Should Islam be blamed for 'barbaric' acts?
By Spengler
Al-Jazeera television on March 9 apologized to viewers after a talk-show guest,
Syrian-American psychologist Dr Wafa Sultan, described as "barbaric" the
response of Muslims to a Danish newspaper's cartoons about the Prophet
Mohammed. "The Muslims' barbaric reaction added to the value of these cartoons.
It simply proved their rightness," said Dr Sultan on the Qatari network. "The
Muslim is an irrational creature, and the things he learned overpower his mind
and inflame his feelings. That is why these remarks have turned him into an
inferior creature, who cannot control himself and respond to events in a
rational way."
Despite the network’s hasty apology, Dr Sultan’s presence on the show is a sign
of the times. The issue of Muslim "barbarism", including honor killings and
other forms of violence against women, has risen in prominence in Europe's
political agenda. The question appears to be: Do Muslims commit barbaric acts
because they are bad Muslims or because they are good
Muslims? Does Islam as such promote barbarism or suppress it? Within the vast
collection of hadith, or apocryphal sayings of Mohammed, are to be found
explicit support for female genital mutilation and wife-beating. Are such
barbaric acts a residue of traditional society that persist despite Islam, or
because of it?
I shall argue that this is the wrong question, for Islam by its nature cannot
be separated from primitive life.
Many Muslims protest that Islamic law does not sanction honor killings, and
that other ethnic groups (eg, Hindus in Britain) are guilty of the
practice. Honor killings are a repulsive aspect of traditional society. We
first hear of such an act in Genesis 34, when after Jacob’s daughter Dinah was
seduced by a man of Shechem, after which his sons Simeon and Levi instigated
the slaughter of the town’s men. But Jacob denounced the act and still
reproached his sons for it from his deathbed.
The Hebrew Bible reports the practice of honor killing, but abhors it. Muslims
remain divided on the subject. Strictly speaking, it is true that Islamic law
forbids a Muslim family from killing an adulteress or a woman who has had
relations with a non-Muslim man. But that is only because Islamic law specifies
that Islamic courts, rather than families, should supervise the killing. It is
not that women (and sometimes men) should not be killed for the crime of
illicit sexual relations, but rather that the Islamic courts should arrange the
killing.
For this reason, Islamic law views quite leniently honor killings that
accomplish what the courts would have done given the opportunity, and many
Islamic commentators do not see why families should wait for the courts at all.
Until recently, Jordan gave "honor" killers sentences of as little as six
months under Article 340 of the Jordan Penal Code, which stated: "Anyone
catching his wife or one of his immediate family in a flagrant act of
fornication with another person, and kills, injures or harms both or either of
them, will benefit from the exculpating excuse ..."
Jordan's King Abdullah succeeded in revising this language, but as the
Associated Press reported last year, "attempts to introduce harsher sentences
for honor killings have been blocked in Jordan's parliament, where the
predominantly conservative Bedouin lawmakers argue that lesser penalties [than
honor killings] would lead to tolerating of promiscuity."
Islamic clerics, to be sure, tend to favor the idea that they rather than
families should do the killing. According to a traditional ruling cited by Dr
Mohammed Fadel and frequently posted on Islamic sites,
The prohibition
against applying a legal penalty without legal authority (bi ghayri sultan)
and without witnesses; cutting off the means to shedding the blood of a Muslim
based merely upon the claim of his accuser, the one seeking the shedding of the
accused's blood. [In this case] the truth of the claim would be known only by
[the accuser's] own statement and Allah, may He be glorified and sanctified,
has made the life of a Muslim a precious thing, and has made the sin in taking
it great as well. Therefore, it [legal punishment] is permissible only under
the conditions in which Allah has permitted it. [Application of legal
punishments] is exclusively for the government so that it may apply that which
Allah has commanded in His book or on the tongue of His Prophet.
There is no question that flogging and execution of adulterers is mandated by
the Koran (eg, Sudra 4:15). As I observed in another context, this point is so
clear in Islamic law that Professor Tariq Ramadan refused to condemn the
practice in a televised debate with then French Interior Minister Nicolas
Sarkozy.
All Islamic commentary on the subject, though, applies to the behavior of
Muslims in a country under Islamic rule in which the only only law is Islamic
law. If no Islamic courts are available, what should an individual Muslim do?
Is it then permissible to take the law into one's own hands? We have no clear
record of Islamic jurisprudence on the subject, for only in recent years have
large numbers of Muslims come to live in non-Muslim countries. But the
reticence of Islamic clergy in the West to denounce honor killings is
noteworthy. Western apologists for Islam who attempt to distinguish between the
religion and primitive practices constantly stub their toes against Muslim
authorities who insist that honor killing, genital mutilation, and stoning of
adulterers is mandated by Islam.
The death penalty for adultery is typical of primitive society (it is of course
found in the Hebrew Bible), but extremely rare in the Jewish Commonwealth
during the historical era. In Hillel's time, a generation before Jesus, the
saying was that a court that handed down one death sentence in a century was
considered a hanging court. Jesus' mercy towards the adulteress reflected a
wide body of Second-Temple opinion.
The crucial issue is why the practices of primitive society perdure in the
Islamic world while they have been eliminated in the Judeo-Christian world. The
practice of genital mutilation, surely one of the most barbaric customs in the
world, is still defended by Islamic clergy. The website Islam Online has the
following to say on the subject:
Before delving deep into the question
of female circumcision, we would like to make it clear that 'female
circumcision' means removing the prepuce of the clitoris, not the clitoris
itself.
As for the Shariah stance on female circumcision, it’s
a controversial issue among the Muslim scholars and even doctors.
In response to the question, the eminent Muslim scholar, Sheikh Yusuf
Al-Qaradawi, states:
Actually, this is a controversial issue among
jurists and even among doctors. It has sparked off fierce debate in Egypt
whereby scholars and doctors are split into proponents and opponents.
However, the most moderate opinion and the most likely one to be correct is in
favor of practicing circumcision in the moderate Islamic way indicated in some
of the Prophet's hadiths - even though such hadiths are not
confirmed to be authentic. It is reported that the Prophet (peace and blessings
be upon him) said to a midwife: 'Reduce the size of the clitoris but do not
exceed the limit, for that is better for her health and is preferred by
husbands.' The hadith indicates that circumcision is better for a
woman's health and it enhances her conjugal relation with her husband. It’s
noteworthy that the Prophet's saying 'do not exceed the limit' means do not
totally remove the clitoris.
And Livingislam.org defends
wife-beating as follows:
The basic rule (asl) is strict
prohibition, followed by dispensation (rukhsa) as explicited by the
Prophet in the hadith below, which al-Shafi`i took for his evidence in
his ruling:
The Prophet said: 'Do not hit the maidservants of Allah!' (la tadribu ima' Allah).
Then Umar (RA) came to the Prophet and said [NB: by way of exaggeration, cf Awn
al-Ma bud]: 'The women are rebelling (dha'irna) against their
husbands!' So the Prophet gave a dispensation (rakhkhasa) to beat them.
Not all Islamic countries practice female genital mutilation, to be sure, and
some non-Islamic African countries do so. The custom is neither universal in
Islam nor unique to it.
Nonetheless, the ubiquity of traditional practices that the civilized world
long has repudiated underscores the fundamental difference between Islam on one
hand, and Judaism and Christianity on the other. No Christian court has
condemned a woman to death for adultery; although the death penalty for
adultery is found in the Book of Leviticus, there is no record of such a
sentence by any Jewish court. Although elements of traditional practice are
found in ancient Jewish law, the entire purpose of the Jewish code is to
separate Israel from the pagan practices of its neighbors. "Holiness" in Hebrew
shares a root with the word for separation. The practices of traditional
society throughout the Hebrew Bible are regarded as an abomination. By electing
Israel, God removes it from the traditional world.
Christianity rejects traditional society all the more emphatically. To become a
Christian, every individual must repudiate ethnicity and be reborn into a
spiritualized Israel. The reborn Christian belongs not to a tribe, but to the
people of God.
Franz Rosenzweig, the great German-Jewish theologian, qualified Islam as a
parody of revealed religion. On the surface Islam mimics Jewish more than
Christian practice; Muslims pray five times a day while the Jews pray three
times, males are circumcised, a similar dietary code prevails, and so forth.
But the inability of Islam to rid itself of the most barbaric practices of the
primitive world at the beginning of the 21st century is a hallmark of a parody.
The resemblances are strictly on the surface. The primitive world persists in
Islam under the Abrahamic veneer, because the religion never offered a
challenge to it. A small people to repudiate the practices of the pagan world,
but a religion that absorbs countless peoples by conquest must accept them with
their customs more or less intact.
In another respect, Islam parodies Christianity. Unlike Judaism, which seeks to
separate Israel from the traditional practices of the surrounding peoples,
Christianity proposes to incorporate all of humanity into the new People of
God, by effecting an inner transformation of every individual. By this
transformation, Christians believe, all of humanity can become holy. Islam
offers a universal religion not of inner transformation but of obedience.
Precisely this form of surface universalism ensures that Muslims carry the
baggage of traditional life into the new religion, for it offers no point of
departure from traditional society.
For this reason it is meaningless to ask whether Islam opposes or promotes the
practices of traditional society, for its method of expansion is to absorb
whole the societies within its power. As a universal religion, it can only
universalize the aspirations of the tribes it assimilates, rather than
transform them. At its worst, Christianity makes compromises with the pagan
heritage of its converts, which is why Sicilian Catholics killed for honor
until recently; at its best, Islam embodies this pagan heritage, which is why
it cannot rid itself of barbarism today.
For more extensive discussion, I refer the reader to my essay
Christian, Muslim, Jew in the October 2007
issue of First Things.
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