Lecture
36 / 84
17
Social Justice
Islam, A Coherent Social Justice Tradition | Omar Suleiman | 16th MAS-ICNA Convention
22
Jurisprudence (fiqh)
Appreciating Scholarship: Intro to Islamic Law - Tesneem Alkiek | Yaqeen in NY
26
Islamophobia
How Yaqeen Heals Internalized Islamophobia - Dalia Mogahed | Making Principled Progress
29
Education
How Yaqeen is a Resource for Our Community - Sh. Omar Suleiman | Making Principled Progress
34
General Psychology
Spiritual Personality - Zohair Abdul-Rahman | 2018 Yaqeen/MAS Academic Conference
35
Social Justice
Conflict Resolution: The Line Between Justice and Peace - Sh. Omar Suleiman | Lecture
47
Identity
Keeping Masculinity from Trending Toxic - Dr. Jonathan Brown | Reframing the Gender Question
The Flexibility of Islamic Law - Tesneem Alkiek | 2018 Yaqeen/MAS Academic Conference
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Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. A few years ago there was an article in the Telegraph that was released with the headlines of Ireland leads the world in Islamic values as Muslim states lag. Followed by the subtitle, Ireland best embodies the Islamic values of opportunity and justice according to a survey by a leading U.S. academic. Now when I first came across the article, naturally I thought my first instinct was, you know, this must be some Western Orientalist who's trying to write about how the West is so much more superior to Muslims in the East and the Muslim world. But as I continued to read, I realized what the article was really getting at. That, you know, so-called Muslim countries today don't really embody the Islamic values that they should be exemplifying. You know, whether it's under development, injustice, corruption, Muslim states aren't really the place that people are turning to for inspiration. You know, we're not looking to the Middle East to think, oh, that's what we want to be. That's as our country, you know, these are the values that we want to be embodying. And for those of you who've ever traveled overseas, you know exactly what I'm talking about, right? From something as simple as the fact that you can pay off a police officer, bribe him if he pulls you over, to something as serious as the exploitation of minority workers in many Gulf countries. So this really then begs the question, as was introduced, what went wrong? Were we always like this? Were Muslims always just corrupt or haphazard or, you know, a little messy in the way they organize things? Is this something inherent to Islam or to Muslims? Was someone else causing this? What really was the problem? And so today I really want to retrace our steps a bit and talk about how the Sharia was classically practiced, meaning how Islamic values and rules played out in traditional societies, and walk you through a very brief overview of how things drastically changed just a little over a century ago. Oh no, my transitions aren't working.
Well, I'll try to explain it better. So throughout Islamic civilization in very general terms, you've got three key groups of people. You've got the rulers, the ulama or the scholars, and then you've got the laymen, just your average people. So in order to break this down a bit, I'll start off from the top with the rulers. Very early on in Islam, as far back as the time of the Prophet ﷺ, the Prophet himself ﷺ and later his early khulafa or successors acted both as religious guides and political guides. Down the line, however, the scope of the caliph or sultan or malik, you name it, slowly transitions to one of only the political realm, meaning that they were primarily preoccupied with governance of the lands, controlling the military, and other typical, what we would call, political responsibilities. So what does this mean? Well, for one, they weren't really connected with the communities on the ground. Yes, they're receiving their taxes, but beyond that, the ruler has really no relationship to the average large Muslim community on the ground. They weren't the ones helping them run the affairs. So this is exactly where the ulema or the scholars come in. These are the educated elite who were directly serving the people, not simply by just walking around, responding to people's religious questions, or telling people this is halal or haram, some images that we typically associate with ulema, but in fact, they were the ones to ensure that al-qaf or endowments were instituted, schools were run, that they were taken care of, that the marketplace was cleaned up and supervised, and really ensuring the personal and economic concerns of the people were addressed. And then finally, we have, again, your average faulty manzaid, normal Muslims, a.k.a. us. People like us got to choose whether or not, which scholar we wanted to follow, which scholar we sought out for religious answers and opinions.
And if we were interested, we could also demand evidence if we were capable of judging it. But the point is that we weren't confined or bound to a single scholar. We had the flexibility in choosing who we wanted to follow. So just one final point here, and this is where the chart is a little helpful. In general, we have two categories of scholars. You have the qadis, the qudah, who are judges, who are usually appointed by the state. And then you have the muftis, or the jurist consults, who the community acknowledged as authoritative because of their knowledge. So the qadis, or the judges, were given this badge of authority by the state. So the rulers, the caliph assigned, you know, this scholar is going to be the judge, and he's going to be judging on behalf of my sultanate, or whatever the case is. Versus the muftis, they didn't necessarily have a title because of a person of authority granting them that. Rather, the community is acknowledging them as authoritative. You know, we trust this person. He or she studied with this scholar, and there's this sort of communal trust based off of their scholarship. Now the point in mentioning this difference is that the qadis, by the nature of the fact that they were being paid by the state for their service, they were sometimes limited in what they could do. Now this doesn't necessarily mean that they were corrupt in their actions, and of course throughout history you always have a batch of corrupt people, whether they're scholars or not. But it means they were limited in what they could do in terms of how they could judge. So for example, under the Ottoman Empire, the empire was proclaimed to be a Hanafi empire, so they followed the Hanafi madhhab when judging, right? So the judges didn't have the choice. They had to judge based off of the Hanafi school of thought. Now versus the muftis, on the other hand, they could issue fatwas or legal opinions to religious questions based on any madhhab.
Now typically you would have a shafi'i mufti giving you a shafi'i answer, but if that scholar had knowledge of more than one madhhab, they were free to give you Hanafi answers, Hanbali answers, whatever the case was, right? So they had more opportunities to give you different answers based on your madhhab. So why do I mention all of this? Well, I'm going to give you a very common scenario, and one that happens very frequently actually throughout the Ottoman Empire by nature of the fact that they are a Hanafi madhhab. And again, I apologize in advance for having to be very brief and not going into the evidence and the debates just for the sake of time, but for those of you who are interested, I can recommend a few books afterwards. But the example is that in Hanafi law, if a husband goes out, for instance, if he's going out for war or travel or business or anything of the like, and he goes missing and he doesn't come back, we don't know if he's dead or not, but he's gone. And it's been a few months, sometimes a couple of years. It's extremely difficult for his wife to get, to have her marriage annulled or for her to get a divorce if he's not there, right? And so again, not going into the details of why, but in most of these situations, what would happen is that woman would then turn to the shafi'i and Hanbali muftis to get their marriages annulled based off of the evidence in those particular mevahim. Now in this same situation, if a woman decided, you know what, I'm not really interested in getting divorced. I don't really care to get remarried right now, but I need some money to survive. Money that her husband technically should be providing for her, but obviously he's not there. So what she would do is that she would go to a judge or mufti and present her case. Now what happens in the end is that the scholar is going to take account her entire situation, including her social and economic status, to determine how much a woman of her stature would typically need on a day-to-day basis.
So note here that custom and culture plays a huge role in making these decisions. Okay, and so then, you know, the judge or mufti is gonna come to the conclusion, you know, you're a middle-class woman, you're living in this society, you have this many children. If your husband were around, he'd probably be giving you, you know, $10 a day or whatever the equivalent in that society was. So thus, because of that fatwa or that ruling, that woman is allowed to borrow money, whether from the state or even from a local person, a friend, and she can pull that money out every single day until her husband returns, and once her husband returns, that loan is on his back. So all of this goes to show you that there's a lot of factors at play when people were looking for religious legal answers. Number one, people had options. Again, they were able to go to different muftis, different madhab if their situation was deemed necessary, and number two, local customs were taken into consideration, among, of course, many other factors. So there was this beauty in leniency and flexibility in the law. So when a Muslim in 14th century was thinking about the sharia, unlike most of us today, they were proud. The sharia was that which helped keep the whole world running. It allowed them to have public facilities, educational programs, and really just a functioning society. People lived their normal lives, and the sharia was there to make everything all the easier. But as you might have guessed, things began to change. Starting as early as the 17th century, the Ottomans are dealing not only with a lot of internal political strife, but a lot of military losses to the Europeans as well. Now, just as a side note, the reason why I'm mentioning the Ottomans here in particular is that they've been around for about 600 years. They're one of the most established, most successful caliphates to exist in Muslim history. You've got a few other caliphates that rise up throughout the Ottoman Empire's existence.
You've got the Sokoto Caliphate in West Africa in the early 20th century. But the point is that when Muslims themselves and Europeans, the West, the rest of the world is thinking about Muslims, they're thinking about the Ottoman Empire because that is where the majority, the locus of the Muslim ummah is situated. So back to the Ottomans, you know, they're facing a lot of defeat on the outside. And on top of that, there's a lot of disagreement among themselves. We've got the rise of modernity, we've got the rise of the nation state, and so things are changing, and they're changing really quick. So globalization's on the rise, you've got trade spreading all over the world. And one of the main outcomes of this is that you have more Europeans actually coming to the Ottoman Empire. Because before then, it was, you know, traveling across empires, especially when empires were defined by religion, was very rare. But now with globalization and trade, it's becoming much more frequent. And so what's happening is that Europeans are now coming to the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottomans, for most of them, it's their first time interacting with Europeans. And so now these Ottomans are, you know, talking and meeting with these Europeans, and they're learning about these concepts, you know, our favorite, what today are our favorite buzzwords. They're learning about secularism, they're learning about liberalism, nationalism, and the like. So what's interesting is that, you know, it's no surprise that because these notions of all of these, you know, different isms that we have today, because these notions were created for European problems, and they weren't created organically in order to solve Ottoman problems, these quote-unquote ideals created more problems. What do I mean by that? So when you have, you know, so for example, when the entire Enlightenment, when it came with it, the rise of, you know, we want to be more rational, we want to be secular, separate church and state, that's because they were dealing with Christianity.
They were dealing with a religion that had very little room for reason and for thinking and questioning, right? Versus Islam, we don't have that problem. Reasoning is at the core of creating law and creating a moral society. And so when you, the entire concept of secularism, because it was created for an entirely different situation, an entirely different group of people, when it's brought over to the Ottoman Empire, and, you know, they're holding it up like it's, you know, one of the greatest values in the world, it's a problem because it wasn't created for the Ottomans. And so when the Ottomans are trying to implement these later down the line, it's not really working out. And if, for those of you who are interested in that, Wa'al Halaq's entire book, The Impossible State, is written just on that topic. The point is that these interactions cause more confusion and were really the cherry on top to all of the other military and administrative problems that the Ottomans were actually, were already dealing with. So in light of all of these challenges, the Ottoman leadership knew something had to change. So they initiated a series of reforms that focused on centralizing the military administration, but more importantly, westernizing the existing models. And these reforms culminated in what is known as the Tanzimat period, which literally means the organizing period during the mid-19th century in the Ottoman Empire. So at this point you're probably wondering what in the world does this have to do with Sharia or Islamic law? This is where it gets interesting. One of the main reforms initiated to centralize the administration was the idea of codifying the Sharia. After the, and this is something I mentioned earlier, after the Renaissance and Enlightenment, you know, aka when the West decided things needed to be more rational, they put forward this idea that custom was, you know, and the way just things were practiced in the past, tradition itself was, it was just too chaotic and disorganized, right?
We're too sophisticated for this tradition, and so now we need to codify all of our laws if we want to be a modern civilization, right? So now all of our rules and laws, they're going to be explicitly written down in one book so as to lessen all of this confusion. So again, just to clarify, codification is this process by which you've got this vast tradition, and they want just an easy book. What's one book we can turn to? What's one thing we can look to? Because what's happening again is with all this globalization, you've got Europeans coming to the Ottoman Empire, and if something is happening, if there's a charge that needs to be placed against a European, Europeans are like, what, we don't, I mean, this is, where do we even start? How do I know what, you know, what you're saying? Just give us one quick answer. Where can we find all these answers? So you want quick answers, you want simple answers, and really it's simplifying this vast tradition of law. But the problem is that we're, remember when I said, you know, Muslims throughout history were never tied to a single scholar or book or really opinion, and that they had the option of going to those different muftis with different schools of thought or different opinions. Or the fact that a mufti could tailor a legal opinion specifically to a person who asked based on their circumstances. So when, versus having, you know, this codified book of rules, you know, you can go to this judge, but they're flipping through a book, I mean, obviously to make this extremely general and simplified, they're flipping through a book and it's like, okay, here's the answer. But again, the muftis were able to take into every person's situation into account. So when you have this immense, you know, sea of Islamic law drained into a single book, there's a whole lot less options. This is not to say that what resulted from the codification was entirely negative, but the consequences really far exceeded the benefits.
And the entire concept of a modern legal code really rested on these notions of generalization and simplification. And so if you look at one of the results of this process, you've got the Ottoman Family Law Code of 1917, which was so simplified from all the legal opinions that existed formally, that Judith Tucker, Dr. Judith Tucker, who's actually at Georgetown, she's written several books on this about how the process of codification actually really disrupted women's rights. And it really limited in what they can do. And so now when we think to ourselves, you know, how women are treated overseas, most of it is coming from these problems that originated with this process of codification. And it's not necessarily inherent to Islamic law. Because again, with less options and no consideration to, you know, the personal details of every person's circumstances, it's not surprising that the law becomes more restrictive. It's tightening it on us. So to fast forward, you know, we're now in the early 20th century and things are still changing pretty drastically. There are a lot of details that I could potentially delve into, like the fact that one of the major results of the codification was basically toppling the structure that we have here, the ruler, scholars, and average people. Because, you know, now that we have all of these laws conveniently in one book, well, we don't really need the ulama or scholars. They're not really necessary for the functioning of a society. But again, we can't forget the ulama, we're at the core of, you know, stable traditional societies. And again, they weren't just simply issuing fatwas sitting behind a desk waiting for people to come to them. They were ensuring that communities were functioning from multiple aspects. So now that the ulama are no longer key players in society, we have, you know, we see a focus on simply the ruler and the people. I had a really cool transition, but I have a feeling it's not going to work. Yeah, okay. Point being is that the ulama are no longer in the picture, right?
You've got rulers directly dealing with the average people, the laymen, the society at large. And, you know, really guess what that means. When the ulama are taken out of the picture, you have no one to act as a judicial check on the power of the rulers. Ulama throughout history were there advising the caliphs. They were there when the caliphs were doing something wrong, they were the ones to sort of either rile up the community or keep them calm. They were, you know, key players in keeping the status quo, this balance. And so when the ulama are out of the picture, they're losing their power because no one's turning to them anymore. Then the ruler gains more power. Cue the rise of dictatorships. Now, of course, this wasn't the only reason, you know, cause for tyranny throughout the Middle East and North Africa. When the Ottoman Empire falls in the early 20s, France and Britain are scrambling to get a hold of the Middle East, getting a hold of mostly Arab countries and a lot of countries throughout, you know, the quote unquote Muslim world. And, you know, until this day, really, the West continues to support politically and economically the existence of dictatorships in the Middle East. But what's important for us to know is that, you know, as a result of years of colonialism, Western law and in particular the French civil code was put into effect in most of these Arab countries, obviously bypassing any existing form of Islamic legislation. So what we end up having is the existence of really just approximately four different types of legal systems. You've got places like Turkey, which are entirely secularized. Once the Ottoman Empire collapses and Turkey becomes a nation state, it's an entirely secular legal system. You've got legal systems that are dominated by the shariah, albeit, you know, not the shariah that we know it today, such as Saudi Arabia. And then you've got countries that have been re-Islamicized like Iran.
But most importantly is the fourth type in which is the most common legal system today in the Muslim world, which is one in which Western law prevails, with the exception of personal status law. So, you know, Western law essentially was rewritten into the legal systems of most Muslim countries today, except for, you know, personal status law, which means marriage, divorce, and, you know, your family affairs. And this all really just brings me to my conclusion. So I know I've presented a lot of information today in the past 20 minutes, but I want to just kind of wrap up and say thank you to all of you for being here. But if I could summarize, you know, the whole talk in just one sentence, it would be this. Islamic law as we know it today, or rather, you know, as we see it playing out in the Middle East, when we hear it from the news, whatever the case is, is more often than not a form of Islamic law that was first significantly reduced through the process of codification, and then diluted by Western law. So again, to conclude, what does this really mean for you and I, and why should we be so interested in this topic? Number one, oftentimes we hear laws being enacted in a Muslim country, we assume, you know, that's the only way Islamic law has been practiced or can ever be practiced, right? So if we hear something that's happening in Saudi, we hear something that's happening in Pakistan, whatever the case is, we think, oh, that's Islamic law, done deal, right? Not, this might be one version of one person's opinion, you know, so taking into, again, that flexibility and leniency that's always existed within the Sharia, and being able to understand that there is beauty in that leniency. And really, that's what makes me love what I do, because when you study the methodology of how a scholar has arrived to a conclusion, it gives you so much appreciation for the greatness, really, of the Sharia. And number two, we almost always assume that when we hear something happening, being implemented in Iran or Saudi or any of these countries, we think,
oh, you know, it's derived from the Quran or Sunnah. Honor killings, for example, are one of the most common accusations against Muslims and against Islam itself. Well, if you've read Dr. Bond's paper on Yaqeen about honor killings, you know that what? Honor killings originated from British law, not Muslim law, and most Muslims themselves don't even know this, right? So when you understand that, number one, there's multiple opinions on almost every issue, and number two, that a lot of the problems that Muslims are dealing with in the Middle East today or in the Muslim world are problems they themselves didn't create but were enforced upon them through the process of colonialism, you begin to appreciate, really, the nuance of Islamic law, number one, and you can have that pride that Muslims throughout Islamic history had for the Sharia, something that was a beauty and a gift to them, and also, we can start to be more wary of what we hear and be more critical of the things we hear in order to strengthen our understanding and confidence within the Sharia.
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