Austria's political jihad against the hijab

The current Austrian government of babyfaced Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP) and rightwing anti-immigrant HC Strache (FPÖ) is currently proposing a ban on the hijab, the traditional Muslim female head covering, for kids in kindergarten and the early years of grade school.

Carla Amina Baghajati writes that this is a solution for a non-problem (Kopftuchverbot: Symbolpolitik ist billig Standard 09.04.2018) because the number of young children affected is "close to zero." Even traditional Muslim families who promote the hijab for Muslim women don't typically require their young children to wear it.

Diese Symbolpolitik auf dem Rücken der Muslime können auch die bei solchen Gelegenheiten eifrig hervorgekramten Phrasen wie "Verhinderung einer Parallelgesellschaft" (Kurz) oder "Gegen den politischen Islam" (Strache) nicht kaschieren. Da es ohnehin einen gesellschaftlichen Konsens gibt, entlarvt dies den Versuch, selbstkonstruierte Narrative über Muslime als "die anderen" und als Feinde der "eigenen" Wertegemeinschaft einmal mehr zu bedienen. Ist eigentlich noch niemandem aufgefallen, dass man Menschen so ja geradezu in eine "Parallelgesellschaft" drängt?

[This symbolic politics on the backs of Muslims can also not airbrush away the eagerly trotted-out phrases like "Preventing a parallel society" (Kurz) or "Against political Islam" (Strache). Because there is a social consensus anyway, these {slogans} expose the attempt to once again serve up self-constructed narratives about Muslims as "the others" and as enemies of our "own" community of values.]

Stirring up controversies about the hijab is a popular tactic of European xenophobes. It lets them nominally claim to be working for the good of innocent children while stigmatizing them, their parents, and their families' religion as foreign, scary, and threatening.

Hypocrisy is a common companion to politics. But this use of Muslim children for hate slogans is callously cynical. It's an inversion of the normal human understand of what a child symbolizes, which one would hope would be the image of the "Christian" civilization that European Islamophobes claim to be defending. A child, like the very Christian image of the Baby Jesus, is normally a symbol of innocence that needs to be protected and defended. The image of Muslim kindergarten girls as something to be afraid of, as symbols of a series of anti-Muslim bogeymen - "Islamization," "Sharia," "parallel society," "Salafi," "political Islam," "Islamic terrorism" - makes the symbol of a child something to be feared and hated, excluded and rejected.

Another aspect here is that "Kopftuch" in German is used for both the hijab and headscarf. Which means that the Islamophobes are telling us that we should be terrified of girls in headscarfs, including kindergarten children. "Hijab" at least has a more exotic sound in Western countries.

We see the same approach with American xenophobes hyperventilating about "anchor babies."

I attended part of a conference this past weekend at UC-Berkeley on "Reconciling Islamic and European Civil Laws." Mathias Rohe, Director of the Erlangen Centre for Islam & Law in Europe (EZIRE), spoke on the real-life issues involved in "The Informal Application of Islamic Legal Norms in Germany - Scope and Limits." Islamophobes like to claim that certain sections of [fill in far-away city of your choice] are completely controlled by Sharia (Islamic law). One of the things he made clear is that in the Western European countries, including Austria and Germany, that civil law (he used the term "mandatory law" also) supersedes religious law. Questions of conflicts between sharia and secular/mandatory law mostly arise in questions of family law. That obviously includes questions of what marriages are recognized by civil law and issues relating to divorce. It also comes up in such issues as refugees obtaining proper documentation for marriages performed in their home countries.

In Austria and Germany, the civil law does not recognize religious marriages and vice versa. The Catholic Church doesn't recognize civil marriages as valid under Catholic canon law, and the Austrian state does not consider a Church marriage valid under civil law. And married couple in both Austria and Germany can conclude prenuptial agreements or other contractual arrangements that may incorporate elements of religious law, including Muslim religious law. Secular/mandatory law will recognize those contracts as valid insofar as they do not contradict mandatory law. Any contractual provision that contradicts civil law is unenforceable in the courts.

Citizen and non-citizen residents in Austria and Germany have access to the legal system and can seek protection against any kind of coercion that violates mandatory law. Rohe talked about how one significant problem among Muslim immigrants is that many of them simply do not know that they can go to the law for redress against things like attempts to force them to do something under religious law that is not sanctioned by secular law. Of course, religious or other kinds of cults, as well as criminal gangs, may create a situation in which their members are fearful or otherwise reluctant to seek help from the law. But it's simply not the case that the government and legal systems in Austria and Germany allow "parallel societies" in which religious law overrides secular law. It's just not so.

Rohe mentioned that the only significant Muslim attempt to build "parallel structures" in Germany occurs among Salafists, of whom he estimates that there are 10-15,000 in Germany among a total 4.5 million Muslims. The "parallel society" slogan int he EU context is deeply dishonest and used in very bad faith.

This summary at EZIRE of an interview with Mattias Rohe describes a recent interest in which the German courts result against a local attempt to promote Sharia: Mathias Rohe comments on “Sharia Police”-Verdict.

The Bertelsmann Foundation provides these facts about the Muslim population of Austria in Muslims in Europe: Integrated but not accepted? (2017):

Approximately 500,000 Muslims live in Austria. At 6.2 to 6.8 percent of the population, their representation is higher there than in Germany. As in Germany, the immigration landscape is largely characterized by Turkish guest workers and migrant workers. There is also a relatively large group of refugees from the Balkan Wars in the 1990s. According to the current Religion Monitor data, 74 percent of the Muslims in Austria come from Turkey and 24 percent from Southeastern Europe. Also, 64 percent are Sunnis and only 4 percent Shiites, of whom more than 18 percent are Alevites. More Muslims in Austria (67 percent) belong to the first generation of immigrants than in Germany; only 32 percent represent the second generation. Of all the countries studied, Austria is home to the youngest Muslim population, on average. At just 35 years old, they also exhibit the greatest difference from the average age of the non-Muslim population (49 years old). ...

In Austria, Islam has been legally recognized as a religious community for more than 100 years. According to the ICRI index, this results in a relatively good legal situation for Muslim religious communities. For example, Austria was the first European country to introduce Islamic religious instruction in schools. Nevertheless, the social climate toward Muslims is particularly tense in Austria. Rejection of Muslims as neighbors reaches its highest level in the five-country comparison [in that particular study], with a share of 28 percent.

88 percent of Muslims feel closely connected with Austria. While this value is high, it is the lowest among the four countries studied. Routine leisure time contact with people of other religions, at 62 percent, is also less common than in the other countries. Also, 68 percent of Muslims report having experienced discrimination, the highest level among Muslims in the five-country comparison. [my emphasis]

Varieties of Islāmic law

The Prophet Muhammad (ca. 570/571-632) in a depiction from ca. 1315

With all the hate-mongering going on over the "Ground Zero Mosque" - which isn't on Ground Zero nor a mosque - one of the things we're hearing a lot from people like Sean Hannity is about the danger of "sharia" (Islāmic law) being imposed on us good Christian Real Americans. This sharia bogeyman is also used by anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim extremists in Europe. So, for anyone who actually cares to know a tiny bit more about the historical context of Islāmic law (sharia), I'm posting this brief description I originally did in March 2006, with only minor changes except for the addition of material about Afghanistan. It's based largely on the scholarly account by the Christian ecumenical theologian Hans Küng.

But I'm adding these introductory paragraphs. In one sense, the US discussion on this is just plain silly. American law is secular. It's not based on religion. On the contrary, for the national or state governments to adopt or enforce purely religious laws would be unconstitutional.

The conservative fear-mongering over "sharia" can't easily acknowledge this for several reasons, some of them obvious and others not so obvious. Pointing out that it would require a change in the entire Constitutional order to impose sharia law in the US wouldn't make it sound like an immediate threat to freak out over. Also, many conservative Christian Republicans want Christian religious ideas to be enacted and imposed by law, however much they might comma-dance around admitting it. (See Julie Ingersoll, Washington Post Story Gets Christian Reconstructionism Wrong Religion Dispatches 08/16/2010.)

The pseudohistory promoted by the scamster David Barton that is popular among Christian fundamentalists in the US - and forms the basis of history lessons at Glenn Beck University (there really is something called that!) - argue that US Constitutional law actually is founded on Christianity. (See J. Brent Walker, A Critique of David Barton's Views on Church and State 04/01/2005 on the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty website and Steve Foster, Beck U. – Leave Those Kids Alone The Donkey Edge 07/08/2010.)

It's also worth remembering that other religious groups have their own laws that are considered binding on their members, e.g., Catholic canon law. As a general rule, American law doesn't enforce those religious laws and doesn't interfere with their enforcement within religious institutions. Ask any Catholic who has had to have a marriage annulled. There are lots of "gray areas", of course, which sometimes produce much rending of clothing and gnashing of teeth among Christian political conservatives. Civil and criminal responsibility of church officials in case of sexual abuse of minors may be affected by the types of internal rules and oversight a church has exercised. But the basic rule is if religious law contradicts civil law, civil law overrides it. That applies to Islāmic religious law just as it does to Christian canon law or other kinds of religious regulations churches adopt.

Finally, Islām is a religion of law. Much of the development of Islāmic tradition has been in the context of the development of religious law, sharia, as compared to Christianity or Judaism, where theological disputes as such have had a greater role. (As always, this kind of broad historical generalization should be understood as just that.) That is due in no small part to the fact that in the traditional Islāmic lands, separation of church and state didn't develop as it did in Christian Europe. Islām has never been organized around a central religious hierarchy comparable to the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Churches. As referenced below, there are certainly problems within the Islāmic world around issues of law and what we call "separation of church and state." But there's a difference in understanding them realistically and making a scary bogeyman out of sharia.

Following is the text from March 2006; it references what at the time were current events and I've left those comments because they also provide context:

Up until not long ago, the President's [Bush's] most loyal supporters were making it a standard of American patriotism that we give unconditional support for his war to defend the Shi'a, Islāmic-fundamentalist government of Iraq. But now that the administration is making moves to improve relations with the Sunni fundamentalists and neo-Baathists and former Saddam supporters, it's hard to know which Muslim fundamentalist group in Iraq good patriotic Americans are supposed to be cheering for these days.

But since we're fighting one way or another for a government that wants to impose sharia (Islāmic law) on the Iraqi people - just like our model government in Afghanistan officially does (to the extent it has the power to impose anything) - we might as well know what we're being patriotic in cheering for.

There are four basic schools of sharia in the majority Sunni tradition: the Maliki, Hanafi, Shafii and Hanbali. Each of the schools is associated with a founding thinker and leader, from which the names were derived:

Mālik ibn Anas (710-795)
Abū Hanīfa (699-767)
Muhammad ibn Idrīs aš-Sāfi'ī (767-820)
Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855)

The Maliki school under Mālik ibn Anas (710-795) and his student Ibn al-Qāsim developed from the legal practices of Medina, the city of the Prophet. Today, Hans Küng writes in Der Islam (2004), the Maliki school of sharia "is distinguished by its strict adherence to the sunna (Islamic traditions) and an unmistakable conservatism". Mālik authored the first handbook of sharia. His most important criteria in defining correct practices was "the local consensus in Medina".

The Maliki school is strong in Upper (southern) Egypt, Algeria (for Sunnis outside large cities), Morocco and the Sudan.

The Hanafi school was founded by Abū Hanīfa (699-767). The Hanafi variety of sharia became the dominant form of law under the Abassid dynasty and later under the Ottoman Empire. Küng regards this as "the most generous and most tolerant" form of sharia. "The Hanafites have been regarded right up until today as the representatives of free opinion and the related juridical dialectics". The Hanafi school from its beginnings emphasized the rational development of laws and professional jurisprudence.

The Hanafi school is influential in Afghanistan (Sunnis), Pakistan, Bangladesh, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina and part of the Sudan. Yes, the dominant Islāmic law tradition in Afghanistan historically is not the gruesome fundamentalism of the Taliban government ousted in 2001. To what extent the Hanafi school in Afghanistan has been corrupted by three decades of more-or-less continuous war with no end in sight, I don't know. In an undated article at GlobalSecurity.org (Hanafi Islam accessed 08/24/2010), they write:

Broad-minded without being lax, this school appeals to reason (personal judgment) and a quest for the better. It is generally tolerant and the largest movement within Islam. The Hanafi school is known for its liberal religious orientation that elevates belief over practice and is tolerant of differences within Muslim communities. ...

An estimated 84% of Afghanistan's population is Sunni, following the Hanafi school of jurisprudence; the remainder is predominantly Shi'a, mainly Hazara. In March 2003 Ayatollah Mohammad Asef Mohseni, leader of the predominantly Shia Harakat-e Islami-yi Afghanistan, proposed that, along with the Sunni Hanafi school of jurisprudence, the Shia Ja'fari school of jurisprudence be included in the new constitution as an official sect.

Taliban legal practices were particularly influenced by the Deobandi tradtion in Sunni Islām.

Muhammad ibn Idrīs aš-Sāfi'ī (767-820) founded the Shafii school. He is considered "the father of Muslim jurisprudence", writes Küng. He credits aš-Sāfi'ī with bringing Islāmic legal thought from what Küng designates as the "Arabian imperial paradigm" into the "classical-Islāmic world region" paradigm. Aš-Sāfi'ī Defined the four principles (i.e., bases) of sharia as the Qu'rān, sunna (religious tradition), development of analogies and consensus.

Küng sees the great strengths of aš-Sāfi'ī 's approach as being his mastery of rational argumentation and reliance on the prophetic traditions (hadith). And his approach led to development of greater consistency in Islamic law. However, even though the incorporation of the authority of divinely inspired tradition led to great progress at that point in Islāmic history, the emphasis on tradition over the long run led to greater "inflexibility and rigidity".

Shafii legal theory is important in Iraq (among Sunnis), Lower (northern) Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Yemen, Lebanon (Sunnis) and Syria.

Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855), the founder of the Hanbalite school, collected over 80,000 hadith, stories about the Prophet Muhammad's words and deeds. If we were to apply an analogous Christian term, we would say these were "extra-canonical" traditions. Küng observes that Ibn Hanbal's devotion to the hadith had a paradoxically liberal effect, because he argued that whatever was not expressly forbidden by authoritative tradition was permitted. Freedom of contracts, for instance, was more easily accommodated by the Hanbalite school.

Through the later (conservative) reformer Ibn Tamīya (1263-1328), founder of the Wahābī version of Islām, the Hanbalite legal tradition became wedded to Wahābī theology, and therefore has great influence today through the oil-rich Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Hanbalite thought, writes Küng, is now "known by its literalist interpretation of the Qu'rān and the sunna and the strict observation of sharia". The Hanbalite school of sharia is also very influential on the Salafi movement which so heavily influences Sunni jihadists.

Hanbali is also strong in Kuwait and Qatar.

There are two significant Shi'a schools of sharia: the Twelver Shi'a school which is prominent in Iran and Iraqi Shi'a as well as in Shi'a parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and the smaller Ibādite school prevalent in Oman, Zanzibar and part of Algeria. Shi'a sharia is more heavily influenced by the authority of the leaders of the umma (Muslim community), the imams and ayatollahs.

Hans Küng considers the rigidity of sharia as one of the key challenges for Islām today. He finds parallel challenges for Christianity in the reverence for traditional teaching, especially in the Catholic Church, and for Judaism in the usage of the Talmud.

Tags: hans küng, islam, islam, islamic law, sharia

The Times' public editor blows whistle on goofy op-ed

Remember that stinker of an op-ed by Edward Luttwak that the New York Times published back in May about how Obama was an "apostate Muslim" according to sharia (Islamic law) and that he would be the target of assassination attempts because of it? (I don't recall a 10-minute rant from Keith Olberman about how it was wicked for the Times to use the word "assassination".)

Careful readers (like Neil at The Blue Voice) could see that it reeked, even without consulting with experts on Islamic law.

Weeks later, the Times public editor Clark Hoyt comments on the article in Entitled to Their Opinions, Yes. But Their Facts? New York Times 06/01/08. Short version of Hoyt's conclusions: "I interviewed five Islamic scholars, at five American universities, recommended by a variety of sources as experts in the field. All of them said that Luttwak’s interpretation of Islamic law was wrong."

And, in what was apparently a further display of total ditziness, Luttwak sent Hoyt what was supposed to be a defense of his claim in the op-ed:

Interestingly, in defense of his own article, Luttwak sent me an analysis of it by a scholar of Muslim law whom he did not identify. That scholar also did not agree with Luttwak that Obama was an apostate or that Muslim law would prohibit punishment for any Muslim who killed an apostate. He wrote, “You seem to be describing some anarcho-utopian version of Islamic legalism, which has never existed, and after the birth of the modern nation state will never exist.”

Tags: edward luttwak, islamic law, sharia

Islām and war

The Prophet Muhammad ascending to Heaven

The current issue of the New York Review of Books has an article available online (they keep them online for a few weeks) by Malise Ruthven, How to Understand Islam 11/08/07 issue. It has some worthwhile thoughts on the Islāmic religious doctrines on war. It also has several quotes from Hans Küng's excellent book Islam: Past, Present and Future, one of the volumes he's reviewing. (Küng is my own favorite contemporary theologian.)

But there are some definitely problematic things about Ruthven's argument, too.

On the useful side, he gives the following description of the concept of sharia, or Islāmic law.

The word sharia, usually translated as "law," refers to the "path" or "way" governing the modes of behavior by which Muslims are enjoined to seek salvation. The way may be known to God, but for human beings it is not predetermined. A famous hadith (tradition) of Muhammad states that differences of opinion between the learned is a blessing. Sharia reasoning is therefore "an open practice." In Islam's classical era, up until the tenth century, scholars exercised ijtihad — independent reasoning — in order to reach an understanding of the divine law. Ijtihad shares the same Arabic root as the more familiar jihad, meaning "effort" or "struggle," the word that is sometimes translated as "holy war." Ijtihad is in effect the intellectual struggle to discover what the law ought to be. As [John] Kelsay remarks, the legal scholars trained in its sources and methodologies will seek to achieve a balance between the rulings of their predecessors and independent judgments reflecting the idea that "changing circumstances require fresh wisdom." The Sharia is not so much a body of law but a field of discourse or platform for legal reasoning. Recently, it has become an arena for intellectual combat.

Ruthven's focus is not on Islāmic law as such, but his article is valuable background not only on the way Muslims think about just war issues as well as on sharia more generally. Sharia is not a single body of jurisprudence in the Anglo-American or European Continental sense. There are four major schools of Sunni sharia, called the Maliki, Hanafi, Shafii and Hanbalite schools.

There are also two significant Shi'a schools of sharia: the Twelver Shi'a school which is prominent in Iran and Iraqi Shi'a as well as in Shi'a parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and the smaller Ibādite school prevalent in Oman, Zanzibar and part of Algeria. Shi'a sharia is more heavily influenced by the authority of the leaders of the umma (Muslim community), the imams and ayatollahs, compared to the Sunni schools of sharia. (I posted on sharia at more length in Varieties of Islāmic law 03/19/06).

None of the three most influential theorists behind Sunni militancy, Abu'l Ala Maududi (1903–1979), Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949), and Sayyid Qutb, (1906–1966), received a traditional religious training. Yet both they and the authors of the landmark texts examined by Kelsay in his admirably lucid book (including the Charter of Hamas, which calls for the destruction of Israel, and bin Laden's 1998 Declaration) claim the mantle of the Sharia, as did the terrorists responsible for the atrocities in New York, Madrid, and London.

(For more on the that trio Mawlānā Abu'l-A‛la Mawdūdī, Hasan al-Bannā and Sayyid Qutb see my posts Sayyid Qutb 09/06/04 and Intellectual godfathers of jihadism 03/22/05.)

On the negative side, Ruthven argues - or rather implies fairly disingenuously - that the 9/11, London and Madrid bombings were somehow a direct application of Islāmic principles:

Like it or not, these terrorist campaigns were inspired by the example of the Prophet's struggle - his "just war" - against the Quraysh, the pagan tribesmen of Mecca. In the context of the original conflict between the early Muslims and the Meccans, the sources, including the Koran and the narratives of Muhammad's life, suggest that "fighting is an appropriate means by which Muslims should seek to secure the right to order life according to divine directives." In militant readings of the Sharia, the historical precedents are not so much interpreted as applied. For ultra-radicals such as bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri there is, as Kelsay observes, "little room for a sustained process of discerning divine guidance" along the lines enjoined by traditional scholars. An even more striking absence is evident in the criticisms of militant readings advanced by official Islamic authorities, including the widely respected Sheikh al-Azhar, head of the mosque-university in Cairo and once the single most important voice in Sunni Islam. While questioning the methods of the militants on grounds of practical ethics - will the "actions taken in the service of justice yield more harm than good?" - their criticisms usually fall short of challenging them on the grounds of political legitimacy. (my emphasis)

But the argument he makes doesn't begin to carry the weight of such a charge. Most people in the world recognize some form of the just war, and at least a lot of us apply some kind of religious viewpoint to making judgments on whether a war is just. The question of whether the "actions taken in the service of justice yield more harm than good?" has been a basic part of the Christian doctrine of the Just War for centuries, at least since the days of St. Augustine, i.e., since the end of the Roman Empire.

That's in itself isn't necessarily a persuasive argument of its value, given the bloody history of the Christian world. But you have to be a person like say, Dick Cheney to not try to make some kind of judgment whether "actions taken in the service of justice yield more harm than good", especially when you're talking about war and killing.

I'm not making any judgment on whether Sheikh al-Azhar's statement against terrorism is totally satisfactory. I'm just saying that Ruthven's argument is exceptionally weak. More specifically, he makes a very broad generalization about "official Islamic authorities" that he doesn't really support in his article.

This has been a big failing on the part of Western critics and scholars, especially the neoconservatives, is that they denounce Islāmic religious leaders for not speaking out enough against terrorism. And then when they do speak out against it in the name of Islām, there's just dissed, as Ruthven does in that paragraph.

I also notice that these mostly unidentified "official Islamic authorities" fail in Ruthven's eyes because they "usually fall short of challenging them on the grounds of political legitimacy". Just what does that mean? That they see Al Qa'ida as a legitimate political authority? To say that is a stretch would be to understate how off the charts it is. Whatever the problems within the Islmaic religion, the "official Islamic authorities" conferring political legitimacy on Al Qa'ida is not one of them.

In making this argument, he smoothes over the degree of radical departure from Sunni Islām by thinkers like Qutb. Qutb is a strong influence over jihadist thought. His brother, who shared much of his outlook, was actually one of Osama bin Laden's teachers in the university. The other fundamentalist founding fathers that he mentions, Mawdūdī and Hasan al-Bannā did not go nearly so far as Qutb. (All of those three were Sunnis.)

One of the key elements of Qutb's contribution to the jihadist ideology practiced by violent Salafist groups like Al Qa'ida was the notion that even Sunni Muslims who didn't share the particular, eccentric brand of Islam are not real Muslims and therefore they can be regarded as legitimate targets for killing.

Ruthven cites Muhammad's struggles with the pagan Quraysh tribe dominant in Mecca, which is certainly important to examine in this context, because Muhammad and his four immediate successors as caliph (they are known as the rashidun, the "rightly guided caliphs") are taken as especially important models for right practice and interpreting the Qu'ran, including on matters of war.

But Muhammad sought to convert the Quraysh in Mecca, not to kill them. The Muslims of Medina and the Quraysh of Medina did have battles. But in the end, Muhammad negotiated a peace with the Quaraysh. When Muhammad's fighters took Mecca, it was through a peace agreement, not by fighting their way into the city or laying seige to it. How blowing up commuters in Madrid is any kind of obvious application of the lessons of the Prophet's dealings with the Quraysh escapes me.

As Karen Armstrong describes in Islam (2000), the peace treaty that the Prophet made with the Quraysh of Mecca was unpopular among both the Meccans and the umma (the Muslim people, the followers of the Prophet). "Many of the Muslims were eager for action," she writes, "and that the treaty was shameful, but Muhammand was determined to achieve victory by peaceful means."

It's worth noting the intellectual figures of the 19th century that Ruthven cites as hopeful directions in Islamic theology:

The intellectual groundwork for change has been laid in the works of modernist reformers who have been revisiting the sources of Islam for more than a century. They include Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan (1817–1898) and Syed Ameer Ali (1848–1928) in India and Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905), the influential chief jurist of Egypt. The problems do not lie in the realm of theology, where Muslim intellectuals have charted retreats from the received certainties of the medieval paradigm that are just as ingenious and (for true believers) just as plausible as the efforts of Western theologians. The obstacle lies rather in the absence, in the majority traditions, of structures of leadership through which reformist ideas can be effected at the popular level.

But why he couldn't have given more emphasis there to some contemporary examples of reformist Islāmic theologians like Adkolkarim Soroush or Mohammed Arkoun, I don't know. He does mention Arkoun in connction with Hans Küng's comments on historical-critical analysis of the Qu'ran.

A strange article, all things considered.

Tags: hasan al-banna, islam, islamic law, mawdudi, sayyid qutb, sharia

Varieties of Islāmic law

Up until not long ago, the President's most loyal supporters were making it a standard of American patriotism that we give unconditional support for his war to defend the Shi'a, Islāmic-fundamentalist government of Iraq. But now that the administration is making moves to improve relations with the Sunni fundamentalists and neo-Baathists and former Saddam supporters, it's hard to know which Muslim fundamentalist group in Iraq good patriotic Americans are supposed to be cheering for these days.

But since we're fighting one way or another for a government that wants to impose sharia (Islāmic law) on the Iraqi people - just like our model government in Afghanistan officially does (to the extent it has the power to impose anything) - we might as well know what we're being patriotic in cheering for.

There are four basic schools of sharia in the majority Sunni tradition: the Maliki, Hanafi, Shafii and Hanbali. Each of the schools is associated with a founding thinker and leader, from which the names were derived:

Mālik ibn Anas (710-795)
Abū Hanīfa (699-767)
Muhammad ibn Idrīs aš-Sāfi'ī (767-820)
Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855)

The Maliki school under Mālik ibn Anas (710-795) and his student Ibn al-Qāsim developed from the legal practices of Medina, the city of the Prophet. Today, Hans Küng writes in Der Islam (2004), the Maliki school of sharia "is distinguished by its strict adherence to the sunna (Islamic traditions) and an unmistakable conservatism". Mālik authored the first handbook of sharia. His most important criteria in defining correct practices was "the local consensus in Medina".

The Maliki school is strong in Upper (southern) Egypt, Algeria (for Sunnis outside large cities), Morocco and the Sudan.

The Hanafi school was founded by Abū Hanīfa (699-767). The Hanafi variety of sharia became the dominant form of law under the Abassid dynasty and later under the Ottoman Empire. Küng regards this as "the most generous and most tolerant" form of sharia. "The Hanafites have been regarded right up until today as the representatives of free opinion and the related juridical dialectics". The Hanafi school from its beginnings emphasized the rational development of laws and professional jurisprudence.

The Hanafi school is influential in Afghanistan (Sunnis), Pakistan, Bangladesh, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina and part of the Sudan.

Muhammad ibn Idrīs aš-Sāfi'ī (767-820) founded the Shafii school. He is considered "the father of Muslim jurisprudence", writes Küng. He credits aš-Sāfi'ī with bringing Islāmic legal thought from what Küng designates as the "Arabian imperial paradigm" into the "classical-Islāmic world region" paradigm. Aš-Sāfi'ī Defined the four principles (i.e., bases) of sharia as the Qu'rān, sunna, development of analogies and consensus.

Küng sees the great strengths of aš-Sāfi'ī 's approach as being his mastery of rational argumentation and reliance on the prophetic traditions (hadith). And his approach led to development of greater consistency in Islamic law. However, even though the incorporation of the the authority of divinely inspired tradition led to great progress at that point in Islāmic history, the emphasis on tradition over the long run led to greater "inflexibility and rigidity".

Shafii legal theory is important in Iraq (among Sunnis), Lower (northern) Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Yemen, Lebanon (Sunnis) and Syria.

Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855), the founder of the Hanbalite school, collected over 80,000 hadith, stories about the Prophet Muhammad's words and deeds. If we were to apply an analogous Christian term, we would say these were "extra-canonical" traditions. Küng observes that Ibn Hanbal's devotion to the hadith had a paradoxically liberal effect, because he argued that whatever was not expressly forbidden by authoritative tradition was permitted. Freedom of contracts, for instance, was more easily accommodated by the Hanbalite school.

Through the later (conservative) reformer Ibn Tamīya (1263-1328), founder of the Wahābī version of Islām, the Hanbalite legal tradition became wedded to Wahābī theology, and therefore has great influence today through the oil-rich Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Hanbalite thought, writes Küng, is not now "known by its literalist interpretation of the Qu'rān and the sunna and the strict observation of sharia". The Hanbalite school of sharia is also very influential on the Salafi movement which so heavily influences Sunni jihadists.

Hanbali is also strong in Kuwait and Qatar.

There are two significant Shi'a schools of sharia: the Twelver Shi'a school which is prominent in Iran and Iraqi Shi'a as well as in Shi'a parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and the smaller Ibādite school prevalent in Oman, Zanzibar and part of Algeria. Shi'a sharia is more heavily influenced by the authority of the leaders of the umma (Muslim community), the imams and ayatollahs.

Hans Küng considers the rigidity of sharia as one of the key challenges for Islām today. He finds parallel challenges for Christianity in the reverence for traditional teaching, especially in the Catholic Church, and for Judaism in the usage of the Talmud.

See also Index to Posts on Hans Küng's Der Islam

Tags: hans küng, islam, islam, islamic law, sharia

Sayyid Qutb

This post is about Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian Muslim fundamentalist who is considered a major influence on today's Islamic extremism. Since most of the sources I've used are not online, I've listed them at the end and refer to them by number in the text.

Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) was an Egyptian Islamist, a Muslim Brotherhood ideologist and leader, who is considered a key intellectual figure for present-day Islamic terrorists like Al Qaeda. But his influence extends to Islamists who do not share the terrorist approach of Al Qaeda, as well. Rohan Gunaratna calls Qutb "the leading ideologue of Egyptian fundamentalists" and a "pioneer" of "the Islamist revival in the Middle East." (2) Karen Armstrong has written:

Every Sunni fundamentalist movement has been influenced by Qutb. Most spectacularly it has inspired Muslims to assassinate such leaders as Anwar al-Sadat, denounced as a jahili [barbaric] ruler because of his oppressive policies towards his own people. The Taliban, who came to power in Afghanistan in 1994, are also affected by his ideology. (4)

Qutb provided a religious justification for fighting against Muslim rulers and for considering Muslims who didn't share the radical goals of the Islamists as not being true Muslims. He took the idea of "jahiliyya" and gave it a new meaning. For most Muslims, jahiliyya refers to the society in Arabia before the Prophet's revelation, a time of ignorance of God's true religion. Gilles Kepel suggests that "barbarism" may be the closest translation. (6)

Qutb was a journalist who also wrote essays and novels. Up until 1945, his interests were mainly literary. When he first started writing political pieces, he wound up having to leave Egypt in 1948 to avoid arrest by the royalist government, though his political friends arranged for him to do so on the government's dime. He came to live in the United States, an experience which he found quite unpleasant. By the time he returned to Egypt in 1951, he was ready to join up with the fundamentalist ("Islamist") Muslim Brotherhood.

It's interesting to speculate in what ways his encounter with America as such shaped his views, as opposed to the experience of effectively being exiled and taken away from his regular community and his country under those circumstances. John Voll suggests that Qutb's hostility to the West had been influenced by British behavior in Egypt during the Second World War and by what he saw as Anglo-American encouragement of Jewish immigration to Israel. Voll sees Qutb's stay in America as having reinforced those ideas:

He found Americans to be materialistic and lacking in spiritual values and was disturbed by the popular and media support in the United States for the nascent state of Israel. After his return to Egypt, he wrote that in the United States, "any objectives other than the immediate utilitarian ones are by-passed and any human element other than ego is not recognized. Where the whole life is dominated by such materialism, there is no scope for laws beyond provisions for labor and production. The result is class struggle which becomes inevitable and visibly evident." (1)

Gamal Abdel Nasser (Jamal 'Abd al-Nasir) seized power in the Free Officers coup of 1952. Nasser favored a much more secular approach to government than the Muslim Brotherhood sought. Qutb wound up going to prison for a three months in 1954. After Qutb's release, a Muslim Brother attempted to assassinate Nasser in October of 1954. Qutb was rearrested, and was incarcerated in the Tura concentration camp until 1964. The experience of persecution by the Nasser regime and the conditions of the concentration camp were the context in which he prepared his most influential works, Milestones and Under the Aegis of the Koran (also in English translation as In the Shade of the Qu'ran), a long commentary on the Qu'ran.

Arrested again in 1965 in a government move against another alleged Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy, Qutb was hanged in August 1966, making him a martyr to the Islamists.

A Muslim Brother who was Qutb's cellmate in the Tura camp, Muhammad Hawwash, said that Joseph had appeared to him in a dream and gave him a message: "Tell Sayyid Qutb that in my sura he will find what he seeks." (6)

Joseph's sura (# 12) in the Qu'ran relates the story of Joseph being imprisoned in Egypt after his master's wife had attempted to seduce him. There, two of his fellow prisoners related dreams to him. (In the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, the story is in Genesis 40.) Before interpreting their dreams, he tells them:

This knowledge my Lord has given me, for I have left the faith of those that disbelieve in Allah and deny the life to come. I follow the faith of my forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We must never serve idols besides Allah. Such is the fight which Allah has bestowed upon us and all mankind. Yet most men do not give thanks.

Fellow-prisoners! Are numerous gods better than Allah, the One, the Almighty? Those whom you serve besides Him are names which you and your fathers have invented and for which Allah has reveal no sanction. Judgement rests with Allah only. He has commanded you to worship none but Him. That is the true faith: yet most men do not know it. (5)

This concept of idolatry was key to Qutb's interpretation of jahiliyya. Qutb applied the term to present-day Muslim societies, including his own Epypt under the "Arab socialism" of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Qutb's most important book is Milestones (also known in English as Signposts and Signs Along the Path or Signposts Along the Road), which he wrote in the Tura camp and was published in 1964. In it, he wrote: "Nowadays, the entire world lives in a state of jahiliyya as far as the source from which it draws the rules of its mode of existence is concerned." (6) This allowed Qutb and his followers to view Muslim societies and Muslim leaders as enemies of Islam and enemies of God.

Qutb also emphasized that in struggling against the jahiliyya, no doubt having in mind in particular the repressive Nasser regime, true Muslims must not restrict themselves to jihad in only the sense of internal struggle or of defensive war. Instead, they must be prepared to propagate true Islam by "the sword" as well as by "the Book." The "jahiliyya regime" of Nasser, writes Kepel interpreting Qutb, "had to be fought in the way pagans were fought."

Qutb stressed that true Islamic faith must be expressed in action against the jahiliyya rulers.

The notion of idolatry was at the core of Qutb's new definition of jahiliyya. Those thought of themselves as Muslims had actually made gods of other things besides God himself. One of those idols is the concept of national sovereignty:

The principle on which [jahiliyya] is based is opposition to God's rule over the earth and to the major characteristic of the Divinity, namely sovereignty (al-hakimiyya): instead it invests men with this, and makes some of them gods for the others. This transference of sovereignty does not occur in the primitive manner of the pre-hegira jahiliyya [of Mohammad's time], but by allowing man to unduly arrogate to himself the right to establish values, to legislate, to elaborate systems, and to take positions, all without regard to divine ethics (minhaj allah lil-hayah), but rather in accordance with what He has expressly forbidden! Now, to oppose the rule of God in this way is to be the enemy of His faithful.

The degradation of man in general in the collectivists regimes [including Nasser's], the injustice suffered by the individuals and people dominated by capital and colonialism, are only the effects of this opposition to the rule of God, the negation of the dignity that God bestowed upon man! (6)

Earlier Islamists had considered Communist, democratic-capitalist and other non-Muslim societies to be jahiliyya, but Qutb's innovation was to place Muslim societies in that category as well.

Qutb argued that a vanguard of the ummah (Muslim society) must lead the drive for a truly Muslim form of rule. The vanguard must purge itself of idolatrous influences by returning to the true faith of the first Muslims, Muhammad and the first four caliphs who succeeded him as leader of the ummah, also known as the rightly guided caliphs.

Once a vanguard has been established with a truly Islamic consciousness and truly Islamic practice, "In the meantime the battle begins between this nascent society that has declared its secession ... from jahiliyya society" and the jahiliyya society itself. and the latter..." (6)

One chapter of Milestones, that was replaced in many editions published after 1981 according to Kepel, Qutb defines jihad in his theology, insisting that jihad against the jahiliyya cannot be restricted to nonviolent measures alone:

To establish the reign of God on earth and eliminate the reign of man, to power out of the hands of those of His worshippers who have usurped it and to return it to God alone, to confer authority upon divine law (shari'at allah) alone and to eliminate the laws created by man ...all this will not be done through sermons and discourse. Those who have usurped the power of God on earth and made His worshippers their slaves will not be dispossessed by dint of Word alone, otherwise the task of His messengers would be far more easily done. (6)

John Voll summarizes the significance of Qutb's view for the Egyptian Islamist movement:

The major conceptual contribution of Qutb was to provide an intellectual and theoretical foundation for the concrete rejection of Nasserism and the other Western-based radical ideologies of his day. One could no longer simply attack the state as being a foreign puppet. Nasser was the first authentically Egyptian ruler of the country for millennia. Egyptians had gotten what they wanted: a successful nationalist committed to social transformation. Qutb explained why true Muslims could not accept this. (1)

The "establishment" Muslim view of Sayyid Qutb, as enunciated by the authorities of Egypt's al-Azhar university, was simply that Qutb was a heretic and an agitator. But in fact, Qutb's ideas had a huge impact on the Egyptian Islamist movement, an impact which was taken in different ways by those who used his ideas.

Among the more militant strain, one of the most prominent in Egypt was the Society of Muslims, led by the agronomist Shukri Mustafa, who believed that true Muslims should make a physical withdrawal from jahiliyya society in order to prepare to attack it. A more "moderate" interpretation within the Muslim Brotherhood and among other Islamists praised Qutb's ideas but had to refute parts of Qutb's Milestones.

If the concept of "moderate" Islamists seems strange, since Islamists as a group represent a "fundamentalist" interpretation of Islam, it's worth remembering that in 1997 even Al Qaeda disassociated itself, both in its pronouncements and in practice, from the Algerian GIA (Armed Islamic Group of Algeria) after its repeated massacres of ordinary Muslims not associated with theAlgerian regime. GIA had also proclaimed the right to hold women captured in military actions as slaves. Al Qaeda, however, did manage to bring key operatives from GIA's European network into a new group, the GSPC (Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat) which became part of the Al Qaeda network. (2)

One of Sayyid Qutb's most important interpreters was his own brother. Muhammed Qutb taught Islamic Studies in Saudi Arabia. At the university in Jeddah, he made a deep impression on one of his young students, Osama bin Laden.

In 1975, Muhammad Qutb published a piece in a journal of the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood defending Sayyid Qutb's views. He quoted the latter as having said repeatedly, "We are preachers and not judges. Our objective is not to legislate against people, but to teach them this truth: that there is no god but God. The problem is that people do not understand what this formula requires of them." (6)

Muhammad Qutb insisted that his brother's work should not be interpreted as the cult-like Society of Muslims did, to mean that true Muslims should make a physical withdrawal from jahiliyya society. But he also opposed interpretations which sought to blunt the political-revolutionary implications of his brother's ideas. It's a measure of Sayyid Qutb's influence that the less militant tendencies in Egyptian Islamism, particularly among the Muslim Brotherhood of the 1970s, still tried to interpret his ideas in ways favorable to their approach.

1. "Fundamentalism in the Sunni Arab World" by John O. Voll in Fundamentalisms Observed (1991) Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds.

2. Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror by Rohan Gunaratna (2002)

3. Is This the Man Who Inspired Bin Laden? by Robert Irwin Guardian (UK) 11/01/01

4. Islam by Karen Armstrong (2000)

5. The Koran, N.J. Dawood, translator; 1974 Penguin edition

6. Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and Pharaoh by Gilles Kepel; trans. from the French by Jon Rothschild (1985). Kepel's book uses the translation Signposts as the name for Milestones.

7. "The Philosopher of Islamic Terrorism" by Paul Berman New York Times Magazine 03/23/03

8. Sayyid Qutb's America: Al Qaeda Inspiration Denounced U.S. Greed, Sexuality NPR 05/06/03. This has more details about Qutb's stay in the US, which was mostly in the conservative town of Greeley, Colorado.

9. Truly, Madly, Deeply Devout by Jonathan Raban Guardian (UK) 03/02/02

Additional Web sites:

Young Muslims, a Canadian Islamic site with links to an English-language text of Qutb's Milestones. The NPR site above links to the Milestones text. It's perhaps a general indication of the perspective of this site that one of the two articles on Qutb currently featured on this page says that describing Muslim extremist violence as "terrorist" is the practice of the "mouthpiece of the zionist establishment in America."

The 9/11 Commission Report mentions Qutb briefly in Chapter 2. The brief analysis there is not too impressive.


Tags: islam, islamic fundamentalism, islamic law, jihadism, muslim fundamentalism, sayyid qutb, sharia