These five objectives create what we may consider to be a premodern Islamic Bill of Rights, providing protection for civil liberties. On the specific question of adultery, Islam, like some other religions, takes a strong position, since it seeks to promote the sanctity and stability of the family. Those found guilty of adultery are supposed to be punished by lashing based on the Quran or stoning based on hadith. But there is a high bar of evidence that must be met before this punishment can be meted out: Four witnesses must observe the actual act of penetration.
Even in this age of voyeurism, it would be next to impossible to meet this criterion. The prescribed punishment for adultery was therefore hardly ever carried out in the premodern world.
This situation is in contrast to the brutal stonings that have been carried out in the modern, post-colonial period in a handful of Muslim majority countries, like Nigeria and Pakistan. From my perspective, the above-mentioned rules of evidence were not given due regard. There are other jurists who have criticized these sensationalist examples of stoning as being in violation of fundamental moral and legal principles within Islam. Most definitely not.
Sharia provides women with certain rights that were practically unheard of in the premodern world. Above all, Sharia allows a woman to inherit property from her male relatives and to keep this property for herself, even after marriage — her husband cannot lay any claim to it.
In contrast, European Christian women were not allowed to hold on to their property after marriage until the 19th century. Muslim feminists campaigning for equal legal rights in Muslim majority societies today draw their arguments and strength from Sharia. A disclaimer: this is a basic overview of some of the issues and is not at all comprehensive.
I teach about Islam in Britain in a university but am not a Muslim myself. The details about Islamic law principles are mainly written from a Sunni perspective the largest group in Islam. As it is the result of human effort and interpretation, it is recognised to be fallible and contestable. These terms are often used interchangeably. This means it is not at all as rigid and frozen as Islamic law is stereotypically imagined as being.
In fact, the legal systems of such countries tend to contain a mix of Islamic legal principles, local custom, European law derived from the colonial period, and civil law developed since independence.
The primary difference between Islamic law and other legal systems, like codified law or our own common law, is that the legislator, the originator of law, is God. A scholar, the jurist faqih , is the primary interpreter of that law and produces fiqh. He or she there have been many female jurists is distinct from the judge qadi in the courthouse who implements it. It splits human activity into those which are obligatory, recommended, neutral, discouraged or forbidden haram.
In the early centuries of Islam, Muslim scholars devised processes for assessing the relative reliability of the thousands of hadith then in circulation. Those hadith considered most reliable were preserved in a number of collections. It is this role of individual reason which enables Islamic law to be dynamic and adaptive to new situations. For example, prominent Persian jurist Abu Hamid al—Ghazali d.
We see this in the development of different schools of thought. As a result, different schools madhhab of law developed in different regions, each offering slightly different conclusions about what God wanted Muslims to do in a given situation.
While jurists disagreed with each other on particular issues, many recognised that difference of opinion ikthilaf was inevitable and indeed legitimate, as long as the basic principles of Islam were upheld.
For Muslims today, there is more plurality in Islamic law than ever. Suitably qualified jurists can issue fatwas, or statements of opinion, on particular matters of Muslim life. So Muslims, particularly those outside Muslim—majority countries, are under no compulsion to follow every fatwa issued by clerics. Access to religious knowledge is becoming democratized and globalised.
According to the traditional Muslim narrative, during the early years of Islam ijtihad was regularly undertaken by suitably qualified jurists. In the colonial period, Muslim reformists argued that if European imperialism was to be overthrown, ijtihad and Islamic law needed to be revived to help Muslims respond to the situation.
In a similar way, today some jurists are recognising the need for revived ijtihad. With social and technological change bringing about situations never before encountered by Muslims, some think a new fiqh is needed which specifically addresses the situation of Muslims in minority contexts, including in Britain.
Such scriptural punishments for these acts and indeed, in some cases even the very condemnation of them horrify people today. However, there are several important conditions that mitigate the severity of these punishments:. For it is better for the authority to err in mercy than to err in punishment.
Altogether, then, it seems that the hudud were intended to be harsh enough to ward Muslims off from committing the crimes, but with standards of proof high enough so that the stated punishments were rarely carried out.
They may have faced other punishments handed down by the judges, who could use their discretion to hand down punishments in line with the circumstances of the case at hand. Depending on the crime, those punishments could still have been severe. Many consider these rules to have been designed for a specific historical context and that they are inapplicable for the very different modern world.
In recent years there have been a number of surveys of British Muslim attitudes. These tend to show that British Muslims overwhelmingly feel a strong sense of belonging to Britain. But regarding Muslim attitudes to Islamic law, the polling questions are often very poorly worded and sensationalist, so we learn very little about their actual views, including on the specific issue of the introduction of the hudud punishments.
It may indicate anything from respondents feeling the question was too simplistic to answer adequately, to having given the topic little thought, to being confused or conflicted about the issue. No doubt some will be thinking of the re—establishment of laws that promote socially conservative values.
But others may mean specific changes to English family law, such as the legal recognition of Islamic religious marriage, which would be no bad thing see below. As with the hudud, the reality is more complex. The particular example about testimony is subject to great debate and disagreement among modern Muslim scholars.
Today, some Muslim scholars argue that it was uncommon for women to be involved in commercial transactions in early Islam; the stipulation for two women as witnesses was not a comment on their mental capacity but a reflection of their likely lack of expertise in such matters, with one being able to support the other. Some Muslims will therefore see this stipulation as unnecessary in a modern world with much greater female education.
In the face of non—Muslim assumptions about their oppression, increasingly many Muslim women in the West and beyond are describing their religion, at its origins, as one of female liberation. This is well documented in a range of recent studies, such as by Shelina Janmohamed [16] and Philip Lewis and Sadek Hamid.
Is this too a form of supremacism? Not all Muslims subscribe to the theological concept of taqiyya, however. In fact, it is a minority opinion. Under this methodology one cannot trust any practicing Muslim. Even if a Muslim preaches and practices nonviolence the CSP authors would say that person is either not a true Muslim or is practicing taqiyya. They have, in fact, used this tactic against Muslim-American leaders who advocate strong civic engagement. While providing a mechanism for critics to ignore any disconfirming evidence, adopting such an interpretation of taqiyya would almost certainly result in every observant Muslim being branded a liar.
The authors do not acknowledge that Sharia is something the extremists are attempting to claim. This purposeful misconstruction of the security issues America faces ignores multiple data points and turns all Muslims into traitors. According to a report from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, 85 percent of all terrorist victims are Muslims. The Muslim community, therefore, has good reason to ally with American interests to defeat extremists.
The war against extremism cannot be labeled as a war against Islam. Taking such a civilizational, apocalyptic view could well become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Further, we actually allow extremists to operate more freely without a clear identification of the threat and a consistent and constitutionally defensible system for recognizing and tracking extremists. It is important to recognize that Muslims are in an ongoing conversation to define what their faith will look like.
They have engaged in that conversation for centuries. But the challenge of faith and modernity is not unique to Muslims, and we cannot single them out for their beliefs. They have repeatedly failed in a country in which more than three-quarters of people identify as Christians. We need to both respect constitutional freedoms and understand that the Constitution and our courts guarantee a separation between church and state.
Download this issue brief pdf In the past year, a group of conservative pundits and analysts have identified Sharia, or Islamic religious law, as a growing threat to the United States. What is Sharia? But these specialists do agree on the following: Sharia is not static. Its interpretations and applications have changed and continue to change over time.
0コメント