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Fatwa Gives Women the Right to Hit Husbands

Riyadh, Asharq Al-Awsat - A fatwa originating from Turkey has given women the right to strike their husbands in cases of self-defense.

Sheikh Mohsen al Obeikan, an adviser to the Saudi Ministry of Justice and a member of the Saudi Shura Council agreed with some Islamic scholars in Turkey and Egypt in this regard. “This [issue] is acknowledged by Islamic jurists and it has roots in Islamic Shariah, the Quran and the Hadith [Prophetic traditions],” said the Sheikh. He referred to the following excerpts of the Quran: ‘The recompense for an injury is an injury equal thereto (in degree),’ [Surat Ashoura: 40] and ‘…whoever then acts aggressively against you, inflict injury on him according to the injury he has inflicted on you…’ [Surat al Baqara: 194] (more…)

International Conference
“Rethinking Jihad: Ideas, Politics and Conflict In the Arab World and Beyond”

The University of Edinburgh, 7-9 September 2009

Especially since 11 September 2001, the notion of ‘jihad’ has assumed
centre-stage in public and academic discourses on Islam, Muslims, and the
Arab world, particularly as a byword for terrorism and violence. But
clearly jihad has meant different things to different people at different
times, whether as theory, as action or as metaphor. As a timely exploration
of this diversity, the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World
(CASAW) is convening a major international conference on the subject of
jihad in its multiple dimensions. The conference has three overarching
goals. The first is to bring together academics and others from a variety
of disciplines and specialisations to generate an in-depth discussion of
jihad in its practical, theoretical, historical, juridical and symbolic
dimensions. It is hoped that by drawing on a diversity of perspectives
(methodological, historical and geographical) the conference will contribute
to a deeper and more critical understanding of jihad. The second goal is to
reflect critically on the importance of jihad, however defined, to the study
of the Arab and Islamic worlds: to what extent is jihad a useful analytical
concept? Have students of Islam and the Arab world minimised or overstated
its importance? How should jihad be located in future research agendas?
Finally, the conference will seek to engage with the broader knowledge
community and explore current understandings and representations of jihad
within policy and media circles internationally. It will critique these
representations, as well as explore ways in which academics might contribute
to an improved understanding and contextualisation of jihad in public
discourse. (more…)

The OIC does not speak for Muslims

by Tarek Fatah, Muslim Canadian Congress, UN Geneva

I speak to you as a Muslim who was born in Pakistan and lived there for 30 years and moved to Saudi Arabia where I worked for 10 years. Since 1987 I have called Canada my home. As an author, journalist and Muslim activist, I have seen the role and agenda of both the soft and hardcore jihadis unfold before my eyes and across the Muslim world.

I approach the issue of freedom of speech and freedom of expression embodied in the 1948 UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights as defending a treasured right that few of my co-religionists can dream off, let alone cherish or possess. We are over a billion strong, but almost all of us live under varying forms and degrees of dictatorship and oppression. Barring a few exceptions such as Turkey, Malaysia and Indonesia, and very recently Pakistan, Muslims live under the tyranny of rulers like those of Iran and Saudi Arabia who have used the religion of Islam as a tool to secure absolute power, and to trample all over the human rights of their citizens.

Barely a day goes by without news of gross violations of human rights of Muslims living in so-called Islamic countries. Whether it is honour killings of sisters and mothers or the harassment of gays and calls for their death; whether it is imprisonment of political opponents or attacks on minorities, we Muslims who live in the West are constantly reminded of the rights we enjoy under secular parliamentary democracies as individual human beings. (more…)

by Mohammed Bamyeh, The Immanent Flame, SSRC Blogs, June 20, 2008

It is hard to disagree with the main arguments of Abdullahi an-Na’im’s impeccable book: a healthy religious life requires a secular state, even as political life may remain infused with the religious values of the population. And the historical examples provide added credence to the point. An Islamic state as such never existed historically, even though pre-modern states cannot be regarded as secular in the contemporary sense of the word. But there has never been a state in Islamic history that fused entirely religious and political authority after Muhammad, and it is far from obvious that Muhammad’s own Medina community constituted a state or was meant as a model for any state. All states in Islamic history had a more clearly defined political than religious character, even as they used religion for their purposes or were expected to fulfill some religious roles. In effect, they were political entities that survived to the extent that they accommodated themselves to the diversity (including legal diversity) of Islam and other local traditions. Colonial rule is to blame for rigidifying the sense of what Islam meant, namely by codifying diverse, flexible religious traditions into standard legal formats and ignoring the fluidity of communal boundaries between Muslims and non-Muslims. However, this rigid colonial perspective on the meaning of religiosity and identity was inherited by contemporary Islamic political movements and states claiming to be Islamic. (more…)

MPS say: no to genital mutilation, 18 is minimum marriage age, juveniles cannot be punished as adults

By: Kawkab Al-Thaibani For the Yemen Times

SANA’A, June 24 — A two-day workshop in Parliament concluded that the minimum marriage age in Yemen should be 18, and the sponsors of both brides and grooms should be punished if they allow them to marry under this age.

The workshop’s participants also concluded that juvenile delinquents between the ages of 15 and 18 are not equal to adult criminals. They further recommended laws banning female genital mutilation.

The workshop covered three main areas: the criminality of juveniles, female genital mutilation, and the minimum age of marriage. These three subjects were chosen because the existing laws concerning them are not specific enough and are often ignored.

This workshop was arranged by Parliament, the Higher Council for Motherhood and Childhood, and the Yemeni Network Combating Violence Against Women known as SHIMA, under the sponsorship of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), OXFAM International, and Save the Children, a worldwide children’s rights organization. Attendees included members of the Sharia Committee, who matches the constitutional laws with Islamic sharia law, Parliament members (MPs), doctors and human rights activists. (more…)

In the latest New York Review of Books, Malise Ruthven offers a cogent review of nine recent books about Islam and terrorism. Here is a brief excerpt about Noah Feldman’s The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State. Check out the online article for the full review.

Excerpt from Malise Ruthven, “The Rise of the Muslim Terrorists,” New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 9, May 29, 2008

Jihadis are not the only political activists seeking an Islamic state that will restore the Sharia—the holy law of Islam—to the position it held in pre-colonial times. In a short but masterful exposition, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, Noah Feldman seeks to answer a question that puzzles most Western observers: Why do so many Muslims demand the “restoration” of a legal system that most Occidentals associate with “medieval” punishments such as amputation for theft and stoning for sexual transgressions? What do they mean by, and expect from, an Islamic state?

Feldman’s analysis focuses on the crucial responsibility of the Ottoman state for the decline of the Sharia. Pre-modern Islamic societies were for the most part governed according to an informal division of authority between the military rulers (often outsiders such as the Mamelukes, recruited from warrior societies, which were far removed from Islam’s cultural centers) and the religiously trained class of legal scholars conversant with the law. The informal compact comparable to, but different from, the feudal arrangements in the West conferred legitimacy on the military men on condition that they upheld the authority of the scholars. The system of scholarly control over law encouraged “stability, executive restraint, and legitimacy.” (more…)

from al-Ahram, July 2004

Aisha Abdel-Rahman, better known as Bint Al-Shati’, might have become famous for her fiction and poetry but it was her stories on rural Egypt which launched her writing career in Al-Ahram. The “Daughter of the Shore”, writes Professor Yunan Labib Rizk, had a weak spot for the countryside and its people

From the outset of her career, Aisha Abdel-Rahman, a prominent scholar and writer, preferred to go by the name Bint Al-Shati’ (Daughter of the Shore). She adopted this pen-name, which alludes to her birthplace in Damietta, out of respect for her family’s customs — her father was a scholar in a religious institute in that northern Egyptian coastal city — and because it was also a custom of that age for women writers to conceal their true identities.

Bint Al-Shati’ first made her mark in Al-Ahram in the summer of 1935 when the newspaper allocated considerable front-page space to the problems of rural Egypt. She was only 23 at the time (she was born in 1913), which is not so odd in itself — it was Al-Ahram ’s policy to give a chance to young and talented aspiring writers, of whom some later became its prominent featured writers and literary and intellectual celebrities. What was odd, given her conservative family background, was the level of education she attained. Her father, an Azharite, would not allow her “modern schooling” so he educated her himself, and so solid was his instruction that she came out first among all the female students who sat for the competency certificate for teachers “from their homes” in 1929. Thus encouraged, she received her secondary school baccalaureate in 1934. This was the only certificate she was armed with when she began writing for Al-Ahram the following year. But then whoever said that degrees make a writer? (more…)

Prof. an-Naim speaking at Harvard in October, 2007

The Christian Science Monitor recently published an article about Emory law professor Abdullahi Ahmed an-Naim and the “Muslims Heretics Conference” held in Atlanta a week ago. Here is a brief excerpt, but click here for the whole article.

Abdullahi Ahmed an-Naim has seen what can happen to an Islamic reformer: His mentor was executed in 1985 in Sudan; he himself had to flee the country. Still, the self-described “Muslim heretic” has no trouble traveling the Islamic world spreading his controversial message:

There is no such thing as an Islamic state.

A secular state and human rights are essential for all societies so that Muslims and others can practice their faith freely, he tells his co-religionists.

“My motivation is in fact about being an honest, true-to-myself Muslim, rather than someone complying with state dictates,” says Mr. Naim, a professor of law at Emory University in Atlanta since 1999. “I need the state to be neutral about religious doctrine so that I can be the Muslim I choose to be.”

So committed is this scholar to opening the door to free debate within his faith that he helped organize the first “Muslim Heretics Conference” in Atlanta over the weekend. Some 75 Muslims, engaged in various reform projects, gathered to discuss issues related to sharia (Islamic law), democracy, and women’s rights – and how to cope with dissent and its consequences.

“We celebrate heresy simply to promote innovative thinking,” he says. “Every orthodoxy was at one time a heresy.”

Photograph: April, 2007 demonstration supporting the secular state Reuters

by Alfred Stepan, Project Syndicate

NEW YORK — The Chief Prosecutor of Turkey’s High Court of Appeals recently recommended to the country’s Constitutional Court that the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) be permanently banned. Only last July, the AKP was overwhelmingly re-elected in free and fair elections to lead the government. The Chief Prosecutor also formally recommended that Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, President Abdullah Gul, and 69 other leading politicians be banned from politics five years.

Clearly, banning the AKP would trigger a political crisis that would end Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union in the foreseeable future and threaten its recent strong economic growth. So the Chief Prosecutor’s threat should not be taken lightly – all the more so given that the Constitutional Court has banned 18 political parties (including the AKP’s predecessor party) since the current constitution was introduced in 1982. Indeed, the recent call to ban the AKP is directly related to its efforts to change Turkey’s constitution.

The underlying charge in the Chief Prosecutor’s indictment is that the AKP has been eroding secularism. But the origins of the current Constitution, and its definition of secularism, are highly suspect. (more…)

Noah Feldman, left; Said Arjomand, right

by Saïd Amir Arjomand, from The Immanent Frame

Noah Feldman prefaces his plea for the Shariah in his recent article for The New York Times Magazine (”Why Shariah?“) with a reference to the proposal recently made by the Archbishop of Canterbury to allow the Shariah and Jewish law to be considered in voluntary family and arbitration courts. The Archbishop and the Professor are addressing very different issues, however. The situation of a Muslim religious minority having the option of voluntary recourse to arbitration or court settlement in Europe, as proposed by the former, cannot be responsibly compared with that of a Muslim majority using the coercive power of the state to stone women accused of adultery in Nigeria, or to perpetuate patriarchal domination in Pakistan by keeping even those women who are eventually acquitted by superior courts in shackles and behind bars for many years.

In this article, presumably as a forerunner of his new book, Feldman extends the paternalism of the failed American empire in What We Owe Iraq to the entire Muslim world by telling the Muslims how good they really are; surely they would not realize this without the American law professor telling them. In telling them, he displays one of the worst examples of Orientalism. (more…)