialist technology college to spend extra time on programming languages to an level of detail not matchable by a specialist modern languages college.

anyway, stereotypes apart, like most of the jewish people (and christians and muslims) i know, religious or not, faithschoolers or not, i do struggle with whether we’re doing enough to encourage critical thinking. and i think it is worth mentioning that, in my opinion, in general, we’re not, which is part of the reason that the kiruv and dawah organisations which are, as far as i’m concerned, the vanguard of clerical fascism, are gaining ground. whether pro- or anti- people don’t know enough about religion to make informed choices and, as a result, many are either accepting it for badly-thought-through, poorly-rationalised reasons, or seeking to have it eliminated for equally misguided reasons. there isn’t a strong enough voice saying that you can be both traditionally religious and a clear, critical thinker, or that even though you don’t believe something yourself you still think it has a role to play. and, in point of fact, i don’t hand over the programming of my kids’ minds to their school, to teach them “the correct way” to think, that has to be my responsibility as a parent as well. part of the problem with the faith schools debate, it seems to me, is that focusing on theology and the problems with critical thinking misses why faith schools are really needed – it isn’t to teach them to “think correctly”, it is to teach them the skills to live in that particular community, which are time-consuming to learn, the same way as if you wanted to grow up to be an orchestra player, you’d need to go to music lessons and spend a lot of extra time practicing in order to be able to perform to the required standard. because christianity does not, generally, require these sorts of skills (say, for example, latin and greek, or scholastic argumentation) it is a lot harder to say how they clearly add value, other than that by all the motivated parents competing to get in increases the performance of the school – i think it might in fact be just another variety of the hawthorn effect.

getting back to the main point about the critical thinking deficit, however, i think a major part of critical thinking is the ability to debate with people of differing opinions. this, i feel, is typified by the current debate over free speech and offence. i analyse the issue and i see a continuum, starting with unintentional offence, going through intentional offence, through harassment to ultimately incitement to violence. it seems to me the debate is currently polarised between those who see all offence as tantamount to incitement to violence and those who see even incitement to violence as merely an expression of free speech. considering the vehemence with which my religion and ethnicity is attacked by the former and their apparent inability to comprehend the continuum connection, one might think that i would go to that opposite extreme – as indeed i have been accused of many times, when pointing out instances of jew-hatred and being told i was merely being hysterical. in fact, i am naturally far closer to faisal’s espousal of the “fry/hitchens standard”, if you like – “so you’re offended? so fecking what?”, as i believe in free speech. my difficulty is where the line should be drawn, which needs a far more nuanced perception than i can currently bring to the debate.

an excellent example of the challenges of critical thinking is currently being debated at harry’s place and elsewhere in this intellectual neighbourhood of the blogosphere between edmund standing and others:

“why would anyone want to take books that manifestly do make assertions about ultimate reality and give clear commands about how humans should behave, the punishments they should incur for thinking or behaving differently, and so on, and then delude themselves and others into thinking that actually those books don’t say what they clearly do say, or attempt to ‘reinterpret’ those books in a way obviously at variance with their intended meaning?”

in other words, if someone says “kill the bastards”, he means “kill the bastards”, not “engage them in debate” – and you should take that statement at face value. the trouble is, mr standing, that *isn’t the way we do it in judaism* (and, i would argue, not the way many people do it in islam) – we take challenging statements like that as a jumping off point, assuming that there is more to the basic statement than meets the eye. it is, for us, clearly established by the talmudic debate about the “oven of akhnai” (BT baba metzia 59b) that human interpretation has the power to overrule a “voice from the heavens”, but our *authority* to do this is derived from the Torah’s plain meaning: “it is not in heaven” (deuteronomy 30) – in other words, that it is for us to interpret how the Text should be interpreted, that’s how it’s designed in the first place, not as an instruction manual free from ambiguity. jewish texts are based on cardinal principles of interpretative methodology and it is understanding how these work that constitutes a large part of the training that jewish children undergo when they are understanding their texts. i would go so far as to say that you can see the difference between people with this training and people without it is abundantly evident from the attitudes of, say, your average bible-belt christian and those of your averagely educated student of jewish law – the latter would not consider carrying out a punishment from leviticus, or even suggesting that it should be carried out as stated in the plain text without the full range of checks, balances and protective safeguards detailed in hundreds of folio pages of Talmud, commentaries and halakhah, under the precise circumstances in which such conditions apply. yet what some people seem to object to is interpretations based on simplistic misunderstandings. the objection then is:

“We don’t look at the work of medieval cartographers and then try to ‘reinterpret’ their maps so they fit with modern understandings of geography.”

well, no, but this isn’t a physical phenomenon here, it’s a legal framework, so its application is always going to be a matter of interpretation. i really don’t see what’s so hard to understand about that – but nonetheless, i don’t see an authoritative argument being made in return for the benefit of those who might not understand why interpretation is important; G!D Forbid, someone might think that that’s what those texts actually mean, or that G!D actually Wants us to behave like bronze age maniacs, when nothing could be further from the truth.

r. jonathan sacks once said, in conversation with john humphrys i believe, that the Torah seeks to teach us to learn to think for ourselves; initially, like a parent, G!D Chastises us and then Picks us up – but there is an expectation that we learn, over time, to pick ourselves up and eventually, not to fall over in the first place. i would argue that developing critical thinking is a salient example of precisely that and that the Commandment to do so is itself a Divine Mandate – so objections such as this:

“In every other area of human thought and writing, we turn to the latest, most advanced ideas, not to the primitive ideas of men of the past.”

should be shown as the red herrings they are. of course, this objection is foreseen:

“There is absolutely no rational basis for ‘reinterpreting’ ancient texts to make them appear relevant to today, nor any objective criteria for how this should be carried out, or to what extent such texts should be ‘liberally’ reinterpreted.”

but why should such criteria be objective? do we demand objective criteria against which to measure the Torah? do we demand that the world be judged against the Torah’s criteria? no, we do not – by the Torah’s own command. nor do we always demand a “liberal” interpretation. the point is that the giants of Torah throughout history to the modern era have always provided for the best of modernity to be understood, whether as “the wisdom of the nations” or as “Torah and wisdom”, but this perspective is in danger from the tendency to look inwards, to assume we have all the answers, from fear and suspicion of the outside world. simply to assert that “it’s not a valid question”, or that “it comes from an impure source” is not going to cut it in the long-term, whether or not you’re able to control the sources of people’s knowledge; and, if this is what is sought, it is both immoral and contrary to the justice that the Torah commands us in the most emphatic terms to pursue.

we need to understand and respond to these questions and attacks as a bona fide challenge, as if they were asked in an open-minded way – because regardless of whether the people conducting the public polemic are open-minded or not, similar questions will always be asked from “inside the camp” – and not to be able to address them effectively will prove the case of the public polemicists.

Blaming Islam for practices such as female circumcision, they claim, is the equivalent of blaming feminism for domestic violence – it is linking totally unrelated phenomena. Again, the absence of a critical analysis of the tradition is striking, and there is no answer to the question of why, if Islam offers women a bill of rights, it has not liberated more women. The point, they reply, is that male chauvinism and its bid to control women exists the world over; it simply takes different forms, and when women are educated and know what Islam really means, they can fight back.

But what if the religious texts (Qur’an, Sunnah and exegeses) themselves have provided Muslim men with the religious justification for suppressing women.

The video above attempts to identify problematic content from the primary texts which may have done just that.

Muslims claim that the Islam freed the woman and gave her more rights. Many modern Muslims also claim that Islam is often misunderstood by both non-Muslims and by the fundamentalists. This Documentary shows historical facts from Islamic scripture (Qur’an, Sunnah and exegeses) explaining the woman’s role her rights in Islam

“Do Anglicans, even moderates, really think of G!D as a sexless being? I was under the impression that most moderate religious people still think of G!D as male. People could use the singular ‘they’ and refer to a ‘parent’ if they were really that bothered.”

i think she could with some justice aim this question at judaism, but it is, nonetheless, a bit of an old chestnut. the best way i can answer it is that in the same way that we deal with anthropomorphism in the text: G!D Isn’t male any more than G!D Has a “hand”, or a “back”, G!D Forbid. when the Text speaks in these terms, it is only to be understood as the way *we* understand the interaction, not the *actual reality* – hence, when we speak of G!D as “Father” or “King”, these are merely the interactions and relevant relationships that are being described, not the Ultimate Reality of the Divine. by the same token, a number of incredibly important Divine Names and interaction/relationships are *female*, such as “E-L ShaDaY”, which comes from the word ShaDaYiM (breasts) and “Ha-RaHaMaN”, which comes the word ReHeM (womb), not to mention the considerable symbology of the Divine Feminine in kabbalah around the SheKhiNaH (Divine Presence) and “Matronit” and the male-female interrelationships actually *within* the G!DHead. one might also mention the idea that the “community of israel” is synonymous with G!D’s “bride” on some level, so that would require one of us to be “male” and the other “female” in that particular situation.

“And then there’s Jesus – no-one could lead themselves to believe he was genderless. Judaism has Moses, Islam has Mohammed – all these prophets are male. How does a person get around that one?”

perhaps by mentioning the seven major jewish prophetesses, sarah, miriam, deborah, hannah, abigail, huldah and esther – (talmudic reference: BT megillah 14a)? according to the great authority rashi, rebecca, rachel and leah should also be included.

a more serious criticism, i believe, is the following:

“If one accepts and follows traditions without question purely on the basis that they are traditions, this leaves the door wide open for all kinds of nasty things. In general, it silences and disables those who disagree with the traditions and would like to do things differently. It’s those ‘harmless’ traditions which can make people feel stifled and like there’s only one right way to do things. At the very least, they discourage creativity, critical thinking and independence.”

this is certainly a position with which we at the spittoon can identify – certainly within judaism (and, i and others would argue, within islam as well) the idea that there is One True Way Of Doing Stuff is a corrosive and oppressive idea not borne out by a truly insightful examination of the texts involved. however, the accompanying analysis is flawed:

“One can usually assess how harmless a tradition is by examining what the penalties are, if any, of not following it. In your example, I would imagine that a Jewish/Muslim pork-eater would face many negative reactions from their community, plus residual religious guilt, and that this is probably the real reason why they ‘like following the tradition’.”

now, this might be a perfectly adequate summary of how the uneducated “feel” about the law in question, in fact, the penalty in halakhah is the indication of exactly how important the principle incurring the penalty is in the first place. in fact, halakhically, the penalty is thirty-nine lashes, a comparatively light penalty compared to breaking shabbat, which is a stoning offence. now, before you get all bent out of shape on how unpleasant it is to get lashed, you’d have to also consider the standard of evidence, which required five further tests before the lashes could be administered:

1. the pork-eating in question would have to be done in front of two kosher witnesses (many, many difficulties in establishing what one of these looks like)
2. the two witnesses would need to have absolutely no discrepancy in their statements.
3. the pork-eater would have to receive a warning from the witnesses that by so doing, he would incur a penalty of lashes.
4. the pork-eater would have to respond that he had understood the warning and the penalty, reiterating precisely what they both were.
5. the eating would then have to occur within 3 seconds of this response.

incidentally, to be binding, the verdict would also have to be handed down by a properly constituted and duly authorised religious court – and there hasn’t been such a court for approximately 1500 years, but considering the re-establishment of such courts is a religious duty, i personally would prefer to rely on the other safeguards. even so, i hope you can see from the standard required that anyone who actually meets it is clearly out to make a point. oh, and, incidentally, if you ran away before the verdict was carried out, you couldn’t be re-arrested. in such a case, the negative feeling from your community is likely to be the only sanction.

another interesting challenge is made here:

“To what extent, for a religious person, is their holy book really their holy book, if they disregard most of its teachings (or haven’t even read it all the way through)?”

for jews, as we were born into a covenantal relationship, we are as subject to it as to the laws of the country we were born into. the same obtains with UK law. presumably amy’s not suggesting that i’m not obliged to follow the regulations of her majesty’s revenue collectors despite the fact that i may never have read them or heard of their provisions? by the same token:

“To align oneself with a movement, an organisation, that one disagrees with at least in part, knowing that in doing so you are giving it power – numbers at least, and in many cases, money too?”

i am not sure how this is different from being a citizen of a country whose policies you may or may not agree with – you’ve still got to pay your taxes.

as part of this discussion, i analysed deuteronomy 22:29 in its context. this provoked a number of further responses including:

“Regarding the Deuteronomy verse (22:29), it says that ’she shall be his wife, because he hath humbled her’ – humbled? That’s rather chilling, no? Is that a mistranslation too?”

not only that, but it is also misrepresenting what the text says, which is ‘AiNah” – “forced”, but not in a *physically* violent way, as in verse 25, more in such a way as to give her no choice but to marry him. i would say that this represents bringing about a marriage by “putting the woman in a compromising position”; if you know pride and prejudice, it’s what wickham does to lydia bennet to get money out of the family; he has to be bribed to marry her. the Torah is trying here to prevent the woman becoming unmarriageable; there is nothing to say that she can’t *then* divorce *him* (after betrothal and before final marriage), thus retaining her autonomy and a hefty divorce payout; it is just that *he* is forever prevented from divorcing *her*, not the other way around. i would understand this verse as a face-saving exercise.

amy then goes on to say:

“Regardless of whether rape occurred or it was ‘just sex’, isn’t it a bit sexist to generally suggest that it’s okay to buy a woman in this way?”

now, i’m not sure you can really project your attitude back to the bronze age as if human values and relationships have always been the same; i mean, that is the same sort of point of view that would reduce shakespeare’s “merchant of venice” to simple antisemitism. the initial audience of the Torah (as opposed to G!D) wouldn’t really understand what you’re getting at here. the thing is, you aren’t “buying a woman”; you’re contracting for procreative services, as it were, which can only be done by ensuring exclusivity on the woman’s part. the woman must enter into the contract without coercion and of her own free will and can exit it at her discretion on virtually any grounds (including bad breath) and is, for the duration of the contracted marriage, entitled to a statutory level of maintenance (and alimony), clothing, housing and sexual satisfaction, breach of which by the husband is, needless to say, grounds for divorce. this quite simply was revolutionary within the context in which the Torah was given; not only in that the woman had to agree, but that she maintained her rights, her property and right of cancellation. in fact, it compares positively to modern civil law in most respects – most people agree that merely falling in love is a rather worse basis for marriage than shared values and clear responsibilities on both sides! both sides contribute assets – the wife’s contribution is *not* a dowry, but her reproductive capabilities, hence:

“(Following your interpretation, it’s a bit like having to pay for something you broke in a shop – fair enough if it’s a vase, but a person? Why does having sex make you a broken person?)”

well, it doesn’t, nor is this implied, although permit me to observe, tongue-in-cheek, that most of us would pay more for new underpants than for second-hand. the statutory levels, in any case, are nominal – in reality, these would in the past have been negotiated, in the case of a woman who had emancipated herself from her father (or previous husband by divorce or widowhood) possibly by the woman herself. and there’s more:

“If God is a supremely knowledgeable being, with ultimate powers, and is perfectly good and moral, why couldn’t he send a clear message – even in the bronze age – that women are people, not property?”

the same reason that G!D also didn’t send the clear message “don’t drive on the wrong side of the road” – it wouldn’t have made sense at the time, only now. the clarity would in fact have been precisely the opposite.

“What stopped him from telling these citizens in no uncertain terms that it’s okay for women to have sex, they don’t have to be virgins until they’re married, and it’s not right to buy and sell them?”

the fact that this wasn’t a student dorm at berkeley, it was bronze age canaan – and if you hopped behind a bush with someone, you’d be liable to end up with your throat slit, or sold into slavery, thus precipitating a blood feud; it wasn’t like there was a police force and cctv; this was the wild fecking west! people took what they could get and, like it or not, if a woman didn’t have protection from a father, guardian or husband, she might be fair game, unless she stayed within the protection of the law. to be honest, this feels somewhat anachronistic reasoning, based on a very different axiomatic substructure, as the following statement identifies:

“I find it quite convenient that you’re explaining away misogyny as mistranslation, and contradictions as just not knowing the ‘right’ context of the verses in question. You seem to be taking it as your a priori assumption that there can’t possibly be any real inconsistency in the texts, there can’t possibly be any real misogyny. Why not? Why can’t there be?”

the answer to this is that if, axiomatically, one believes, as i do, that the Torah is a Divine document, any inconsistency in the texts is there to teach us something and the basis of traditional methodologies is the ability to identify the root cause of the inconsistency in order to illustrate the teaching point concerned. this has certainly been our approach as long as we can remember -and, more to the point, this is documented quite a long way back. secondly, in the conception we have of G!D it would make no more sense for G!D to Be a “misogynist” than it would for G!D to have a “hand”, or to “be angry”; these things are simply expressions of how we experience what we interpret out of the text. we believe that G!D Expects us to behave with respect and compassion to each other, not to systematically disadvantage half the human race. now, obviously, if you have different assumptions, then these might include a priori that any statement in the Torah reflects bronze age sensibility and capability in terms of gender relations, science and critical reasoning and therefore there can’t possibly be any real lessons to be learned from it. on this i suspect i might have to differ from you, seeing as how our culture is based almost entirely on this document and in most respects is generally considered to have produced major leaders in each field who are also committed to some of the same assumptions about the document. this is not to say that they are all going to agree with each other all the time:

“Why is your ‘methodology’ necessarily going to result in a clear, unequivocal message?”

because it is based on a clear set of assumptions and underpinned by a unified philosophical structure – i’m not saying that this necessitates clarity and unequivocable messaging in all cases, because it doesn’t, but in the case of this particular verse, it clearly precludes certain interpretations such as “G!D Is a misogynist” as nonsensical. there are some other pertinent questions that obtain:

“On what do you base your faith in it?”

on the fact that this way of doing things has preserved the sole remaining diaspora culture of the ancient world through several millennia of unremitting and occasionally genocidal hostility. in other words, it works.

“How do you know that the eventual interpretation is right, in any case?”

the principle we test it against is “after the majority shall you incline” (exodus 23:2) but we *also* preserve minority opinions (BT bava metzia 59b) in case eventually they become majority.

“What do you check it against?”

it’s peer-reviewed. all jewish law has been aggressively picked apart, analysed, defended or amended on this basis. that is what the talmud documents.

“Then you say that two contradictory positions can both be the word of the ‘living god’? How is that even possible – how can a creator of the universe not make his mind up?”

of course – but “it is not in heaven” (deuteronomy 30:10), so we are told we have to work it out for ourselves, on the authority of the Torah itself, so the majority opinion came down on one side at that time. G!D may well Have an opinion, but in the famous talmudic debate of the “oven of achnai” (the reference given above) the majority decision was to say “bugger off, G!D, this is a human decision now, You Said so in the Torah”.

“Not be 100% clear about his message? Do you not find it slightly odd that all this interpretation is necessary?”

no, we find it incredibly empowering that we are being treated like grown-ups responsible for our own actions, not children with no sense of right or wrong.

“Why doesn’t God reiterate his message and clear things up? Hasn’t he got the power to do this?”

well, yes, obviously, but during the “oven of achnai” debate, the position of the majority was “we do not make legal decisions on the basis of Divine Voices from Heaven”.

we still haven’t quite got to the bottom of the equality debate here, however:

“When I talk about a sense of equality, I am talking about equality between men and women – e.g. what is it that leads you to know that stoning a woman to death for not being a virgin is wrong? Would you only know that it’s wrong if you’d read all the scriptures? Or would you know that it’s wrong based on your own empathy and reasoning? I would argue the latter, seeing as I know it’s wrong, and I haven’t read all the scriptures or engaged in textual interpretation.”

i would argue that the case that you are basing it on your own “empathy and reasoning” alone is not a strong argument. nobody grows up in a vacuum. you have these attitudes because you developed them, based on your upbringing. i would argue that you *have* been influenced indirectly by them because they have influenced the society you grew up in. i can even point to the bit of Torah that it comes from: “you shall love the stranger [person who is different from yourself] for you were strangers in egypt” (leviticus 19:34) nor am i saying that my own reasoning is inoperative – obviously, i needed to use it to apply the verse to this situation, similarly the sages needed to apply it in order to get the relevant safeguards in place to prevent it happening unless it really, really, really, REALLY applied. if you’re going to do something as drastic as stoning a woman to death for not being a virgin, you’d better be really sure that’s what the text says – and that what the text says applies to this EXACT situation.

“This is what I’m talking about. A religious person reads such a horrendous verse, thinks ‘That can’t be right’ and proceeds to delve more deeply into the scriptures to find some way of justifying it.”

i don’t really understand why this should be so wrong – it is the way the Torah does thought experiments; under what circumstances might such a penalty apply? what might justify it in *practice*? are you sure? are you really, really sure? what principle is being upheld? that’s not the same as “justifying” it – you can’t be “justifying” it if you end up effectively prohibiting it, which was the actual effect – but then again, you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t know the proper context for Torah, which is as the written component of jewish law, not as a copy of “gender relations for dummies”, which is how it is so often abused by literalist protestants and bible-bashers in particular.

“I doubt that a person starts reading scriptures and then concludes ‘Well whaddaya know? Stoning women is immoral!’”

i agree – and so do the sages! although there are more morally complex issues in the Torah than this one.

amy is also good enough to address a criticism i make of her that she is generalising about religious people:

“Sure, not all religious people follow their religion in exactly the same way, but they do believe in a god/gods, and their holy texts do mean something to them. These are the two aspects of religion that I critique in my piece, and they appear to me to be pretty universal among the faithful. The rest is a critique of the arguments used by religious feminists to defend the misogyny in their holy texts, and examples of religiously-inspired misogyny. What is it that I’m generalising about? What is it exactly that you object to?”

well, i suppose what i object to is the implication that religious feminists are “defending misogyny”, because as i have attempted to show, i don’t think the misogyny is there either in intent or in application – except by people who really don’t understand either the text concerned, or who don’t follow an acceptable standard of textual interpretation. i accept that it *could* result in misogyny, because it *has* – but human beings do get things wrong from time to time and Torah is not easy.

anyway, i hope this is not too irrelevant and that there are enough interesting nuggets here for the conversation to continue here; certainly i would encourage people to take a look at the original piece.

king messiah, or ex-parrot?

of course, the official chabad line on this is that they’re not in fact messianic and that messianic chabadniks are a small minority. some would beg to disagree. in fact, the jc offers a piece of analysis from my very favourite mainstream wiseacre, the egregious rabbi yitzhak “marry a jew” shochet, to show why the precise formulation of the affirmation demanded by the rca offers ample opportunity for a bit of hasidic taqqiyah. r. shochet, of course, is the  best friend of every parent in the matilda marks primary school catchment area, whose appallingly smug and arrogant “ask the rabbi” column in the jewish news, the cause of much friday night swearing in the bananabrain household, was memorably and accurately caricatured on the satirical jewdas website (not something i generally endorse, however).

the amusing thing is, of course, that r. shochet’s analysis appears to rest not upon the fidgy-widginess of whether chabad can sign up to the non-messianic affirmation required in good conscience, or not, but upon the contention that:

“Allegiance to the “Thirteen Principles of the Faith” does not matter, and all the serious problems afflicting Jews and Judaism are not of primary concern. They are not as important, and will not provide the headlines, as inventing and prosecuting alleged heresies. This is certainly an intriguing agenda for a rabbinical organisation.”

can we now expect r. shochet to drop his long-standing objection to the non-orthodox communities, whose non-adherence to the thirteen principles is generally considered as indicative of their heretical status? in fact, can we now look forward to a proper debate on the misappropriation of maimonidean dogmatic theology by the guardians of “Torah judaism”? is he prepared to have an honest look at whether maimonides actually meant what modern orthodoxies of every stripe say he meant, given that his positions aroused astonishing controversy at the time and were themselves condemned numerous times for heresy? can we now expect the united synagogue to cease prosecuting the non-orthodox movements for their “alleged heresies”?

i doubt it – but we shouldn’t let our antipathy to chabad stand in the way of hypocrisy, should we?

the latest halachic ruling banning the use of elevators on the Sabbath shocked residents of the Tovei Ha’Ir retirement home in Jerusalem.

Most residents at this institution, which caters to the religious and ultra-Orthodox, received news of the rabbinical edict with indifference.

Tovei Ha’Ir residents have been using elevators on the Sabbath for years – this is the only way they can get from their rooms on the upper floors to the dining hall and synagogue. 
  
One of the retirees, a Haredi man, barely concealed his sarcasm when he responded, “What changed suddenly? What was kosher until now is suddenly treyf?”

if you’re not familiar with the concept of a shabbat elevator, it’s basically a way of using a lift without pressing buttons. this, according to many people, both jewish and non-jewish, is what is known as “cheating”. personally, i disagree with that position, as i believe G!D Wants us to use our brains and work within the system that was Revealed to us at sinai and if this means our ingenuity allows us to exploit loopholes, then as it says in the famous story of the “oven of achnai“, i believe G!D Laughs: “My children have defeated Me“. anyway, as far as i’m concerned, if you start making the sabbath into a total pain in the arse, then that can only lead to contempt for Torah and halakhah – and rabbinical teaching. when will these people learn to deal with those of us that don’t live in their box? what on earth are they thinking? do they want us to end up like the kara’ites, sitting in the dark on shabbat because we can’t use timeswitches?

AAARRGHH. what a way to start the new year. the only glimmer of light is that what passes in the haredi world for rumblings of plausible deniability and discontent may yet have begun…

Ten years ago, this cover story in The Atlantic caused quite a stir. It revealed, researchers were proposing new theories about Islam’s holy book and Islamic history to reinterpret Islam for the modern world.

I believe Muslims will be well served if they read this essay rather than burn it. We do not have to agree with the findings, but we need to know how academia views the Muslim holy book.

Read and reflect.

Tarek
—————-

January 1999

Toby Lester

The Atlantic Monthly

IN 1972, during the restoration of the Great Mosque of Sana’a, in Yemen, laborers working in a loft between the structure’s inner and outer roofs stumbled across a remarkable gravesite, although they did not realize it at the time. Their ignorance was excusable: mosques do not normally house graves, and this site contained no tombstones, no human remains, no funereal jewellery.

It contained nothing more, in fact, than an unappealing mash of old parchment and paper documents—damaged books and individual pages of Arabic text, fused together by centuries of rain and dampness, gnawed into over the years by rats and insects. Intent on completing the task at hand, the laborers gathered up the manuscripts, pressed them into some twenty potato sacks, and set them aside on the staircase of one of the mosque’s minarets, where they were locked away—and where they would probably have been forgotten once again, were it not for Qadhi Isma’il al-Akwa’, then the president of the Yemeni Antiquities Authority, who realized the potential importance of the find.

Al-Akwa’ sought international assistance in examining and preserving the fragments, and in 1979 managed to interest a visiting German scholar, who in turn persuaded the German government to organize and fund a restoration project. Soon after the project began, it became clear that the hoard was a fabulous example of what is sometimes referred to as a “paper grave”—in this case the resting place for, among other things, tens of thousands of fragments from close to a thousand different parchment codices of the Koran, the Muslim holy scripture.

In some pious Muslim circles it is held that worn-out or damaged copies of the Koran must be removed from circulation; hence the idea of a grave, which both preserves the sanctity of the texts being laid to rest and ensures that only complete and unblemished editions of the scripture will be read.

Some of the parchment pages in the Yemeni hoard seemed to date back to the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., or Islam’s first two centuries—they were fragments, in other words, of perhaps the oldest Korans in existence.

What’s more, some of these fragments revealed small but intriguing aberrations from the standard Koranic text. Such aberrations, though not surprising to textual historians, are troublingly at odds with the orthodox Muslim belief that the Koran as it has reached us today is quite simply the perfect, timeless, and unchanging Word of God.

The mainly secular effort to reinterpret the Koran—in part based on textual evidence such as that provided by the Yemeni fragments—is disturbing and offensive to many Muslims, just as attempts to reinterpret the Bible and the life of Jesus are disturbing and offensive to many conservative Christians.

Nevertheless, there are scholars, Muslims among them, who feel that such an effort, which amounts essentially to placing the Koran in history, will provide fuel for an Islamic revival of sorts—a reappropriation of tradition, a going forward by looking back. Thus far confined to scholarly argument, this sort of thinking can be nonetheless very powerful and—as the histories of the Renaissance and the Reformation demonstrate—can lead to major social change. The Koran, after all, is currently the world’s most ideologically influential text.

Looking at the Fragments

THE first person to spend a significant amount of time examining the Yemeni fragments, in 1981, was Gerd-R. Puin, a specialist in Arabic calligraphy and Koranic paleography based at Saarland University, in Saarbrücken, Germany. Puin, who had been sent by the German government to organize and oversee the restoration project, recognized the antiquity of some of the parchment fragments, and his preliminary inspection also revealed unconventional verse orderings, minor textual variations, and rare styles of orthography and artistic embellishment.

Enticing, too, were the sheets of the scripture written in the rare and early Hijazi Arabic script: pieces of the earliest Korans known to exist, they were also palimpsests—versions very clearly written over even earlier, washed-off versions. What the Yemeni Korans seemed to suggest, Puin began to feel, was an evolving text rather than simply the Word of God as revealed in its entirety to the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century A.D.

Since the early 1980s more than 15,000 sheets of the Yemeni Korans have painstakingly been flattened, cleaned, treated, sorted, and assembled; they now sit (“preserved for another thousand years,” Puin says) in Yemen’s House of Manuscripts, awaiting detailed examination. That is something the Yemeni authorities have seemed reluctant to allow, however. “They want to keep this thing low-profile, as we do too, although for different reasons,” Puin explains. “They don’t want attention drawn to the fact that there are Germans and others working on the Korans. They don’t want it made public that there is work being done at all, since the Muslim position is that everything that needs to be said about the Koran’s history was said a thousand years ago.”

To date just two scholars have been granted extensive access to the Yemeni fragments: Puin and his colleague H.-C. Graf von Bothmer, an Islamic-art historian also based at Saarland University. Puin and Von Bothmer have published only a few tantalizingly brief articles in scholarly publications on what they have discovered in the Yemeni fragments.

They have been reluctant to publish partly because until recently they were more concerned with sorting and classifying the fragments than with systematically examining them, and partly because they felt that the Yemeni authorities, if they realized the possible implications of the discovery, might refuse them further access. Von Bothmer, however, in 1997 finished taking more than 35,000 microfilm pictures of the fragments, and has recently brought the pictures back to Germany.

This means that soon Von Bothmer, Puin, and other scholars will finally have a chance to scrutinize the texts and to publish their findings freely—a prospect that thrills Puin. “So many Muslims have this belief that everything between the two covers of the Koran is just God’s unaltered word,” he says. “They like to quote the textual work that shows that the Bible has a history and did not fall straight out of the sky, but until now the Koran has been out of this discussion. The only way to break through this wall is to prove that the Koran has a history too. The Sana’a fragments will help us to do this.”

Puin is not alone in his enthusiasm. “The impact of the Yemeni manuscripts is still to be felt,” says Andrew Rippin, a professor of religious studies at the University of Calgary, who is at the forefront of Koranic studies today. “Their variant readings and verse orders are all very significant. Everybody agrees on that. These manuscripts say that the early history of the Koranic text is much more of an open question than many have suspected: the text was less stable, and therefore had less authority, than has always been claimed.”

Copyediting God

BY the standards of contemporary biblical scholarship, most of the questions being posed by scholars like Puin and Rippin are rather modest; outside an Islamic context, proposing that the Koran has a history and suggesting that it can be interpreted metaphorically are not radical steps. But the Islamic context—and Muslim sensibilities—cannot be ignored.

“To historicize the Koran would in effect delegitimize the whole historical experience of the Muslim community,” says R. Stephen Humphreys, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “The Koran is the charter for the community, the document that called it into existence. And ideally—though obviously not always in reality—Islamic history has been the effort to pursue and work out the commandments of the Koran in human life. If the Koran is a historical document, then the whole Islamic struggle of fourteen centuries is effectively meaningless.”

The orthodox Muslim view of the Koran as self-evidently the Word of God, perfect and inimitable in message, language, style, and form, is strikingly similar to the fundamentalist Christian notion of the Bible’s “inerrancy” and “verbal inspiration” that is still common in many places today. The notion was given classic expression only a little more than a century ago by the biblical scholar John William Burgon.

The Bible is none other than the voice of Him that sitteth upon the Throne! Every Book of it, every Chapter of it, every Verse of it, every word of it, every syllable of it … every letter of it, is the direct utterance of the Most High!

Not all the Christians think this way about the Bible, however, and in fact, as the Encyclopaedia of Islam (1981) points out, “the closest analogue in Christian belief to the role of the Kur’an in Muslim belief is not the Bible, but Christ.” If Christ is the Word of God made flesh, the Koran is the Word of God made text, and questioning its sanctity or authority is thus considered an outright attack on Islam—as Salman Rushdie knows all too well.

The prospect of a Muslim backlash has not deterred the critical-historical study of the Koran, as the existence of the essays in The Origins of the Koran (1998) demonstrate. Even in the aftermath of the Rushdie affair the work continues: In 1996 the Koranic scholar Günter Lüling wrote in The Journal of Higher Criticism about “the wide extent to which both the text of the Koran and the learned Islamic account of Islamic origins have been distorted, a deformation unsuspectingly accepted by Western Islamicists until now.”

In 1994 the journal Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam published a posthumous study by Yehuda D. Nevo, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, detailing seventh- and eighth-century religious inscriptions on stones in the Negev Desert which, Nevo suggested, pose “considerable problems for the traditional Muslim account of the history of Islam.”

That same year, and in the same journal, Patricia Crone, a historian of early Islam currently based at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, published an article in which she argued that elucidating problematic passages in the Koranic text is likely to be made possible only by “abandoning the conventional account of how the Qur’an was born.” And since 1991 James Bellamy, of the University of Michigan, has proposed in the Journal of the American Oriental Society a series of “emendations to the text of the Koran”—changes that from the orthodox Muslim perspective amount to copyediting God.

Crone is one of the most iconoclastic of these scholars. During the 1970s and 1980s she wrote and collaborated on several books—most notoriously, with Michael Cook, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World (1977)—that made radical arguments about the origins of Islam and the writing of Islamic history.

Among Hagarism‘s controversial claims were suggestions that the text of the Koran came into being later than is now believed (“There is no hard evidence for the existence of the Koran in any form before the last decade of the seventh century”); that Mecca was not the initial Islamic sanctuary (“[the evidence] points unambiguously to a sanctuary in north-west Arabia … Mecca was secondary”); that the Arab conquests preceded the institutionalization of Islam (“the Jewish messianic fantasy was enacted in the form of an Arab conquest of the Holy Land”); that the idea of the hijra, or the migration of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina in 622, may have evolved long after Muhammad died (“No seventh-century source identifies the Arab era as that of the hijra“); and that the term “Muslim” was not commonly used in early Islam (“There is no good reason to suppose that the bearers of this primitive identity called themselves ‘Muslims’ [but] sources do … reveal an earlier designation of the community [which] appears in Greek as ‘Magaritai’ in a papyrus of 642, and in Syriac as ‘Mahgre’ or ‘Mahgraye’ from as early as the 640s”).

Hagarism came under immediate attack, from Muslim and non-Muslim scholars alike, for its heavy reliance on hostile sources. (“This is a book,” the authors wrote, “based on what from any Muslim perspective must appear an inordinate regard for the testimony of infidel sources.”)

Crone and Cook have since backed away from some of its most radical propositions—such as, for example, that the Prophet Muhammad lived two years longer than the Muslim tradition claims he did, and that the historicity of his migration to Medina is questionable. But Crone has continued to challenge both Muslim and Western orthodox views of Islamic history. In Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (1987) she made a detailed argument challenging the prevailing view among Western (and some Muslim) scholars that Islam arose in response to the Arabian spice trade.

Gerd-R. Puin’s current thinking about the Koran’s history partakes of this contemporary revisionism. “My idea is that the Koran is a kind of cocktail of texts that were not all understood even at the time of Muhammad,” he says. “Many of them may even be a hundred years older than Islam itself. Even within the Islamic traditions there is a huge body of contradictory information, including a significant Christian substrate; one can derive a whole Islamic anti-history from them if one wants.”

Patricia Crone defends the goals of this sort of thinking. “The Koran is a scripture with a history like any other—except that we don’t know this history and tend to provoke howls of protest when we study it. Nobody would mind the howls if they came from Westerners, but Westerners feel deferential when the howls come from other people: who are you to tamper with their legacy? But we Islamicists are not trying to destroy anyone’s faith.”

Not everyone agrees with that assessment—especially since Western Koranic scholarship has traditionally taken place in the context of an openly declared hostility between Christianity and Islam. (Indeed, the broad movement in the West over the past two centuries to “explain” the East, often referred to as Orientalism, has in recent years come under fire for exhibiting similar religious and cultural biases.)

The Koran has seemed, for Christian and Jewish scholars particularly, to possess an aura of heresy; the nineteenth-century Orientalist William Muir, for example, contended that the Koran was one of “the most stubborn enemies of Civilisation, Liberty, and the Truth which the world has yet known.” Early Soviet scholars, too, undertook an ideologically motivated study of Islam’s origins, with almost missionary zeal: in the 1920s and in 1930 a Soviet publication titled Ateist ran a series of articles explaining the rise of Islam in Marxist-Leninist terms.

In Islam and Russia (1956), Ann K.S. Lambton summarized much of this work, and wrote that several Soviet scholars had theorized that “the motive force of the nascent religion was supplied by the mercantile bourgeoisie of Mecca and Medina”; that a certain S.P. Tolstov had held that “Islam was a social-religious movement originating in the slave-owning, not feudal, form of Arab society”; and that N.A. Morozov had argued that “until the Crusades Islam was indistinguishable from Judaism and … only then did it receive its independent character, while Muhammad and the first Caliphs are mythical figures.

“Morozov appears to have been a particularly flamboyant theorist: Lambton wrote that he also argued, in his book Christ (1930), that “in the Middle Ages Islam was merely an off-shoot of Arianism evoked by a meteorological event in the Red Sea area near Mecca.”

Not surprisingly, then, given the biases of much non-Islamic critical study of the Koran, Muslims are inclined to dismiss it outright. A particularly eloquent protest came in 1987, in the Muslim World Book Review, in a paper titled “Method Against Truth: Orientalism and Qur’anic Studies,” by the Muslim critic S. Parvez Manzoor. Placing the origins of Western Koranic scholarship in “the polemical marshes of medieval Christianity” and describing its contemporary state as a “cul-de-sac of its own making,” Manzoor orchestrated a complex and layered assault on the entire Western approach to Islam.

He opened his essay in a rage. The Orientalist enterprise of Qur’anic studies, whatever its other merits and services, was a project born of spite, bred in frustration and nourished by vengeance: the spite of the powerful for the powerless, the frustration of the “rational” towards the “superstitious” and the vengeance of the “orthodox” against the “non-conformist.”

At the greatest hour of his worldly-triumph, the Western man, coordinating the powers of the State, Church and Academia, launched his most determined assault on the citadel of Muslim faith. All the aberrant streaks of his arrogant personality—its reckless rationalism, its world-domineering phantasy and its sectarian fanaticism—joined in an unholy conspiracy to dislodge the Muslim Scripture from its firmly entrenched position as the epitome of historic authenticity and moral unassailability.

The ultimate trophy that the Western man sought by his dare-devil venture was the Muslim mind itself. In order to rid the West forever of the “problem” of Islam, he reasoned, Muslim consciousness must be made to despair of the cognitive certainty of the Divine message revealed to the Prophet. Only a Muslim confounded of the historical authenticity or doctrinal autonomy of the Qur’anic revelation would abdicate his universal mission and hence pose no challenge to the global domination of the West. Such, at least, seems to have been the tacit, if not the explicit, rationale of the Orientalist assault on the Qur’an.

Despite such resistance, Western researchers with a variety of academic and theological interests press on, applying modern techniques of textual and historical criticism to the study of the Koran. That a substantial body of this scholarship now exists is indicated by the recent decision of the European firm Brill Publishers—a long-established publisher of such major works as The Encyclopaedia of Islam and The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition—to commission the first-ever Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an.

Jane McAuliffe, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Toronto, and the general editor of the encyclopedia, hopes that it will function as a “rough analogue” to biblical encyclopedias and will be “a turn-of-the-millennium summative work for the state of Koranic scholarship.” Articles for the first part of the encyclopedia are currently being edited and prepared for publication later this year.

The Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an will be a truly collaborative enterprise, carried out by Muslims and non-Muslims, and its articles will present multiple approaches to the interpretation of the Koran, some of which are likely to challenge traditional Islamic views—thus disturbing many in the Islamic world, where the time is decidedly less ripe for a revisionist study of the Koran.

The plight of Nasr Abu Zaid, an unassuming Egyptian professor of Arabic who sits on the encyclopedia’s advisory board, illustrates the difficulties facing Muslim scholars trying to reinterpret their tradition.

THE Koran is a text, a literary text, and the only way to understand, explain, and analyze it is through a literary approach,” Abu Zaid says. “This is an essential theological issue.”

For expressing views like this in print—in essence, for challenging the idea that the Koran must be read literally as the absolute and unchanging Word of God—Abu Zaid was in 1995 officially branded an apostate, a ruling that in 1996 was upheld by Egypt’s highest court. The court then proceeded, on the grounds of an Islamic law forbidding the marriage of an apostate to a Muslim, to order Abu Zaid to divorce his wife, Ibtihal Yunis (a ruling that the shocked and happily married Yunis described at the time as coming “like a blow to the head with a brick”).

Abu Zaid steadfastly maintains that he is a pious Muslim, but contends that the Koran’s manifest content—for example, the often archaic laws about the treatment of women for which Islam is infamous—is much less important than its complex, regenerative, and spiritually nourishing latent content. The orthodox Islamic view, Abu Zaid claims, is stultifying; it reduces a divine, eternal, and dynamic text to a fixed human interpretation with no more life and meaning than “a trinket … a talisman … or an ornament.”

For a while Abu Zaid remained in Egypt and sought to refute the charges of apostasy, but in the face of death threats and relentless public harassment he fled with his wife from Cairo to Holland, calling the whole affair “a macabre farce.”

Sheikh Youssef al-Badri, the cleric whose preachings inspired much of the opposition to Abu Zaid, was exultant. “We are not terrorists; we have not used bullets or machine guns, but we have stopped an enemy of Islam from poking fun at our religion…. No one will even dare to think about harming Islam again.”

Abu Zaid seems to have been justified in fearing for his life and fleeing: in 1992 the Egyptian journalist Farag Foda was assassinated by Islamists for his critical writings about Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and in 1994 the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed for writing, among other works, the allegorical Children of Gabalawi (1959)—a novel, structured like the Koran, that presents “heretical” conceptions of God and the Prophet Muhammad.

Deviating from the orthodox interpretation of the Koran, says the Algerian Mohammed Arkoun, a professor emeritus of Islamic thought at the University of Paris, is “a very sensitive business” with major implications. “Millions and millions of people refer to the Koran daily to explain their actions and to justify their aspirations,” Arkoun says. “This scale of reference is much larger than it has ever been before.”

Muhammad in the Cave

MECCA sits in a barren hollow between two ranges of steep hills in the west of present-day Saudi Arabia. To its immediate west lies the flat and sweltering Red Sea coast; to the east stretches the great Rub’ al-Khali, or Empty Quarter—the largest continuous body of sand on the planet. The town’s setting is uninviting: the earth is dry and dusty, and smolders under a relentless sun; the whole region is scoured by hot, throbbing desert winds.

Although sometimes rain does not fall for years, when it does come it can be heavy, creating torrents of water that rush out of the hills and flood the basin in which the city lies. As a backdrop for divine revelation, the area is every bit as fitting as the mountains of Sinai or the wilderness of Judea.

The only real source of historical information about pre-Islamic Mecca and the circumstances of the Koran’s revelation is the classical Islamic story about the religion’s founding, a distillation of which follows.

In the centuries leading up to the arrival of Islam, Mecca was a local pagan sanctuary of considerable antiquity. Religious rituals revolved around the Ka’ba—a shrine, still central in Islam today, that Muslims believe was originally built by Ibrahim (known to Christians and Jews as Abraham) and his son Isma’il (Ishmael).

As Mecca became increasingly prosperous in the sixth century A.D., pagan idols of varying sizes and shapes proliferated. The traditional story has it that by the early seventh century a pantheon of some 360 statues and icons surrounded the Ka’ba (inside which were found renderings of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, among other idols).

Such was the background against which the first installments of the Koran are said to have been revealed, in 610, to an affluent but disaffected merchant named Muhammad bin Abdullah. Muhammad had developed the habit of periodically withdrawing from Mecca’s pagan squalor to a nearby mountain cave, where he would reflect in solitude. During one of these retreats he was visited by the Angel Gabriel—the very same angel who had announced the coming of Jesus to the Virgin Mary in Nazareth some 600 years earlier.

Opening with the command “Recite!,” Gabriel made it known to Muhammad that he was to serve as the Messenger of God. Subsequently, until his death, the supposedly illiterate Muhammad received through Gabriel divine revelations in Arabic that were known as qur’an (“recitation”) and that announced, initially in a highly poetic and rhetorical style, a new and uncompromising brand of monotheism known as Islam, or “submission” (to God’s will). Muhammad reported these revelations verbatim to sympathetic family members and friends, who either memorized them or wrote them down.

Powerful Meccans soon began to persecute Muhammad and his small band of devoted followers, whose new faith rejected the pagan core of Meccan cultural and economic life, and as a result in 622 the group migrated some 200 miles north, to the town of Yathrib, which subsequently became known as Medina (short for Medinat al-Nabi, or City of the Prophet). (This migration, known in Islam as the hijra, is considered to mark the birth of an independent Islamic community, and 622 is thus the first year of the Islamic calendar.)

In Medina, Muhammad continued to receive divine revelations, of an increasingly pragmatic and prosaic nature, and by 630 he had developed enough support in the Medinan community to attack and conquer Mecca. He spent the last two years of his life proselytizing, consolidating political power, and continuing to receive revelations.

The Islamic tradition has it that when Muhammad died, in 632, the Koranic revelations had not been gathered into a single book; they were recorded only “on palm leaves and flat stones and in the hearts of men.” (This is not surprising: the oral tradition was strong and well established, and the Arabic script, which was written without the vowel markings and consonantal dots used today, served mainly as an aid to memorization.)

Nor was the establishment of such a text of primary concern: the Medinan Arabs—an unlikely coalition of ex-merchants, desert nomads, and agriculturalists united in a potent new faith and inspired by the life and sayings of Prophet Muhammad—were at the time pursuing a fantastically successful series of international conquests in the name of Islam. By the 640s the Arabs possessed most of Syria, Iraq, Persia, and Egypt, and thirty years later they were busy taking over parts of Europe, North Africa, and Central Asia.

In the early decades of the Arab conquests many members of Muhammad’s coterie were killed, and with them died valuable knowledge of the Koranic revelations. Muslims at the edges of the empire began arguing over what was Koranic scripture and what was not. An army general returning from Azerbaijan expressed his fears about sectarian controversy to the Caliph ‘Uthman (644-656)—the third Islamic ruler to succeed Muhammad—and is said to have entreated him to “overtake this people before they differ over the Koran the way the Jews and Christians differ over their Scripture.”

‘Uthman convened an editorial committee of sorts that carefully gathered the various pieces of scripture that had been memorized or written down by Muhammad’s companions. The result was a standard written version of the Koran. ‘Uthman ordered all incomplete and “imperfect” collections of the Koranic scripture destroyed, and the new version was quickly distributed to the major centers of the rapidly burgeoning empire.

During the next few centuries, while Islam solidified as a religious and political entity, a vast body of exegetical and historical literature evolved to explain the Koran and the rise of Islam, the most important elements of which are hadith, or the collected sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad; sunna, or the body of Islamic social and legal custom; sira, or biographies of the Prophet; and tafsir, or Koranic commentary and explication. It is from these traditional sources—compiled in written form mostly from the mid eighth to the mid tenth century—that all accounts of the revelation of the Koran and the early years of Islam are ultimately derived.

“For People Who Understand”

Roughly equivalent in length to the New Testament, the Koran is divided into 114 sections, known as suras, that vary dramatically in length and form. The book’s organizing principle is neither chronological nor thematic—for the most part the suras are arranged from beginning to end in descending order of length.

Despite the unusual structure, however, what generally surprises newcomers to the Koran is the degree to which it draws on the same beliefs and stories that appear in the Bible. God (Allah in Arabic) rules supreme: he is the all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-merciful Being who has created the world and its creatures; he sends messages and laws through prophets to help guide human existence; and, at a time in the future known only to him, he will bring about the end of the world and the Day of Judgment. Adam, the first man, is expelled from Paradise for eating from the forbidden tree.

Noah builds an ark to save a select few from a flood brought on by the wrath of God. Abraham prepares himself to sacrifice his son at God’s bidding. Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt and receives a revelation on Mount Sinai. Jesus—born of the Virgin Mary and referred to as the Messiah—works miracles, has disciples, and rises to heaven.

The Koran takes great care to stress this common monotheistic heritage, but it works equally hard to distinguish Islam from Judaism and Christianity. For example, it mentions prophets—Hud, Salih, Shu’ayb, Luqman, and others—whose origins seem exclusively Arabian, and it reminds readers that it is “A Koran in Arabic, / For people who understand.”

Despite its repeated assertions to the contrary, however, the Koran is often extremely difficult for contemporary readers—even highly educated speakers of Arabic—to understand. It sometimes makes dramatic shifts in style, voice, and subject matter from verse to verse, and it assumes a familiarity with language, stories, and events that seem to have been lost even to the earliest of Muslim exegetes (typical of a text that initially evolved in an oral tradition).

Its apparent inconsistencies are easy to find: God may be referred to in the first and third person in the same sentence; divergent versions of the same story are repeated at different points in the text; divine rulings occasionally contradict one another. In this last case the Koran anticipates criticism and defends itself by asserting the right to abrogate its own message (“God doth blot out / Or confirm what He pleaseth”).

Criticism did come. As Muslims increasingly came into contact with Christians during the eighth century, the wars of conquest were accompanied by theological polemics, in which Christians and others latched on to the confusing literary state of the Koran as proof of its human origins. Muslim scholars themselves were fastidiously cataloguing the problematic aspects of the Koran—unfamiliar vocabulary, seeming omissions of text, grammatical incongruities, deviant readings, and so on.

A major theological debate in fact arose within Islam in the late eighth century, pitting those who believed in the Koran as the “uncreated” and eternal Word of God against those who believed in it as created in time, like anything that isn’t God himself. Under the Caliph al-Ma’mun (813-833) this latter view briefly became orthodox doctrine. It was supported by several schools of thought, including an influential one known as Mu’tazilism, that developed a complex theology based partly on a metaphorical rather than simply literal understanding of the Koran.

By the end of the tenth century the influence of the Mu’tazili school had waned, for complicated political reasons, and the official doctrine had become that of i’jaz, or the “inimitability” of the Koran. (As a result, the Koran has traditionally not been translated by Muslims for non-Arabic-speaking Muslims. Instead it is read and recited in the original by Muslims worldwide, the majority of whom do not speak Arabic. The translations that do exist are considered to be nothing more than scriptural aids and paraphrases.) The adoption of the doctrine of inimitability was a major turning point in Islamic history, and from the tenth century to this day the mainstream Muslim understanding of the Koran as the literal and uncreated Word of God has remained constant.

Psychopathic Vandalism?

GERD-R. Puin speaks with disdain about the traditional willingness, on the part of Muslim and Western scholars, to accept the conventional understanding of the Koran. “The Koran claims for itself that it is ‘mubeen,’ or ‘clear,’” he says. “But if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn’t make sense. Many Muslims—and Orientalists—will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible.

This is what has caused the traditional anxiety regarding translation. If the Koran is not comprehensible—if it can’t even be understood in Arabic—then it’s not translatable. People fear that. And since the Koran claims repeatedly to be clear but obviously is not—as even speakers of Arabic will tell you—there is a contradiction. Something else must be going on.”

Trying to figure out that “something else” really began only in this century. “Until quite recently,” Patricia Crone, the historian of early Islam, says, “everyone took it for granted that everything the Muslims claim to remember about the origin and meaning of the Koran is correct. If you drop that assumption, you have to start afresh.” This is no mean feat, of course; the Koran has come down to us tightly swathed in a historical tradition that is extremely resistant to criticism and analysis.

As Crone put it in Slaves on Horses, The Biblical redactors offer us sections of the Israelite tradition at different stages of crystallization, and their testimonies can accordingly be profitably compared and weighed against each other. But the Muslim tradition was the outcome, not of a slow crystallization, but of an explosion; the first compilers were not redactors, but collectors of debris whose works are strikingly devoid of overall unity; and no particular illuminations ensue from their comparison.

Not surprisingly, given the explosive expansion of early Islam and the passage of time between the religion’s birth and the first systematic documenting of its history, Muhammad’s world and the worlds of the historians who subsequently wrote about him were dramatically different. During Islam’s first century alone a provincial band of pagan desert tribesmen became the guardians of a vast international empire of institutional monotheism that teemed with unprecedented literary and scientific activity.

Many contemporary historians argue that one cannot expect Islam’s stories about its own origins—particularly given the oral tradition of the early centuries—to have survived this tremendous social transformation intact. Nor can one expect a Muslim historian writing in ninth- or tenth-century Iraq to have discarded his social and intellectual background (and theological convictions) in order accurately to describe a deeply unfamiliar seventh-century Arabian context. R. Stephen Humphreys, writing in Islamic History: A Framework for Inquiry (1988), concisely summed up the issue that historians confront in studying early Islam.

If our goal is to comprehend the way in which Muslims of the late 2nd/8th and 3rd/9th centuries [Islamic calendar / Christian calendar] understood the origins of their society, then we are very well off indeed. But if our aim is to find out “what really happened,” in terms of reliably documented answers to modern questions about the earliest decades of Islamic society, then we are in trouble.

The person who more than anyone else has shaken up Koranic studies in the past few decades is John Wansbrough, formerly of the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Puin is “re-reading him now” as he prepares to analyze the Yemeni fragments. Patricia Crone says that she and Michael Cook “did not say much about the Koran in Hagarism that was not based on Wansbrough.” Other scholars are less admiring, referring to Wansbrough’s work as “drastically wrongheaded,” “ferociously opaque,” and a “colossal self-deception.”

But like it or not, anybody engaged in the critical study of the Koran today must contend with Wansbrough’s two main works—Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation (1977) and The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History (1978).

Wansbrough applied an entire arsenal of what he called the “instruments and techniques” of biblical criticism—form criticism, source criticism, redaction criticism, and much more—to the Koranic text. He concluded that the Koran evolved only gradually in the seventh and eighth centuries, during a long period of oral transmission when Jewish and Christian sects were arguing volubly with one another well to the north of Mecca and Medina, in what are now parts of Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Iraq. The reason that no Islamic source material from the first century or so of Islam has survived, Wansbrough concluded, is that it never existed.

To Wansbrough, the Islamic tradition is an example of what is known to biblical scholars as a “salvation history”: a theologically and evangelically motivated story of a religion’s origins invented late in the day and projected back in time. In other words, as Wansbrough put it in Quranic Studies, the canonization of the Koran—and the Islamic traditions that arose to explain it—involved the attribution of several, partially overlapping, collections of logia (exhibiting a distinctly Mosaic imprint) to the image of a Biblical prophet (modified by the material of the Muhammadan evangelium into an Arabian man of God) with a traditional message of salvation (modified by the influence of Rabbinic Judaism into the unmediated and finally immutable word of God).

Wansbrough’s arcane theories have been contagious in certain scholarly circles, but many Muslims understandably have found them deeply offensive. S. Parvez Manzoor, for example, has described the Koranic studies of Wansbrough and others as “a naked discourse of power” and “an outburst of psychopathic vandalism.”

But not even Manzoor argues for a retreat from the critical enterprise of Koranic studies; instead he urges Muslims to defeat the Western revisionists on the “epistemological battlefield,” admitting that “sooner or later [we Muslims] will have to approach the Koran from methodological assumptions and parameters that are radically at odds with the ones consecrated by our tradition.”

Revisionism Inside the Islamic World

INDEED, for more than a century there have been public figures in the Islamic world who have attempted the revisionist study of the Koran and Islamic history—the exiled Egyptian professor Nasr Abu Zaid is not unique. Perhaps Abu Zaid’s most famous predecessor was the prominent Egyptian government minister, university professor, and writer Taha Hussein.

A determined modernist, Hussein in the early 1920s devoted himself to the study of pre-Islamic Arabian poetry and ended up concluding that much of that body of work had been fabricated well after the establishment of Islam in order to lend outside support to Koranic mythology. A more recent example is the Iranian journalist and diplomat Ali Dashti, who in his Twenty Three Years: A Study of the Prophetic Career of Mohammed (1985) repeatedly took his fellow Muslims to task for not questioning the traditional accounts of Muhammad’s life, much of which he called “myth-making and miracle-mongering.”

Abu Zaid also cites the enormously influential Muhammad ‘Abduh as a precursor. The nineteenth-century father of Egyptian modernism, ‘Abduh saw the potential for a new Islamic theology in the theories of the ninth-century Mu’tazilis. The ideas of the Mu’tazilis gained popularity in some Muslim circles early in this century (leading the important Egyptian writer and intellectual Ahmad Amin to remark in 1936 that “the demise of Mu’tazilism was the greatest misfortune to have afflicted Muslims; they have committed a crime against themselves”).

The late Pakistani scholar Fazlur Rahman carried the Mu’tazilite torch well into the present era; he spent the later years of his life, from the 1960s until his death in 1988, living and teaching in the United States, where he trained many students of Islam—both Muslims and non-Muslims—in the Mu’tazilite tradition.

Such work has not come without cost, however: Taha Hussein, like Nasr Abu Zaid, was declared an apostate in Egypt; Ali Dashti died mysteriously just after the 1979 Iranian revolution; and Fazlur Rahman was forced to leave Pakistan in the 1960s. Muslims interested in challenging orthodox doctrine must tread carefully. “I would like to get the Koran out of this prison,” Abu Zaid has said of the prevailing Islamic hostility to reinterpreting the Koran for the modern age, “so that once more it becomes productive for the essence of our culture and the arts, which are being strangled in our society.”

Despite his many enemies in Egypt, Abu Zaid may well be making progress toward this goal: there are indications that his work is being widely, if quietly, read with interest in the Arab world. Abu Zaid says, for example, that his The Concept of the Text (1990)—the book largely responsible for his exile from Egypt—has gone through at least eight underground printings in Cairo and Beirut.

Another scholar with a wide readership who is committed to re-examining the Koran is Mohammed Arkoun, the Algerian professor at the University of Paris. Arkoun argued in Lectures du Coran (1982), for example, that “it is time [for Islam] to assume, along with all of the great cultural traditions, the modern risks of scientific knowledge,” and suggested that “the problem of the divine authenticity of the Koran can serve to reactivate Islamic thought and engage it in the major debates of our age.”

Arkoun regrets the fact that most Muslims are unaware that a different conception of the Koran exists within their own historical tradition. What a re-examination of Islamic history offers Muslims, Arkoun and others argue, is an opportunity to challenge the Muslim orthodoxy from within, rather than having to rely on “hostile” outside sources. Arkoun, Abu Zaid, and others hope that this challenge might ultimately lead to nothing less than an Islamic renaissance.

THE gulf between such academic theories and the daily practice of Islam around the world is huge, of course—the majority of Muslims today are unlikely to question the orthodox understanding of the Koran and Islamic history. Yet Islam became one of the world’s great religions in part because of its openness to social change and new ideas. (Centuries ago, when Europe was mired in its feudal Dark Ages, the sages of a flourishing Islamic civilization opened an era of great scientific and philosophical discovery.

The ideas of the ancient Greeks and Romans might never have been introduced to Europe were it not for the Islamic historians and philosophers who rediscovered and revived them.) Islam’s own history shows that the prevailing conception of the Koran is not the only one ever to have existed, and the recent history of biblical scholarship shows that not all critical-historical studies of a holy scripture are antagonistic. They can instead be carried out with the aim of spiritual and cultural regeneration. They can, as Mohammed Arkoun puts it, demystify the text while reaffirming “the relevance of its larger intuitions.”

Increasingly diverse interpretations of the Koran and Islamic history will inevitably be proposed in the coming decades, as traditional cultural distinctions between East, West, North, and South continue to dissolve, as the population of the Muslim world continues to grow, as early historical sources continue to be scrutinized, and as feminism meets the Koran.

With the diversity of interpretations will surely come increased fractiousness, perhaps intensified by the fact that Islam now exists in such a great variety of social and intellectual settings—Bosnia, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, the United States, and so on. More than ever before, anybody wishing to understand global affairs will need to understand Islamic civilization, in all its permutations. Surely the best way to start is with the study of the Koran—which promises in the years ahead to be at least as contentious, fascinating, and important as the study of the Bible has been in this century.

the only true followers of Moses [pbuh], are the Muslims, for it is part of moses religion [and the religion of all other prophets] to accept the latest Messenger and revelation; that is why Muslims are considered to be the followers of all the Prophets.

it also appears that the last piece upset some of our local islamist trolls.

good.

anyway, what i’m going to take a look at now is the assumption i noted in the previous piece, namely that “the jews” possess a “corrupt” verion of the Torah and that, as a result, we have drifted away from the “original religion” of every prophet from adam to abraham – which was, of course, “islam”. there are four components to this idea, namely:

1. that the jews changed the actual Text of the Revelation from G!D (whatever that was)
2. that the *original* Text would of course have confirmed that muhammad would ultimately be along with the Qur’an as the final Revelation and, incidentally, that jesus was the messiah.
3. that the jews “permitted what was forbidden and forbade what was permitted”
4. that the jews thereby ended up committing “shirk” by putting our rabbis on a par with G!D.

there are several sorts of evidence adduced for this putative corruption, namely:

1. accusations made in the Qur’an itself and therefore, by definition, true.
2. accusations of perfidy amongst the jewish people made in the Torah and other jewish texts themselves, including prophetic writings foreseeing “unfaithfulness” and sin anticipated at a future date.
4. the conclusions of biblical scholarship, which assumes of course that the Torah is a [composite] human document in all particulars and therefore, by definition, corrupt.
5. polemics made by jewish converts to islam and therefore, by definition, people who are familiar with every detail of the lies but have now embraced the Truth.

in this way, we are shown to be condemned out of our own mouth, by independent, scientifically impartial scholars and, most damning of all, by G!D. it’s an open-and-shut case, really.

except, of course, it isn’t.

in dealing with the first sort of evidence, the first thing that has to be understood is terminological. when jews speak of “Torah” we may mean any number of things. *the* Torah is, of course, the text of the pentateuch itself. this is not the same as “the bible”, a fact which is lost on most of the adherents of this particular line of reasoning. the “hebrew bible” is known as the TaNa”Kh, an acrostic comprising the Torah, the nebi’im (“prophets”) and qetubim (“writings”) – for more about the structure of Tanakh, see here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanakh

however, the important thing here is that when jews refer to “torah”, it may be the general word for “teaching”. the salient point here is that “torah” may involve multiple interpretations, contradictions and opinions, whereas THE Torah itself as a text is fixed. the relevant verses in the Qur’an do not appear (not being any kind of expert in Qur’an, and i apologise in advance for any shortcomings in quotes i obtained from islamicity.com ) to make it clear what precisely is being referred to:

And unto thee have We revealed the Scripture with the truth, confirming whatever Scripture was before it, and a watcher over it. So judge between them by that which Allah hath revealed, and follow not their desires away from the truth which hath come unto thee.

- Qur’an 5:48 (Pickthall)

this “them”, apparently, is taken to refer to the recipients of the former Revelations, namely jews and christians. as you can see, there is rather a lot of wiggle-room for interpretation there, the “consensus of the scholars” notwithstanding. and every verse i’ve been shown purporting to show the corruption of the Torah from the Qur’an has a similar amount of wiggle-room. here’s a particular favourite:

They have taken as lords beside Allah their rabbis and their monks and the Messiah son of Mary, when they were bidden to worship only One G!D. There is no god save Him. Be He glorified from all that they ascribe as partner (unto Him)!

- Qur’an 9:31 (Pickthall)

this is then supported by the hadith:

“…and I said to him: “We don’t worship them”. He [the Messenger [sm]] said: “Do they not forbid what Allah has permitted you and do you not then forbid it [to yourselves]?, and do they not make permissable for you what Allah has forbidden and do you not then make it permissable [to yourselves]“?, I replied “certainly!”. He [sm] said: “That is worshipping them” [Narrated by At-Tirmidhi who graded it as well-authentic [hasan]]

now, obviously we would be extremely horrified if it were to be suggested that we were in any way “worshipping” rabbis – this would be just as great “shirk” to us as it would be to muslims. what i would like to believe is that muhammad knew better than these scholars and was referring strictly to a certain group of jews he knew locally, NOT to jews IN GENERAL. from the way the Qur’an and muslim sources describes how these local arabian jews behaved, they were either very ignorant or just plain wrong and the fact that they are described as jews may have little or nothing to do with what normative mainstream judaism actually says. in other words, these words should not be taken as applying to all jews.

there are, therefore, the following possibilities:

1. the Qur’an is not referring to all jews at this point
2. there is some difference in the way jews and muslims treat scholarly interpretation
3. this is incorrect reporting of what muhammad said
4. this is incorrect reporting of what jews actually do
5. this is slander

in respect of point 2, however, there is an extremely important talmudic story known as the “oven of achnai” (BT bava metzia 59b) which describes how the principle of authority for human interpretation occurred, over a trivial argument about whether the aforementioned oven was kosher or not. the vote was unanimous save for one rabbi who dissented. the majority quoted the Torah verse that “after the majority shall you incline” to try and get him to concede the point, at one point appealing to a Divine Voice (“bat qol”) which supports them. however, the dissenting rabbi refuted them all by appealing to the verse in the Torah which states “it is not in Heaven”, (deut. 30:11) which was taken to mean that we can’t wait for G!D to provide answers in every situation, but must do our own interpretation in the here and now. it was subsequently reported by another rabbi who had had mystical communication with the prophet elijah (khidr) that G!D had been extremely pleased that “My children have defeated Me” – kind of like when you’re pleased when your kid makes a logical argument for the first time in order to get his own way. however the authority for this is couched, it remains pretty clear that no matter how multifarious and intertextual a sacred text like the Torah is, you still need human interpretation in an every-day situation, whether one’s own or that of experts and scholars.

so, what we have here is quite the conundrum. apparently, it’s all right for *muslim* scholars to make what is very clearly an interpretation and to pass this down as correct but, apparently, when rabbis do it they are “forbidding what G!D has permitted and permitting what G!D has forbidden”. i would suggest that for muslims to suggest that the experts and scholars of other faiths are thereby introducing “manmade” laws and causing themselves to be worshipped, whilst of course their own are “rightly-guided” and infallible, stretches credibility to the point where one would surely be forgiven for considering that such a position makes them look like a bunch of hypocritical beardy bigots. we lied about abraham, did we? deary me. and, what’s more, we left the evidence for our own guilt right there in the text! look at deuteronomy 12:32 and 4:2! perhaps if islamists could supply the undistorted past scriptures that they are talking about here:

Therefore woe be unto those who write the Scripture with their hands and then say, “This is from Allah,” that they may purchase a small gain therewith. Woe unto them for that their hands have written, and woe unto them for that they earn thereby.

- Qur’an 2:79 (Pickthall)

this would look like a bit less of a fit-up. the verse of Tanakh (it’s in Nevi’im rather than Torah itself) most commonly adduced in support of this is the famous one about the “lying pen of the scribes” in jeremiah 8:8. but can one be certain that the “lying pen” referred to by jeremiah in means only that there was a text and it was altered by “the scribes”? how can one know for sure that this doesn’t refer to incorrect decisions in practical circumstances? there are *many* ways that this verse could be interpreted. furthermore, reading the text one realises that the prophets are pretty darn ticked off at the behaviour of the people for precisely this reason. it is not unreasonable in these circumstances to conclude that it was the prophets themselves who preserved the originally revealed Torah, which was why they were “on-message”, so to speak, as opposed to the ‘lying pen of the scribes’, which might imply, for the sake of argument, that the prophets were aware that there were people circulating miscopied, altered or falsified texts – which could very well be the very texts that academics have discovered and have used to support the conclusion that the text was an unstable or composite document as per the “documentary hypothesis”.

it becomes clear, in conclusion, that it is not hugely difficult to find an interpretation of that text which actually provides support for the *opposite* PoV – and that is ignoring the point i made above about the lying scribes being so inefficient as to leave the sentence about their guilt in the final text!

the final point i want to make here is really about logic. if the Torah has been changed/deleted/added, as suggested, it isn’t the Revelation any more, so you are respecting a changed/deleted/added text, not the Divine Word. one cannot have it both ways. either the Torah is as it was at Revelation/Sinai and one must respect it as the Divine Word, or it has been changed/deleted/added and is no longer the Divine Word that one must respect at the risk of committing shirk.

this doctrine represents an attack on jewish identity which cannot be tolerated. the suggestion is that we are in error and that our errors can only be rectified by embracing the “final revelation” and the “truth”. as readers of this blog will no doubt be aware that many cultures, not least christianity and islam, have our conversion a priority over the last few millennia, but we’re still here, just as we were thousands of years ago, the only surviving culture of the ancient world. you can say what you want about us, but it don’t make it true. this doctrine is underpinned by nothing but “because we say so” writ large. one remains of course at liberty to believe what one wishes – there is, as it says, “no compulsion in religion” – but if islam expects to coexist with the rest of the planet, this supercessionist triumphalism will have to go.

b’shalom

bananabrain

We have had the normal reaction on the left to condemn him, the reaction from the right in the UK to call for a ban and even claim Muslims support them and this has caused a little stir amongst Islamists.

iEngage for example originally followed the 1st electronic print of the Express article stating that Ghaffar Hussain from the Quilliam Foundation had stated that the Burka/Burqa was a cultural practice and not sanctioned in the Quran, but then went further and mistakenly claimed that he supported a ban. This has subsequently been “corrected”, by both the Express and iEngage.

A number of ancilliary discussions have persisted some of which are quite interesting, hypocritical and opportunistic.

When speaking of the “Burqa” or Jilbab or veil or in fact niqab (face-mask) we should be clear that there is no explicit injunction requesting Muslim women to wear a veil but rather there are verses which are interpreted as such.

The verse which states: “Those who harass believing men and believing women undeservedly, bear (on themselves) a calumny and a grievous sin. O Prophet! Enjoin your wives, your daughters, and the wives of true believers that they should cast their outer garments over their persons (when abroad) That is most convenient, that they may be distinguished and not be harassed. And Allah is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful.” is interpreted traditionally to mean cover everything except, well for some everything!

Commentators though have explained that this does not include the face and hands and Imam Tabari (the first ever author of an exegesis of the Quran) in his commentary of the verse: “they show not their charms except that which is apparent” states that there is almost consensus on the fact that covering the face and hands is not a part of a woman’s Awra or parts of the body that must be covered. He states in his commentary, that what is correct is “that there is a consensus that women should uncover their face and hands in the prayer and therefore they are not obliged to cover the face and the hands, and this is the correct meaning of the words ‘except what is apparent from her” (in the verse from Surah al-Nur, Tafsir al-Tabari volume 5 page 419 Muass’sas al-Rayan edition).

In fact before poor Ghaffar Hussain made now infamous statement about the cultural nature of the Burqa/Jilbab, scholars had done so. Many have explained that the usage of the word ‘veil’ was more to do with Arab custom, and not a Quranic injunction nor any kind of prescription from God that they must be veiled.

Imam Muhammad Tahir ibn Ashur in his book Maqasid al-Sharia al-Islamiya in the chapter about the universal nature of the Shariah, states: “This is a legislation that took into consideration an Arab tradition, and therefore does not apply to women who do not wear that stykle of dress” (page 140 of Ibn Ashur: Treatise on Maqasid al-Shari’ah translated by M T el-Mesawi). [Ibn Ashur also states that there is a view which does not oblige the hijab at all i.e. covering the hair and feet and hands are not religious duties etc in his Quran exegesis al-Tahrir wal-Tanwir, volume 8 page 207).

But hold on! All this is pointless, why am I speaking about Quranic injunctions and so forth when according to iEngage this is nothing to do with a religious edict but a “liberal edict”(?!?).

Surely they are defending the right to practice what they see as their religion but within the framework of liberal democracy? Which would mean that if France decided according to their legislature to ban the face-veil/burqa/burka in public life by a democratic mandate they would of course agree with this? As then there would a be a liberal democratic mandate?

Or is it that they feel that the best way to argue their case in a liberal democracy is to seek to protect the veil through appealing to a common value of individual freedom and right to religious expression and personal liberty?

Well I guess they would have to, as traditionally Muslim scholars who have held that women should cover their face have always made the exception of social transactions i.e. if they are involved with say, speaking to their local MP, teaching or even learning, or just engaging in a financial transaction they should remove the face veil! (See writings of scholars like Zamakhshari and Suyuti for this).

So it is not so un-Islamic to prevent the veil in public life, as it is moreso contradicting liberal principles which allow individuals to dress as they please (a point of view I agree with) whilst maintaining that they should whenever public inquiry requires, remove it for purposes of identification, security, financial and other social transactions that require communication e.g. teaching etc.(Remember the case with the veiled school teacher?)

In fact, as a part of respecting the culture in the West those that have obliged the face covering state that it does not have to be covered from two of the main schools of religious rite, hanafi and shafi schools (it is well known the maliki schools don’t oblige it, and hanbali, Albani and Tuwayjuri have had quite some differences on it)

But hold on, when Jack Straw even suggested this, there was outcry! How unreasonable he was being!

Hizb ut-Tahrir (along with others) put out a statement saying that this was:

1. Divisive – the group has a chapter entitled why Hijab is not obligatory in one of its books!

2. They understand that it is a barrier to communication, but a minor one! In the book Social System in Islam which is a Party Policy book they explain that it is a barrier to social interaction and backward!

3. They say they recognize the differences,but in their policy book they state that it is not based on the Quran or any Islamic evidence!

4. They quote from scholars stating that the veil should be removed in public life in front of judges, when trading or to be recognized etc. So why capitalize on this debate? The irony is that they state not to capitalize on this discussion now (to whom and how?).

So if they agreed with Jack Straw’s point of view, and would not advocate it, neither fo they believe there is anything Islamic about it nor that it is healthy for society? Why the campaign?

Blatant Islamist politicization of social and religious issues for their own ideological Islamist anti-Western agenda!

The debate I am sure will continue but hopefully without wild accusations of Islamophobia and meaningful discussion about where we draw the lines to religious. But always expect the rants from the likes of Islamist political groups hijacking the discussion for political ends, and shallow “Think-Tanks” such as iEngage, for their petty squabbles…

1. There is such a thing as The Sharia!

This is simply not true. Muslim scholars do not have a single detailed rule of Sharia that they agree upon. They agree on broad principles which most humans do, but in general they do not agree on a single body of law which they call Sharia. They have loads of different interpretations on most aspects of their religious code – if not all. To give an example let’s take the rulings of alcohol and wine. Is wine or alcohol forbidden? If it is both or either, is there a punishment? If so, what is the punishment? If not then it is up to the authorities to criminalize or not – a process called Tazir. The fact is there is no consensus on such issues.

So Islamists are not imposing Sharia in as much as calling for a sectarian state such as Shia Islamist Iran, or Wahabist Saudi Arabia or Taliban-twisted interpretations of Deobandism in Afghanistan, etc.

2. Are differences tolerated? What kind of differences should be tolerated in “Islamic” interpretation/s of Sharia? Well according to Ibn Taymia a medieval theologian, and a favourite of Jihadists and Islamists, as long as the person is sincere in his ijtihad (efforts to find the “truth” or Gods judgment), whether it is to do with fundamentals (Usul) or detailed questions about secondary issues (furoo – branches) or matters which are to do with beliefs or rituals,  it is all tolerated. This is the case  as the companions of the Prophet and the first generation of Muslims all differed with each other on all issues including basic beliefs. He answers the question: what if some consider certain things definitive/clear cut or speculative? He says this is a matter of opinion which people differed over! Ibn Taymiya in his book al-Fatawa al-Kubra, Vol. 20, p.256. (See Shawkani‘s Irshad ul-Fuhul Dar ul-Kutub ul-Ilmiya 1995 edition Beirut-Lebanon page 385).

3. The ruler should not impose his opinion of the Sharia – in fact according to Ibn Taymia this is HARAM! Forbidden! Ibn Taymia, like John Locke, says that authorities are not allowed to enforce one religious opinion tradition i.e. Sharia rules over the another. Rather they should be free to follow their own religious conviction, and rulers rule in the temporal i.e. secular sphere. (See this Islamist blog, for the details and an example of Ibn Taymia’s fatwa stating this!)

The main argument against imposing the Sharia normally came from the propounders of Fiqh (interpretations of Sharia) who believed that imposing it on society by a political authority would cause trouble and sectarian strife (this is way before they tried it in Iran and Sudan!).

When Imam Malik the founder of the second sunni school of Islamic Fiqh was given an opportunity to impose his interpretations across the Muslim empire, he replied:

“Do not do so! For people have already heard different positions, heard ahadith and related narrations. Every group have taken whatever came to them and put it into practice, conforming to it though others differed. To take them away from what they have been professing will cause a disaster! Therefore, leave people with whatever school they follow and whatever the people of each country choose for themselves”. (See here for full reference.)

I  guess imposing Sharia is not quite what medieval Sharia expounders quite had in mind.

Many Islamic theologians/scholars do in fact consider interest an aspect of usury, though many don’t (see here for a full discussion of all of the Islamic scholars who permitted interest and did not see it as Riba). Assuming many did forbid interest as Riba, it does not necessarilly mean that is the complete picture.

Traditionally theologians have developed elaborate means of ensuring that effective financial transactions are not prevented through the blanket application of Islamic rules of Fiqh (human interpretations of Sharia divine law) to situations without recourse to strategies where necessary.

These strategies are known as Hiyal which are means of avoiding unintended consequnces to prohibitions. For example, one which is given in medieval writings, is losing investors when they are afraid to invest funds with people who have ideas and business sense but no capital, when they fear losing their monies. Sound familiar? Well there have been ways of doing so since the early development of Islamic Fiqh.

Below is one found in the writings of Imam Muhammad bin Hasan al-Shaybani, a leading scholar and student of Imam Abu Hanifah (the founder of the 1st Sunni school of Fiqh) as the view of the three Hanafi Imams, Abu Hanifa, Abu Yusuf and Muhammad bin Hasan:

“What if someone wishes to give his capital to another as a form of capital investment where the other is the active partner (and he silent) but he wants the active partner to be liable for it – what is the Heela (permitted strategy) for this?”

He (Shayabani) replied: “The capitalist should give his monies with the exception of one dirham (let’s say a pound!) to the active partner as a loan. He should then form a partnership with him with the dirham (pound) along with the loaned money on condition that they work with the entire capital sum, and share whatever they are gifted by God equally or whatever ratio he so wishes. This is permitted.” Kitab al-Makharij fi al-Hiyal  [Edited by J Schacht. Leipzig edition 1930] pp76-78

(He also gives a more elaborate version to secure all monies if required involving three stages of contracts of loans, partnerships and not for profit agencies.)

It would appear then that though there are scholars that forbid interest and venture capitalism and returns on “loans”, they also provide ways around this. The problem with “Capitalism” and interest based banking seems more ideologically and politically driven, than based upon interpretations of Islamic rules and principles (as traditionally Muslims would tolerate differences of practice and opinion amongst themselves and not get revolutionary about it). It is not just the early companions  of the prophet like Ibn Abbas, later scholars and also recent Muftis like the famous Maliki Illi’yish (he did not consider Fiat money as being subject to rules of Riba), present day jurists and traditional authorities have explained this also. Those that did forbid interest and so forth have developed means of allowing most financial transactions within sharia frames. (It seems capitalism and interest based banking is not so un-Islamic after all)

There are certainly excesses and exploitation that have and do take place within existing financial institutions, in the developed and the “3rd world” dealings with it which people of conscience should unite against, but these should be separated from Islamist ideological rantings. If only the left new…