Author Archives: Ikram Hawramani

Ikram Hawramani

About Ikram Hawramani

The creator of IslamicArtDB.

IslamQA: It is permissible for menstruating women to enter mosques and to stay there for lectures

A fatwa from the Palestinian scholar Dr. Husam al-Din Afana, professor at Jerusalem University [view Arabic original]

Question: Is it permissible for a menstruating woman to enter a mosque to attend a lecture?

According to most jurists it is impermissible for a menstruating woman to enter mosques and their main evidence against it is the hadith from Aisha that the Prophet PBUH said: “The mosque is not halal for a menstruating woman or for a ritually impure [junub] person.” (Narrated by Abu Dawud and Ibn Maja). There has been much debate about this hadith’s chain of narrators, as will be explained.

Some jurists also used the following verse as evidence against allowing menstruating women to enter mosques:

O you who believe! Do not approach the prayer while you are drunk, so that you know what you say; nor in a state of ritual impurity—unless you are travelling... (The Quran, verse 4:43).

Despite the fact that this verse does not specifically mention menstruation, they related it to ritual impurity.

Another group of jurists has the opinion that it is permissible for for a menstruating woman to enter mosques. This was the opinion of Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal according to a saying of him narrated by al-Muzani, the companion of Imam al-Shafi`i. Imam Dawud and Ibn Hazm, both of whom belong to the Zahiri school of thought, also share this opinion.

Sheikh Husam al-Din Afana (center)

Imam Ahmad says in a different narration that it is permissible for a menstruating woman to enter a mosque if she performs ablution and is sure that she will not have any accidents. See the Insaf, volume 1, p. 347.

The hadith scholar Sheikh Nasir al-Din al-Albani preferred this opinion as mentioned in his Tamam al-Minna, p. 119. I find this view the most satisfactory, therefore my view is that it is permissible for a menstruating woman to enter a mosque to attend lectures.

The evidence for this view is as follows:

1. Original purity: The basic principle is that entering mosques is forbidden to no one. There is no clear and explicit piece of evidence that prohibits menstruating women from entering mosques. Imam al-Nawawi says: “The best that this school of thought directs one to is that the basic principle is non-prohibition. A person who says it is forbidden does not have a clear and explicit piece of evidence.” (Al-Majmu`, vol 2, p. 160)

Sheikh al-Albani says: “Our view on this question is the same as on the issue of touching the Quran in a state of ritual impurity; which is to assume purity by default, and to recognize that there is no evidence to prohibit it, as Imam Ahmad and others have said.” (Tamam al-Minna, p. 119).

2. There is a great deal of disagreement on the hadith that the majority has used as evidence, which says “The mosque is not halal for a menstruating woman or for a ritually impure [junub] person.” That is because its narrator is Aflat bin Khalifa from Jasra (?) bint Dujaja, both of whom are considered unreliable [da`eef] by many hadith scholars, such as al-Khattabi, al-Bayhaqi, Abd al-Haq al-Ishbili and Ibn Hazm. It is also related from Imam Ahmad that he considered them unreliable.

Imam al-Baghawi says: “Imam Ahmad and al-Muzani considered it permissible to stay in there [i.e. at a mosque] and Ahmad considered the hadith unsound [da`eef] because its narrator, who is Aflat bin Khalifa, is unknown [majhul] and he interpreted the verse [4:43] as referring to travelers who need to make dry ablution [tayammum] in order to pray, as has been narrated from Ibn Abbas.” (Sharh al-Sunna, vol 2., p. 46).

Imam al-Albani mentions that

Al-Bayhaqi says it is not a strong [narration]."

Abd al-Haq al-Ishbili says [regarding the hadith]: "It is not proven [to be sound]." Ibn Hazm goes to an extreme, saying: "It is baseless."

The hadith has two supporting narrations [shawahid] that do not increase its soundness because their chains contain wholly unreliable narrators. (Tamam al-Minna, p. 119)

Al-Albani also mentions it as unsound in Irwaa’ al-Ghalil vol. 1, p. 162.

Imam al-Nawawi considers the hadith unsound in his book Khulasat al-Ahkam, where he includes this narration among the unsound narrations that relate to the issue of ritual impurity and menstruation. (Khulasat al-Ahkam, vol. 1, p. 206-210).

Ibn Hajar says regarding Aflat bin Khalifa that he is of unknown reliability. (al-Talkhis al-Habir, vol. 1, p. 140).

Al-Khattabi says: “They [referring to previous hadith scholars] considered this hadith unsound and said that its narrator Aflat is unknown, therefore the hadith is not fit to be used in evidence.” (Ma`aalim al-Sunna, vol. 1, p. 67.)

He also considered the hadith, as it is narrated in Ibn Maja’s collection, to be unsound, saying: “Its chain of narrators is unsound because Makhduj’s reliability is not verified, and Abu al-Khattab is unknown.” (Sunan Ibn Maja, vol. 1, p. 212)

Imam al-Bukhari mentions in his al-Majmu` (vol. 2, p. 160) that “Jasara has some strange narrations,” a statement that has been considered by many scholars as a judgment of unsoundness about this hadith.

Ibn Hazm considered the hadith unsound in all of its narrations, saying [regarding the narrators]: “All of this is baseless, for Aflat has little fame and his reliability is unknown,  while Makhduj’s hadiths are to be abandoned since he narrates riddles from Jasara. And Abu l-Khattab al-Hijri is unknown, while Ataa’ bin a-Khaffat is Ataa’ bin Muslim whose hadiths are munkar [questionable]. Isma`il is unknown and Muhammad bin al-Hasan has been called a liar and Kathir bin Zayd likewise. Therefore everything in this hadith is fasle.” (Al-Muhallaa, vol. 1, p. 401)

It should however be mentioned that many scholars considered this hadith hasan [not reaching the level of soundness, but considered to be worth narrating]. See Nasb al-Raaya, vol. 1, p. 194.

3. What strengthens the opinion on permitting menstruating women to enter mosques is the general meaning of the Prophet’s saying PBUH: “Muslims never become najis [ritually polluted].” (Al-Bukhari and Muslim).

4. Another fact that supports permissibility is that the scholars permit non-believers to enter mosques whether male or female. A Muslim should be given preference even if ritually impure, and a Muslim woman, even if menstruating, over non-believers.

5. Another fact that supports permissibility is what al-Bukhari and Muslim narrate in the story of the black woman who used to live in a tent inside the mosque of the Prophet PBUH.

In short, it is permitted for menstruating women to enter mosques seeking knowledge if they are sure not to cause the mosque to become dirty, since women have a crucial need for knowledge and learning about religion.

This is a shortened and paraphrased translation.

IslamQA: Why are Muslim men so judgmental about what a woman wears?

This is a topic that really gets on my nerves but I need an insight from a males perspective. Why is it Muslim men are the first ones to criticise Muslim women? Whether it be about how's she's dressed or how her hijaab is worn. I just feel that the majority of men do it as a control thing.

That is not really about religion but about good manners. You will never find a devout middle class Iranian or Egyptian man or middle class European convert to Islam who has a disrespectful attitude toward women. Their families have brought them up to have good manners.

But when it comes to Muslim men who have never learned good manners, for them religion often becomes an arena for what we might call “virtue signalling”, where outward appearances of faith make up most of what matters to them. To such men it is “obvious” that there is something wrong with a woman who fails to engage in the virtue signalling that they think is so important, and so they criticize her.

And it is not just a problem with men. I have often heard Muslim women criticize other women in a similar manner. Generally if a man is the type of person to do that, the women in his family will also do it. The problem is with the entire family’s manners.

The Muslim Plan for Western Civilization: There is No Plan

Interior da Catedral de Amiens by Jules Victor Genisson (1842)

Do Muslims hope to establish a World Caliphate? It is undeniable that some Muslims, including religious scholars, look forward to one day there existing a new Islamic empire that represents “true” Islam and that brings back the glory of the olden days. As is usual with fantasy-land Islam, the thinking is top-down, the caliphate has to be established first, then good things will come.

This is the thinking that drives Islamist political parties, who believe in acquiring power first, then doing good with it. Fortunately, most Muslims do not find their fantasy-land ideologies practical or interesting, therefore throughout the world the history of Islamism has been one of perpetual failure.

Among Muslims there are also ideas about the coming of a “Mahdi” who will establish some holy kingdom before the world ends. Similar to the way Robert R. Reilly thinks that Ash‘arite doctrines are causing a closing of Muslim minds, there are Western books that study Islamic End Days literature and from that make sweeping claims about the thinking and potential future behavior of Muslims. They ignore that almost all of that literature is open to doubt, including the coming of the Mahdi, since it is not based on the Quran. It largely relies on dubious and likely fabricated materials. In the view of many Muslims, End Days literature is entertainment for the masses rather than an intellectually compelling framework to base one’s thinking on.

The truth of the matter is that among Muslims, there is little agreement over what a Muslim’s priorities should be and what they should be working for. Like the Christians of Victorian England, they are happy enough to just get along. This is good, because, like the Christian society of Victorian England, it means there is little room for radical ideologies. People do not expect magic solutions to their problems.

Islam is a democratic religion in that everyone is a civilian. Religious scholars, intellectuals, free thinkers, radicals, conservatives, modernists, ultra modernists, feminists, Western spectators and Western saviors all vie for control of the heart and soul of Islam to reform it, to drag it kicking and screaming into the new century, to open its eyes, its mind, to elevate it, to secularize it, to stop it from having such a hold over people’s minds. All of them largely fail to recognize the limits of their power over human nature, this human nature that everyone tries to mold, unaware that it is a sovereign, a self-molder.

A few months before writing these words I randomly happened upon an online article by Claude Polin, a French professor at Paris-Sorbonne University that I did not read, except for its first paragraph, which said:

What used to be Western civilization is indeed threatened today with progressive extinction at the hands of Muslim immigration, which considers the West as a worthless relic of a useless past, at best, or, in the minds of Islam’s more or less hidden leaders, as a hostile multisecular force to be destroyed, either by sheer violence or by submerging it under a demographic tsunami.1

His phrase “Islam’s more or less hidden leaders” is such a sad misconstruction of Islam that it is almost charming.

In truth, Islam has no leaders, and this is its great strength and weakness. Even if all of the Muslims in the world were wiped out by some calamity, and the world continued without Islam for 500 years, all it takes is for some random person to discover a Quran for them to restart Islam anew.

Islam does not work to establish God’s Kingdom on Earth. Islam is best envisioned as similar to yoga; a person can carry it out daily and expect health benefits from it, but it does not promise to magically solve their problems, turn humans into angels or make this world other than what it is.

Muslims, like bees, are a life form that gives shape to the world, only to go on to die. There is no bee master plan to turn the whole world into one big hive, it is sufficient honor for a bee to take part in the dance of a bee’s existence, and this dance leads to complex and interesting hives that are not the product of a master plan, but the product of each bee following its instincts.

Those who envision secret Muslim plans and societies should actually be far more worried about Islam the way it is. A Leaderless, plan-less movement cannot be fought. There are no leaders to bribe or kill, no plans to obstruct. A person has believed the negative propaganda about Muslims may despairingly wonder what one can do about Muslims. Discovering a hidden organization of shadowy Muslims who have no good intentions toward the West and prosecuting its leadership will give one a nice sense of accomplishment. But there is no such accomplishment to be had.

The best way to envision the functioning and thinking of Muslim societies and their ideas about the world is to compare them with late 19th century English society. This society was Christian, yet Christianity was considered nowhere sufficient to give society everything it needed of meaning and identity. It was a Christian society that looked outward. God’s free men and women experienced the world and tried to make the best of it. In that society, everyone probably had a relative who saw nothing wrong with bringing up religion in polite conversation, using it to propound how society should work and how people should behave. But most people considered such a person deficient in civility. This is not to say that those Christians did not let religion affect their lives. For them religion was an important part of their personal meaning-making projects and strongly affected their behavior, but they would have found it insulting to be considered “Christians” only, as if that said everything one needed to know about them.

The same applies to the Muslims I am describing. There is a reason why “Islamic” social media networks, magazines and newspapers almost all invariably fail. An “Islamic” alternative to Facebook sounds useless to Muslims (some, out of a sense of religious duty, may praise the idea while never actually wanting to use it). Muslim users of social media in the West almost all invariably have non-Muslims in their networks. An “Islamic” social media network narrows down the scope of their lives. It is does not do justice to the complex cultural lives they lead. Muslim users of social media in the West almost all invariably have non-Muslims in their networks. An “Islamic” social media network narrows down the scope of their lives. It does not do justice to the complex cultural lives they lead.

The embodied Islam of Muslim populations, compared to the embodied Christianity of Christian populations, are extremely similar in their real-world consequences. When reading novels like Pride and Prejudice, I was always amazed at how Islamic the ways of thinking and behavior of the characters were. Certainly my father did not drink wine like Mr. Bennet, but the social atmosphere is so similar to the social atmosphere of my Iranian Sunni background that I could have been reading a novel about a Muslim society. The same extends to later works by Christians, such as The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien and the Harry Potter novels by Rowling. There is nothing in the human fabric of these novels, in their ideas and ideals, that feel foreign to me. The characters in these novels could have been Muslim; “Islamizing” the novels would only cause minute aesthetic changes. For example, the people of Rohan wouldn’t drink wine when celebrating weddings.

J. K. Rowling, Dostoevsky and Shakespeare are bestselling authors in Iran, according to Adinehbook.com, one of Iran’s major online booksellers.

Comparing cosmopolitan Muslim societies of today to the cosmopolitan Christian societies of the 19th century is a very fruitful exercise. If we focus on religious discourse among Muslims and compare that to religious discourse among Christians, we get the misleading idea that the two communities are fundamentally different. But if we look at the embodied Islam of today’s cosmopolitan Muslims to the embodied Christianity of late 19th century England, we see two very similar societies whose differences are aesthetic rather than essential.

For a Westerner, it is of course not easy, and in fact often quite impossible, to get a true sense of the experience of embodied Islam. George Orwell writes:

It is quite easy to be on terms of intimacy with a foreign ‘intellectual’, but it is not at all easy to be on terms of intimacy with an ordinary respectable foreigner of the middle class. How many Englishmen have seen the inside of an ordinary French bourgeois family, for instance? Probably it would be quite impossible to do so, short of marrying into it. And it is rather similar with the English working class.

Orwell beautifully sums up the difficulty in understanding the inner life of a foreign society, and it is this very same problem that has made it so difficult for Westerners to understand Islam. To understand Muslims, it is not sufficient merely to spend time in a Middle Eastern country. It is quite possible for a Westerner to spend a decade or more in an Oriental country only to go back home with nothing but a large bag of prejudices, as so many British colonial servants did.

Westerners who have the best understanding of Islam, as Orwell predicts above, are those who have married into Muslim families. Even Western converts to Islam can have highly inaccurate pictures of the functioning of Muslim societies. They can occasionally be observed on the Internet complaining about how none of the Muslims they meet act as the Muslims of their imaginations. It can take them quite a long time to come to terms with the fact that self-consciously religious people are always a minority whether in Muslim or Christian societies, and that most believers by and large judge things based on custom and do not often think to differentiate between what is religious and what is merely cultural.

A Westerner who wants to find out what will happen if the number of Muslims increases can look at the Muslim middle class of Cairo, Turkey, Tehran and Kuala Lumpur when they get the rare opportunity to do so and see how they conduct themselves. They are busy as intellectuals, researchers, scientists and professionals doing what they can to make the world a better place. Their daughters go to university, write books and read even more books. What is on their minds is not Islamic law and Islamic plans, it is solving the problems they see around them.

God’s Stewards

A faithful Muslim eager to live a useful life will naturally look in the Quran to find out if God has any pointers to give regarding what they should do with their lives. For radicals wishing to destroy society then rebuild it, the Quran is vexingly deficient when it comes to utopian ideas. A Muslim who carefully reads the Quran learns that a Muslim’s purpose in life is to be God’s steward. In a farming society, a steward is someone who takes care of a farm when the master is absent, for example when the master goes on a long journey abroad. Stewardship is the purpose of humanity:

When your Lord said to the angels, ‘I am placing a steward [i.e. Adam] on earth.’…2

It is He who made you stewards on the earth, and raised some of you in ranks over others, in order to test you through what He has given you. Your Lord is Quick in retribution, and He is Forgiving and Merciful.3

13. We destroyed generations before you when they did wrong. Their messengers came to them with clear signs, but they would not believe. Thus We requite the sinful people. 14. Then We made you stewards on earth after them, to see how you would behave.4

It is He who made you stewards on earth. Whoever disbelieves, his disbelief will recoil upon him. The disbelief of the disbelievers adds only to their Lord’s disfavor of them. The disbelief of the disbelievers adds only to their perdition.5

‘O David, We have made you a steward in the land, so judge between the people with justice, and do not follow desire, lest it diverts you from God’s path. Those who stray from God’s path will have a painful punishment, for having ignored the Day of Account.’6

The Arabic word for ‘steward’ is khalīfa, which is often translated as “successor”, “deputy” and “vicegerent” in translations of the Quran. The word “steward”, however, expresses its meaning better. A steward cares for the land and manages it for the sake of a master, taking the master’s wishes into account, but having great freedom to use his or her own creativity. A Muslim is a steward who looks after the earth in the apparent absence of its master. He or she is God’s steward, God’s agent on earth.

Muslims, as God’s stewards, do what they can to promote what is good and to reduce what is evil and harmful. And this means for every Muslim to do what is best with what they have wherever they are. Every single good act done in this world is an act of stewardship, and thus an act of worship, whether it is the planting of a tree, helping a friend in need, or donating money to a scientific research institute with the aim of making the world a better place. To make the world a better place, to leave it better than you found it, is to be a steward, and by extension this is what it means to be a Muslim.

In Islam, there is no utopian goal to achieve. Even if we create a worldwide caliphate that rules the world for the next 500 years, it too will perish like all the caliphates before it. Whether we rule or are ruled, whether we are weak or strong, it does not matter; what matters is to do good with the time given us.

The Quran teaches a long view of history that is best expressed in the thinking of the elves in the Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings novels. The elven lord Elrond says:

I have seen three ages7 in the West of the world, and many defeats, and many fruitless victories.

The Quran’s long view of history teaches that the end never justifies the means. Even if we establish what we suppose to be a state that best represents God’s wishes, any evil we do in the process will be counted against us. This is a crucial moral teaching that is opposed to the utopianism of Marxists and various other man-made ideologies that always justify evil and murder if it is done for a supposed greater good. The Quran, in fact, goes to an extreme length to teach its lesson that the end never justifies the means:

Because of that We ordained for the Children of Israel: that whoever kills a person—unless it is for murder or corruption on earth—it is as if he killed the whole of mankind; and whoever saves it, it is as if he saved the whole of mankind. Our messengers came to them with clarifications, but even after that, many of them continue to commit excesses in the land.8

Killing an innocent person is the same as killing all of humanity. There is a mathematics of infinity in this; the life of a human is of infinite worth, meaning that no expected good, no matter how great, not even the founding of the world’s greatest and happiest empire, justifies the killing of a single innocent person.

I can think of no greater affirmation of the transcendence of the human individual and no greater obstruction to Marxist-style utopianism. The verse’s other teaching, that saving a single life is like saving all of humanity, is equally important. A glorious, population-wide victory that is accomplished through evil is of no worth compared to uplifting a single human soul.

The Quran’s view of history is wise and sad. It deflates glory by teaching that it always comes to an end. It deflates human arrogance by teaching that nothing we achieve will last forever, except the good we do that God records for us. It does not teach hopelessness, however. A steward has duties that he or she must carry out, and that means they must try to be the best they can be wherever they are. It teaches to work for good but to not get carried away by this, like it happens to so many, through teaching that hurting even a single human is a grave sin no matter what we hope to accomplish.

Westerners who learn that there are positive and constructive interpretations of Islam, and that there also are negative and dangerous interpretations, go on to worry about the bad interpretations taking over. Am I not just one moderate voice among a sea of radicals? What defenses do Muslim societies have against radicalism? We have a very strong defense, and that is our humanity. Muslims, being humans, are blessed with reason and conscience. Coming into contact with non-Muslims, they are capable of appreciating the humanity in them and empathizing with them. No Muslim I know will happily watch a Christian girl get tortured, they would in fact do their best to stop it. Their empathy for this girl is not due to theological principles. They do not need to go look it up in an Islamic law reference whether empathy for Christian girls is allowed. It is due to their being human and their not believing in a tribalist ideology that dehumanizes outsiders.

Our humanity is sufficient for us as Muslims to make us good and kind people who are not intent on turning this world into Hell. Our history and our present shows this. Radicals like Wahhabis have never been able to take charge except with the support of powerful sponsors, such as the Saudi family in Saudi Arabia (with help from Britain, see Professor Mark Curtis, Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam) and the CIA in Afghanistan (see Professor Andrew J. Bacevich’s America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History).

Muslims, of course, are not paragons of virtue. They are subject to all of the human weaknesses and vices. But they are humans who also embody the same morality that built Western civilization. In Tolkien’s Return of the King, Gandalf says:

But I will say this: the rule of no realm is mine, neither of Gondor nor any other, great or small. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task, though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I also am a steward. Did you not know?

The character Gandalf represents what an ideal Muslim would be in this world. Gandalf arrives at Middle Earth (where the story takes place), spends his entire time improving, protecting, educating, not expecting anything in return, never seeking power, and expecting to one day leave it all behind, as he does at the end of the story. I like to use the example of Gandalf because he is a Western character created by a Christian man. This highest ideal that this Christian man could conceive of gets amazingly close to the highest ideal of Islam, showing the closeness of Islam and Christianity once we can get beyond technicalities and see what truly drives Muslims/Christians. Tolkien’s embodied Christianity is very similar to my embodied Islam.

A Muslim is like a steward who watches over a farm with a sense of duty, knowing that he or she is not its master and that one day he or she will leave it. This stewardship does not seek mastery. It does not condescendingly look down on the world, wanting to control it and remake it for the benefit of the unwashed peasants, like Marxism does. It rather approaches humanity with a sense of respect, honoring it, being considerate toward it, recognizing the dignity of its own meaning-making projects, then wants to do good where it can, without force, but with gentle persuasion. The steward treats his or her fellow humans as equals, claiming no authority beyond speaking the truth.

A Muslim, unlike Gandalf, is denied the pleasure of considering themselves crucial to the course of history. History does not depend on my success or failure. Even if I fail, even if all my works are lost, God is capable of raising another person like me in very little time the way he measures time. This denies us the pleasure of self-importance, while bestowing upon us the pleasure of knowing that we cannot fail. God is already in charge, so nothing we can do can add to his power.

Rebels, radicals, revolutionaries and fundamentalists are closet aristocrats, as was recognized by Frank Herbert.9 They patronizingly look down on the masses, invalidating the meaning-making project of ordinary mortals, considering themselves the chosen elite who see through the mirages that the gullible masses cannot see through who will remake the world in their own image. They always create a feudal mini-aristocracy with themselves at the top, making decisions for everyone else, always with everyone else’s good in mind, of course. A Marxist radical has no plans for being a peasant in Siberia, contributing in their little way to the communist project. They want to be in Moscow at the heart of things, part of a celebrated, powerful and conceitedly benevolent elite that decides things for everyone else. Those who oppose the revolution of course should be shot and wiped out like insects, it is for the greater good.

A Muslim steward is exactly what the above are not. A defining characteristic of Muslim stewardship is the non-seeking of power, which is a very morally demanding requirement. We like to think that we need to gain power in order to do good. The Quran teaches to do good right now, without regard for power.

Whoever seeks glory, then [let them know that] to God belongs all glory…10

All doers of good run the risk of becoming tyrants in the name of the greater good. It is very morally demanding to remain humble, to actually respect other humans and listen to them, when one thinks of themselves as a doer of God’s will, one whose actions are sanctioned by the Transcendent. A Muslim, eager to do good and spread God’s message, may fervently wish to increase the number of Muslims, which should help achieve some imagined utopia. But the Quran deflates these glorious hopes:

Had your Lord willed, everyone on earth would have believed. Will you then compel people to become believers?11

6. Perhaps you may destroy yourself with grief, chasing after them, if they do not believe in this information. 7. [But] We made what is upon the earth an ornament for it, to test them as to which of them is best in conduct. 8. And We will turn what is on it into barren waste.12

The second passage quoted above, speaking to someone who is upset that the people around them refuse to live up to their expectations, reminds the reader that this world is a testing hall and that it will one day become a barren waste, so why be so eager, why let desire overcome you, even if it is desire to do good?

Being a doer of good also runs the risk of being a busybody who does more harm than good with their good intentions. The ideal steward gets beyond this too. By respecting other humans as sovereign meaning-makers, they have a humble approach that admits mistakes and claims no divine sanction or guidance. All power-seeking, glory-seeking and influence-seeking are shunned. If they deserve power, God will grant it, if and when he chooses. Stewards are the servants of an all-powerful master who is already in charge of the universe and who lacks nothing; a steward cannot do God any favors. God has zero need for the steward; rather, any role granted to the steward is a gift and favor from God.

The above is an ideal that Muslims can hope to emulate, although most of them do not achieve it. And the majority of Muslims will likely not be able to describe their role in the above terms. A Muslim who reads the Quran dedicatedly is gently nudged along to recognize and avoid mistake after mistake until they form a vague modus operandi that is to some degree like that of the Gandalf-like steward of God mentioned above. They know that they should not be attached to wealth, to power, to results, always being reminded that this world will end sooner or later, always being told to be kind and forgiving and to do good deeds, and all of these slowly narrow down the scope of possible behavior in the name of God, so that a Muslim who is a dedicated follower of the Quran can, in most circumstances, know the pitfalls to avoid. Through years of falling, of making mistakes, of achieving fruitless victories, and of being reminded and taught by the Quran, a devout and religiously eager Muslim’s character is slowly developed into that of a steward.

By learning all the things that a Muslim should not be, a Muslim learns what they should be. And along the way, they are offered various Gandalf-like characters in the Quran that they are encouraged to emulate. Gandalf, of course, being a divinely-sent guide who helps humanity and then leaves, is almost certainly inspired by the Biblical/Quranic prophets.

All of the lovers of the Quran I have met have been kind, compassionate humanists who can appreciate the humanity even in those who disagree with them and oppose them.13

The effect of the Quran’s teachings is very clear for those willing to see it. Extremism only results when the Quranic program is abandoned for a man-made program, often put forward by a prominent thinker who replaces the stewardship core of the Quran with a focus on seeking power in the name of the greater good.

Political Islam

To not seek power but try to do good, relying on God, will naturally feel naïve, especially for young people who are eager for action and glory. It may sound like nothing but foolishness to not want to seize the world and make it better, and certainly this is how some will interpret these views about God’s stewards. But if there is a God, and if he is as he says he is in the Quran, then the steward’s mode of behavior makes perfect sense. The Quran teaches that, when it comes to power, the game is already over. God is already in charge and he needs no favors. What he wants is just one thing:

1. Blessed is He in whose hand is the sovereignty, and Who has power over everything. 2. He who created death and life—to test you as to which of you is better in conduct. He is the Almighty, the Forgiving.14

We are in the presence of an all-powerful Mentor-King; while we cannot do him any favors, and while he already has total power, he is interested in seeing what we will do. He is interested in seeing us work toward the highest ideals we can imagine. This world is nothing but God’s factory for producing humans who worked toward those ideals.

To a person who does not believe in the metaphysical, a belief system that rejects power may sound self-defeating. How can one hope to do good if one lacks power? If the metaphysical did not exist, it would naturally make sense to seek power, to act according to the physical laws of the world, including sociological laws.

But if the metaphysical exists, if the God of the Quran is a true God, and if one believes in him, then it makes sense to take him at his word; to do as he says, rather than as our human desires would have us do. As Muslims who believe in the Quran, we believe that all power already belongs to God, therefore what must be sought is what is with God, not what is with people.

An ideal steward does not seek power; therefore he or she cannot be part of a political party without suffering inner moral conflict. To them politics is a game for power-hungry, pathological personalities, or naïve do-gooders.

While Islamists have a top-down view, where they have to be at the top to force goodness on everyone else, Muslim populations have a grassroots view, the view that if everyone were good and wholesome inside, the country’s leadership would be good and wholesome. The example of Muhammad and Saladin support this grassroots view, and so does the Quran:

God does not change the condition of a people until they change what is within themselves/their souls.15

God has promised those of you who believe and do righteous deeds, that He will make them established stewards on earth, as He made those before them established stewards, and He will establish for them their religion—which He has approved for them—and He will substitute security in place of their fear…16

128. Moses said to his people, ‘Seek help in God, and be patient. The earth belongs to God. He gives it in inheritance to whomever He wills of His servants, and the future belongs to the righteous.’ 129. They said, ‘We were persecuted before you came to us, and after you came to us.’ He said, ‘Perhaps your Lord will destroy your enemy, and make you established stewards in the land; then He will see how you behave.’17

The last passage with Moses shows the opinion of one of the Quran’s main characters when it comes to politics. He calls his followers to be patient and tells them that God may choose to one day make them powerful. He does not tell them to seek power or to be up in arms against the Pharaoh. Muhammad’s life shows the same pattern. Despite years of persecution, abuse and torture, his followers patiently took it all without striking back and without organizing into a mob or militia. In the end, God’s promise came true the way it came true for Moses’ people; Muhammad was invited to become the ruler of the city-state of Medina, and from there a worldwide power was established,that was soon to be corrupted and turned into an instrument of evil and injustice, again, similar to the story of the people of Moses, who, no sooner had they been established in Canaan than they started to worship other gods and engage in evil.

None of the prophets mentioned in the Quran took part in a power struggle as part of furthering their message. Moses did not try to stir up a rebellion against Pharaoh despite the hundreds of thousands of Hebrews who probably took him seriously. The prophets try to effect reform within the existing power structure, through persuasion rather than force. They often attract a following of largely poor and powerless people. They are laughed at and are threatened with expulsion. The prophet and his followers endure until God grants them refuge and safety, such as in the form of Muhammad’s migration to Medina. Only then he had to be involved in politics.

While the Quran’s teachings and its long view of history strongly discourage political power-seeking, they do not discourage political activism. The great stewards of the Quran were people who spoke up against evil and injustice and tried to make things better. In fact, it appears that part of the function of a steward is to be a gadfly to the strong and powerful:

And to Median, [We sent] their brother Shuaib. He said, “O my people, worship God; you have no god other than Him. A clear proof has come to you from your Lord. Give full measure and weight, and do not cheat people out of their rights, and do not corrupt the land once it has been set right. This is better for you, if you are believers.” “And do not lurk on every path, making threats and turning away from the path of God those who believe in Him, seeking to distort it. And remember how you were few, and how He made you numerous. So note the consequences for the corrupters.”…The arrogant elite among his people said, “O Shuaib, We will evict you from our town, along with those who believe with you, unless you return to our religion.” He said, “Even if we are unwilling?”

We meet this same steward in another passage where we meet the only instance of the word “reform” in the Quran:

88. He said, “O my people, have you considered? What if I have clear evidence from my Lord, and He has given me good livelihood from Himself? I have no desire to do what I forbid you from doing. I desire nothing but reform, as far as I can. My success lies only with God. In Him I trust, and to Him I turn.”

89. “O my people, let not your hostility towards me cause you to suffer what was suffered by the people of Noah, or the people of Hud, or the people of Saleh. The people of Lot are not far away from you.”

90. “And ask your Lord for forgiveness, and repent to Him. My Lord is Merciful and Loving.”
91. They said, “O Shuaib, we do not understand much of what you say, and we see that you are weak among us. Were it not for your tribe, we would have stoned you. You are of no value to us.”18

Shuaib is such an annoyance to the power elite of Median that they threaten to stone him to death. His ideas about financial reform are met as follows, which is one of the rare places in the Quran where we see sarcasm used:

They said, “O Shuaib, does your prayer command you that we abandon what our ancestors worshiped, or doing with our wealth what we want? You are the one who is intelligent and wise.”19

Muslim stewards, who are meant to emulate these stewards before them,20 are called, through following their example, to be political activists and reformers without being power-seekers. It is perhaps every politician’s wish to be allowed to do whatever they think is good without being taken to task for it, and for most politicians, this often means doing evil in the name of the greater good, something that is wholly rejected by Islamic morality. Muslims are taught to think that all power belongs to God. This teaches them to not be intimidated by powerful people. A steward looks at a king or dictator and sees them become a footnote in the history of such and such 100 years from now. It is an annoyance and a challenge for the elite oligarchy of a nation to not be taken seriously; for their wealth and power to be devalued and their authority rejected whenever they justify evil in the name of good. And that is exactly what the ideal steward does.

The ideal stewards are also perhaps the ideal citizens of a democracy, because they hold politicians to the highest standards and take them to account whenever they deviate. They cannot be silenced or intimidated because they do not take the world and its powers seriously. They cannot be bought with promises of wealth and power because they reject these things, believing that the wealth and power that God grants is better. And since they themselves do not partake in the game of politics, they have no attachment that blinds them. They critique everyone and speak their minds freely, considering none too holy or dangerous to be critiqued. Ideal stewards are threats to established power whether they are in a Muslim or non-Muslim country, unless the power is truly benign and benevolent. In Saudi Arabia they would criticize the excesses of the Saudi family, the evils of Saudi’s servility to the United States, the evils and corruptions seen in their own neighborhoods and towns. In the United States, instead of acting like an interest group that allies itself with whatever politician who promises Muslims good things, they judge everything the way God would judge them. A politician who tries to woo Muslims but has a record of supporting unethical corporations will be judged by that record by a true steward.

The Muslim population, like any population, is subject to manipulation and intimidation. The above only describes the ideal steward that the pious and intelligent among the Muslims try to emulate.

While political power-seeking is rejected by the best Muslims, political activism is not. A Muslim can be involved in all kinds of activities meant to reduce corruption and create reform, as long it does not involve power-seeking. Instead of creating the American Muslim Party that seeks to gain power to do good, they donate their money to institutes that seek to hold the government accountable, or they themselves work as writers, journalists and activists working for various political causes.

Turkey’s Muslims support Recep Tayyip Erdoğan because he is a charismatic personality who promises to work toward empowering the Turks. The fantasy Islam view would seek to find in Erdoğan an embodiment of Islam, then it would seek to generalize this; this is what Islam looks like if it were to be allowed to gain power.

In reality, had Turkey been an entirely Christian country, an Erdoğan would still have been very much possible; a populist who seeks power in the name of nationalism and caters to the religious feelings of the population is nothing special. This is what any clever populist would do, and this is what many Eastern European leaders do to attract Christian voters.

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has tried to spread its ideology of seeking power in the name of the greater good to the rest of the world, yet despite the fact that it has a moderate Sunni ideology, its history has been a history of perpetual failure. Even though its various offshoots claim to have nothing in mind but the betterment of Muslims, Muslims, being humans with independent and skeptical minds, judge them as humans do. The Islamist parties may claim to have the best ideas about how society should function, their ranks may even contain certain individuals admired for their piety and sincerity, yet due to their politicized nature, the average Muslim feels uncomfortable associating with them; there is no compelling reason to do so, and the existence of hierarchies of power within these organizations makes them feel dirty to Muslims. Even if a Muslim has a positive view of them, joining them feels like losing one’s independence and freedom, since one immediately becomes subservient to the party’s power structure.

The translation of the Western institution of a political party into an “Islamic” one leads to inherent contradictions and dysfunctions. The Quran teaches an extreme egalitarianism where no person is superior to any other and where every person retains the right to critique any other. The Islamic political party invariably clashes with this framework of thought; for a self-respecting intellectual to join them is to degrade himself or herself. One automatically becomes associated with a power structure full of individuals of questionable sincerity (even if a few are known to be sincere). This attachment to this structure is a loss of intellectual independence and a loss of the God-given freedom of the soul, and it always feels too similar to associating oneself with the rich and powerful for it to feel elevating, regardless of one’s intentions for joining the party.

In the Kurdistan region of Iraq (population over 5 million), there are multiple moderate Islamist parties seeking power, the main one considering itself the Kurdish branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Despite the fact that the region is a Muslim-majority, Sunni-majority region, these parties have had little success, even among devout Muslims.

When it comes to an Islamist party, the individuals working for it are judged individually. Some of them are the butts of jokes, others are admired. And to devout Muslims, joining the party feels like taking part in some ridiculous pantomime, the way joining a political party feels to many Americans and Europeans. It feels especially degrading to an intelligent person who values their own independence of mind. They may, of course, vote for an Islamist candidate in a local election if they consider him or her to be sincere and worthy, or if they consider him or her the lesser evil compared to other candidates.

The example of the failure of political Islam to gain ground in Iraqi Kurdistan has been repeated everywhere else in the Islamic world. When the Islamic world is given a chance to function on its own without foreign interference, as in Malaysia, what comes about is a very Western-style civilization where Islamists have little reach. Muslims, rather than giving into Islamist hysteria, remain culturally conservative, respecting their institutions and shunning radicals.

Iran had a democratic government that was overthrown by the CIA and British intelligence.21 A violent and incompetent military dictator was reinstated, whose forced secularization project and all-powerful police state engendered sufficient hatred and disgust among the Iranian population that they were glad to accept any alternative. The Islamist Ayatollah Khomeini exploited this opportunity, attracting both the religious and the secular through professing respect for the principles of democracy and religious freedom.22 After gaining power, Khomeini quickly moved to secure his position, making himself absolute ruler, with direct control of the military and the political process.23

It would be a mistake to see in Iran an expression of the natural tendencies of a Muslim people. Iran is what happens when a country is made the plaything of Western powers that support a despotic dictator and his police state. Khomeini appeared at the right time and was given constant coverage by the West’s media during his stay in France, helping convince the Iranians that he was their natural leader against the tyrannical Shah. Khomeini did not show his true colors until months after the founding of the revolutionary government, and for a few years into his rule, the pretense of true democracy was maintained.

I consider the failure of political Islam a good thing despite the fact that I consider many of the people involved in it good people, and despite the fact that I believe them when they say they have the best of intentions, because political Islam always ends up being a vehicle for oppression if it achieves its goal of gaining power. Let us think of an imaginary Muslim village in which there is an Islamist who wants to create his own political party. The Islamist thinks, “If only everyone joined this party, we would be able to do so much good!” This thought, in itself, is dehumanizing toward his fellow humans, because it ignores the fact that many among his fellow villagers could have powerful human reasons for not associating with him and his friends and for not wanting to belong to a power structure that operates in parallel to the one already in force (law, custom, societal relations). Perhaps they remember his past, and knowing that he is not infallible, are not comfortable with giving him even more power.

The Islamist has to believe in the utopian but inhuman idea that everyone could become a member of his party. It is only in the heights of arrogance that a person cannot see that people could have thousands of reasons for not wanting to join him. What occurs in reality is that the Islamist is able to attract a following of like-minded people, closet aristocrats who, just like Marxists, think they should think for the benefit of everyone else and make their decisions for them. The party grows until it attracts perhaps 5% of the village’s population, more if it has wealthy backers.24Then it stalls. Unless a preponderance of unfortunate circumstances enables them to gain power as happened in Iran, the party will remain on the margins of society. People may appreciate any good they do, they may even befriend them closely, but they will not submit themselves to it.

The reason that Muslims do not join Islamist parties is the same reason that most Americans do not join political parties. Americans may identify more with one party than another; the Republican Party continues to profess some allegiance to Christian morality, and this helps attract devout Christian voters. But the parties are not treated as representative of the heart and soul of the population; they are rather treated like artificial structures, similar to corporations. They are not the will of the people; they are the will of the people who work for the party.

Similar attitudes can be seen among Muslims toward Islamist parties. Even in a conservatively Muslim country like Egypt, in the 2012 presidential elections, the Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi won by a narrow margin over the secular candidate Ahmed Shafik (51.73% versus 48.27%). Morsi’s government, reflecting the usual Islamist mindset (as is also seen in Erdoğan’s Turkey), tried to give itself sweeping powers, leading to violent protests and opening the way for the Western-backed coup the ousted him.25Morsi appeared to be a sincere and a well-meaning leader, but this does not excuse his lack of interest in dealing with his detractors on equal terms. Feeling himself blocked and hindered at every turn by the seculars, he tried to give himself the leverage of power in order to overcome these obstacles.  This is not stewardly behavior, since a steward works through persuasion rather than compulsion. His thinking was probably that he could do so much good if only these dinosaurs left over from the previous regime could be taken out of the way. His wish for leverage was nothing more than a wish for overcoming the will of nearly half the population supposedly for their own good. This is not civilized behavior, since it discounts the human sovereignty of this section of the population. If he had been rightly respectful of his fellow humans, he would have worked to create a new political system that equally pleased the seculars. This would have meant creating a secular government that respected religious freedom and that did not impose Islam on secular citizens.

If a Western country ends up having a population that is half Muslim, this in no way suggests that this would open the way for an Islamist takeover of the government. Islamists have failed miserably in the heartlands of Islam, it is sheer fantasy to think that they would have more success in the West. Albania’s population was 56.7% Muslim in 2011,26 yet it has a stable Western-style government. The president is Ilir Meta, a Muslim who claims adherence to Islamic values, yet he is indistinguishable from any Western statesman in his manners and politics.

Similar to so many other issues concerning Muslims, the issue of Islam and politics has a “fantasy Islam” version imbibed with the worst prejudices, and a real-world version that is complex and full of human elements.

Jihad

It is a fact that up to the 20th century there was a mainstream view that jihad (literally “striving in the way of God”) was meant as a military endeavor aimed at the constant expansion of Islam. Taking such views seriously, as representative of Islam-the-sociological-phenomenon, is like reading the sermons of the Catholic Church in support of the Crusades as representative of Christianity.

The vagueness of the concept of jihad in the Quran lends itself to many interpretations. The religious scholars, from their ivory towers, continued to favor the interpretation that jihad was a call to constant expansion. The Muslims were the good guys, so it only made sense to spread this goodness as far and wide as possible, and to only make peace with the infidels only when too weak to carry jihad forth.

The world-jihad idea continued to survive in the madrasas of the scholars while the real world around them completely ignored it. Muslim states maintained diplomatic ties with those around them and acted similar to non-Muslim states, dealing with the world according to the needs of the time. The concept of jihad continued to be used by rulers who wished to drum up support for their wars, but the theoretical idea of permanent, non-stop jihad was just that, a theory, that was used when convenient without defining the modus operandi of any Muslim government.

It has been common to take the scholars at their word, completely ignore history, and paint the picture of Islam as a permanently aggressive force that can never live in peace with the outside. One should distinguish between the fantasy Islam of the scholars and the real-world Islam embodied by Muslim populations. It is completely irrelevant what scholars write in their books if the average Muslim does not take their writings on some topic seriously. And this has been exactly the case when it comes to jihad. There is no urgent need for reform of the Islamic literature to prevent the Middle East from blowing up as some reformers think. The overwhelming majority of Muslims themselves stand against Jihadi ideologies because they have a human understanding of the world around them and know that the utopia promised by Jihadism is complete nonsense, and the American-trained head-cutters in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria provide ample proof to Muslims for the horror and misery that Jihadism promises. For Muslims, it is not necessary for the jihad to be taken out of their medieval books for them to be safe from Jihadism; being blessed with living somewhere that is not relevant to the United States’ geopolitical goals, such as Morocco, is the best way to be safe.

Things are actually even better than that. With the increase in literacy and learning over the past 200 years and the wide dissemination of Islamic references among the population (references are no longer locked away in madrasas) has enabled Muslim intellectuals to start engaging with the scholars and challenging them to reform their thinking when it comes to jihad, so that throughout the world today Muslims, including the most respected and admired scholars, are busy redefining and clarifying the concept. As already said, this is not of crucial importance to the world’s Muslims, what is taking place is that embodied Islam is finally seeping into theoretical Islam now that Islamic scholarship is no longer bound to the ivory tower atmosphere of the madrasas.

500 years ago, the majority of Muslims lived in states that acted like modern states; with borders, diplomatic policies and sophisticated diplomats and statesmen. That continues to this day. Modernizing jihad doctrine will not change anything when it comes to the realities of daily life for Muslims. It will only help remove an annoyance; that of Muslims being considered potential Jihadists by the ignorant.

As a devout Muslim, I naturally take the Quran’s statements regarding jihad seriously. My interpretation, which is the interpretation of the overwhelming majority of Muslims one way or another, is that jihad refers to two things at the same time: the duty of every Muslim to contribute toward defending theirs states against aggressors, and the more general duty of every Muslim to strive to please God: to be a steward. Most of the Quran’s discussions of jihad are centered on warfare, but not all of them. While he was a subject of the pagans of Mecca, Prophet Muhammad was commanded to conduct jihad against them (in the Meccan chapter 25 of the Quran). Did this mean that he started to gather up an armed group to take over the city? Of course not, since he was receiving revelations from God, not from the CIA. God had forbidden him from fighting. While being commanded to conduct jihad, he was also commanded to forgive the pagans and be lenient toward them (verse 86:17, 15:85, 15:94). An intelligent reader of the Quran has therefore to reconcile these facts, and the reconciliation, which has been conducted everywhere in the Muslim world in some form, is that jihad’s general meaning is to strive for the sake of God in whatever way possible, while one of its specific applications is toward conducting warfare when the circumstances justly demand it. Violent jihad is a matter of statecraft; it was only permitted to the Prophet once he had become the ruler of the sovereign state of Medina.

I have been asked why the Quran contains violent verses; why is it not a nice book telling us just to be nice? The reason is that life is not nice. Is there a single state in the world whose rulers say that they will not keep an army because niceness is sufficient? Even Sweden, perhaps the most strongly environmentalist and feminist nation in the world, keeps a powerful army. The Quran, among its many moral and ethical teachings, provides suggestions toward proper foreign policy; it recommends that Muslims keep well-equipped fighting forces (as every country today does), it defines where and when fighting can take place and where and when it cannot, and always recommends that the Muslim side should accept peace offers from the other side (2:193, etc.), and asks Muslims to respect their contracts and treaties. The Quran has a no-nonsense but ethical view of foreign policy. Calling the Quran violent because it defines and regulates the violent requirements of foreign policy is like calling the US Constitution violent, since it does the same.

The Fate of Western Civilization

The comparatively high fertility rate of Muslims living in the West has created fears of an “Islamization” of the Western world. Some people talk about Eurabia and Londonistan. By placing the issue of the growth of Muslims outside the bounds of public discourse, leftist media organizations like the New York Times have been able to stifle discussions of the topic, so that anyone who brings it up can be automatically dismissed as a bigot.

Opposite them stand a minor group of dissident intellectuals who think they are bravely fighting for the fate of their civilization against foreign invasion, having fallen into the trap of confusing fantasy Islam with real-world Islam.

Today, Portugal’s population is shrinking. Its countryside is being abandoned, thousands of villages are being reclaimed by nature.27 As the population deteriorates, the remaining citizens have to move to larger towns in order to get the services they need. According to the World Bank, Portugal’s fertility rate has been below replacement levels since 1982, meaning Portuguese women have been having fewer children than is needed to maintain their population.28 It usually takes 30 years for a population to start shrinking once it hits below-replacement fertility. Portugal’s population peaked at 10.57 million in 2010. By 2016 it had fallen to 10.32 million.

Portugal’s fertility rate in 2015 was 1.23, meaning that women of fertile age were on average having 1.23 children throughout their fertile period. The women in a population need to give birth to about 2.1 children in their lifetimes in order to produce a new generation that is the same size as the one before it. What Portugal’s fertility rate means is that each generation will only reach 58.5% the size of the previous generation. In this way, a village that has a population of 250 fertile-age women (total population 1000) will only have 10 fertile-age women left in 6 generations (168 years), due to the successive shrinkage of each generation. By then, this imaginary village would probably have long been abandoned.

What is happening to Portugal, which has been spared Muslim immigration, seems to be a run-of-the-mill process that happens to all civilizations. A socially conservative, high-fertility-rate population establishes itself in an area and builds it up. Prosperity and growth come about until a stage of civic life is reached where people question the virtue of having children; life goes on well enough without them, so why burden oneself with them? Having children becomes a choice rather than an unquestioned part of life as it used to be for the supposedly naïve forefathers of old. Why burden oneself with children when there is so much to do, and when one hasn’t yet figured out the meaning and purpose of life, and when one is already under so many financial pressures?

Western youth by and large do not consider themselves part of the project that is Western civilization and those who have passed through the Western university system are likely to have been taught by their professors to consider this civilization evil and harmful, something to apologize for and dissociate themselves from. Such youth will naturally not feel bound to contribute to this civilization, nor will they look forward to the civilization’s flowering.

It is culture that lead to civilizations. The Victorian bourgeoisie (i.e. middle and upper classes) had a reliable and predictable social system that led to so much free time and energy that everyone was in some way thinking of doing good works, of making themselves useful. In an uncivilized society people do not have to worry about being useful. One is either useful or dead. The material world’s demands fully capture one’s attention. One has to seek food, shelter, avoid predators, avoid social threats, find mates and keep mates. Victorian Christianity suppressed that “noise” of the material world; it put them all out of the way. Food and shelter were plenty; a rigid social code made social life very predictable; a rigid sexual morality made mates reliable. While religion is often thought of as a restrictor of freedom, it can actually be thought of as a creator of freedom. It suppresses the noise of the material world and its demands, creating a reliable structure within which one is free to act.

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.29

An imaginary “free” society where no man can trust his wife (who is free to flirt and cheat), where he cannot trust his business partner, where he cannot trust his own children, where he uses drugs and prostitutes without being sanctioned, is not a free society. It is a society that is very much oppressed by the material world. Hence it is an unproductive society.

The best sign that a society is too oppressed by the material world to have free energy for other things might be below-replacement fertility rates. Having and raising children requires great commitment of one’s energies, and the presence of trust in one’s mate and the social system. In a modern society these are lacking. The material world drains one’s energies through financial need, unhelpful relatives, unkind and uncharitable employers who are determined to give as little as they can to their employees, and not the least of its oppressive qualities: the unreliability of mates. In this world of misanthropes, how is a man or woman to find the energy and stability to produce children? Women’s strong instinctive desire for children ensures that many will have at least one child in their lifetimes, and a few will have two. But they stop there. And that is nowhere enough to sustain civilization.

The usual story of a civilization is one of acquiring a culture. Note that I am including religion in my definition of culture, in fact it is culture’s most essential element. The culture suppresses noise and makes life stable (think of the Germanic tribes converting to Christianity and becoming the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire), which leads to the freeing of energy to build and create. Eventually the population questions the worth of their culture, so that its elements are slowly abandoned. Life loses its reliability and stability, noise reasserts itself and drains energy, fertility rates fall below replacement levels, the civilization enters into a centuries-long era of twilight until it either goes extinct, is conquered, or acquires a new culture that revitalizes it.

A civilization can continue functioning for centuries during its twilight. If Portugal’s population continues to shrink at its 2014 rate of 0.5%, it will still have 6.2 million people a hundred years from now, and 200 years from now it will have 3.7 million people.

What will happen if this dying civilization acquires Islam? To avoid the racial issue, let us imagine that this happens through the conversion of the local population, rather than immigration.

If we are to use ideas from fantasy Islam to make projections about what may happen, as is so often done, one may imagine a militant Wahhabi dystopia coming about.

But if we are to think about real-world Islam, the embodied Islam of Muslim populations, we get a very different picture. Iranian society provides a very useful data point. Being the largest Muslim Indo-European nation, they are distant cousins of the Portuguese. Looking at Iranians (whether the Shia majority or the millions of Iranian Sunnis), we may ask if they are doing anything that is fundamentally at odds with the Portuguese Western-style way of life. Are Iranians systematically destroying their pre-Islamic heritage and rejecting it? No, in fact they are quite proud of it and celebrate it. Iran’s national epic is the Shahnameh, which is largely concerned with pre-Islamic Iran. Iran’s most important annual festival is Noruz, which is a pre-Islamic celebration.

Iranian women, instead of being docile women in need of rescue, could shock Victorian women with how independent and opinionated they are. You can scarcely meet a middle class Iranian girl who does not consider herself something of a philosopher and a poet, and who does not have a strong voice in her family, feeling free to contradict and make fun of her brothers and give advice to her father.

Iran has a thriving intellectual atmosphere, with most Western bestsellers translated into Persian within months. Not everything is well with Iran, of course, but despite the fact that the government uses and propounds Shia Islam to maintain its rule, the population itself is made up of independent-minded citizens who think for themselves.

We can use the example of Iranian society to project what may happen if a Portuguese ghost town was to be re-inhabited by 100,000 Portuguese Muslims.

I should mention here that I do not wish to suggest that I support open borders and uncontrolled migration. I respect each country’s sovereign right to decide its own fate.

Similar to Christianity, Islam would suppress the noise of material life, making social life stable and predictable. While the Portuguese cultural elite are content to merely exist and enjoy life while it lasts, this town’s population will have an optimistic, purposeful, forward-looking culture. The town will have above-replacement fertility and a growing economy.

Similar to the way a person in India can go from a Muslim to a non-Muslim town with ease, a person can visit this town without feeling like they have entered a foreign, non-Portuguese land. There will be more women wearing the hijab, and fewer places to drink alcohol at, but the city’s growing economy will likely attract many non-Muslim workers from the rest of Portugal.

The town will not be a utopia, but it can be expected to show the best features seen in other intelligent and cosmopolitan Muslim populations, such as in Tehran and Kuala Lumpur. It will be a society similar to late Victorian society, a mix of religiosity and European common sense.

The fear of Islam among Western intellectuals is the fear of loss. We do not want a beautiful German town full of beautiful Gothic architecture to become an Arabian desert. Would Muslims not want to destroy the Western heritage to replace it with an “Islamic” one?

What would be lost if a Portuguese town converted to Islam? The town’s alcohol-drinking culture would be lost. Casinos and brothels would have to close down due to the lack of a customer base long before any law is passed banning them. If the town is on the Atlantic coast, there would no longer be scantily clad young women to view on the beaches. Any existing pig farms would close down. Restaurants would stop offering pork-containing dishes.

What else?

It is actually quite difficult to come up with anything else beyond these largely cosmetic differences. The same way that devout Muslims have no trouble contributing to Egypt’s various civic institutions, devout Muslim Portuguese would have no trouble continuing their town’s hundreds of institutions. Newspapers, book clubs, libraries, philosophical societies, animal welfare societies, sports clubs, museums, in short, everything a Westerner considers “Western” institutions would continue to function like before. Egypt, Iran, Turkey and Malaysia have these same institutions, why would the Portuguese fail to maintain theirs?

Migrants and Converts

Economic growth requires increases in population or increases in productivity. Since increases in productivity are limited by physical laws, the European elite prefer immigration as a way of replenishing lost productive capacity and going beyond it. Immigration helps increase economic growth, which leads to increases in military, economic, technological and political power on the world stage, and most importantly, helps ensure that the government can continue to make interest and pension payments by importing more young people to tax.

Canada has had below-replacement fertility rates since 1972. By now it would have been a country with a shrinking population, with villages and towns suffering Portuguese fates. Instead, thanks largely to immigration, the population has doubled since 1960. Canada is a rising star that will soon overshadow Spain in achievement and power. Canada’s immigration policies prefer people with educational achievement. This has ensured that the migrant population has been productive and largely problem-free, so that the Canadian population has a far more positive attitude toward immigration compared to other Western countries. Canada’s over one million Muslims are so boringly middle class, similar to California’s Iranians, that they rarely make the news.

The issue of immigration is a sensitive one. The very rich of the West like it because it means that they can maintain their wealth and power. Their real estate would lose value and their businesses would lose customers if the population shrinks, therefore they constantly lobby for increased immigration while confident that they can continue living in exclusive and expensive mostly-white neighborhoods that migrants cannot afford to live in. The rest of the population either like it or dislike it depending on where they live and their social positions and cultural values. For some immigration means increased taxes, fewer jobs and worse services, and they dislike it for these. Some dislike it for increasing the number of strangers in their societies, they dislike constantly meeting people whose morality and beliefs are a mystery. It was so much simpler back in the old days when basically everyone you met throughout the day followed the same cultural protocols as yourself.

And then there are those who out of humanitarian considerations like the idea of helping less privileged people enjoy a Western life.

If the Syrians in Germany are less prosperous and slightly more criminal than Germans, the exact same thing would be seen if Brazilian Christian immigrants or even Appalachian whites from the United States were to be admitted into Germany. Making it about religion feels satisfying to some Westerners since it “shows” the superiority of their civilization. This is a hasty jump to conclusions that does not bother to look beneath the surface since focusing on the surface is so gratifying.

Whatever good or bad things that Islam (rather than Arabs or whatever race or ethnicity) will cause to the West can only be studied accurately if we hold all other things constant. This is one of the basic principles of the social sciences. It means that we should look at converts to Islam in the West and their descendants rather than foreigners, since foreigners do not just bring Islam with them, but a far larger cultural heritage. Converts have the same cultural heritage as the native non-Muslims, with their only difference being religion, helping us see the effects of Islam in isolation from confounding factors like culture.

Do Europeans become less productive, less intelligent or more criminal when they convert to Islam?

Der Spiegel reported in 2007 that 4000 Germans were annually converting to Islam.30 In 2011, there were supposed to be 100,000 converts to Islam in Britain.31 If we keep in mind the imaginary Portuguese example, these conversions do not represent a loss to European culture, but a gain. While secular Westerners are not carrying their weight, not doing what they must to continue their civilization, these Europeans are embracing a new conceptual framework that enables them to continue their civilization. Even if there are only a few hundred thousand converts to Islam among ethnic Europeans in Europe and North America, these people are perfectly capable of carrying forth both their European genes and their European heritage. Iranians are not rejecting their pre-Islamic Iranian heritage, why would Europeans do that?

The Europeans who could synthesize their humane and beautiful Christianity of the Victorian era out of the rigid and sometimes inhuman Christianity of the Middle Ages can very well do the same with Islam. Iranian intellectuals have done that for Islam, why not Europeans?

An important convert demographic in the United States is African American inmates who convert in prison. These men, when they are released, rather than becoming more criminal as a simple-minded view of Islam might suggest actually, perhaps for the first time in their lives, start to think very seriously about forming a family and holding down a job.

My long view of history prevents me from gleefully looking forward to the Islamization of the West. Even if Islam spreads greatly for the next century or two, some new force can come about that wipes it out, as it happened to every former Islamic power. The Quran says this regarding past nations:

That was a nation that has passed; for them is what they have earned, and for you is what you have earned; and you will not be questioned about what they used to do.32

My view of future nations is the same. Whatever good or evil they do is their business, and nothing they accomplish will last forever. Our duty is to do good with the time given to us.

It will, of course, be very interesting to see what Europeans will do with Islam. I trust in their humanity and common sense to enable them to make something good and beautiful out of it. European Muslims have already produced incredible Islamic works, such as Brown’s Canonization and Wymann-Landgraf’s Malik and Medina, works that are just as sensible, moderate and sophisticated as any other European work of scholarship.

If we want to perform an intellectually honest comparison between Western civilization’s representatives and Islam’s representatives, we must compare the best of the West with the best of Islam, rather than comparing the intellectual elite of the West with the criminal underclass of Muslim societies. Look at the American math professor Jeffrey Lang, the American scholar Hamza Yusuf, the British philosopher Martin Lings, the British scholar Timothy Winter, the German diplomat Murad Wilfried Hofmann, all of whom deeply studied Islam and embraced it yet remained every bit as dedicated to contributing to Western civilization as any Western intellectual.

The only way we can have an intelligent discussion about Islam’s future in the West is to compare the intellectuals Westerners respect with the intellectuals Western Muslims respect. Conceptualizing Muslims as a horde of invaders may be satisfying to some, but it does not get us anywhere toward making empirically accurate predictions about future Muslim behavior. It is our intellectuals who are busy preparing the Muslim “program” in the West. One needs to be familiar with the thought of this intellectual elite of Western Islam before considering themselves in any shape or form well-informed about Muslims and their thought and potential future behavior.

For the question of “Sharia law” and pluralism please see my essay: Consensual Communities and the Sanctity of Human Life: The Path to Moderate Islam between Pluralism, Authoritarianism, Conformity and Individualism

Reader Questions

A post in your website titled "The Muslim Plan for Western Civilization" talks about how Muslims should not seek power, and I do found that there is no explicit verse in The Quran that says for Muslim to establish an Islamic State. Back in my times being in a halaqa, there is a hadith that narrates about The 5 Periods of Era (The Prophetic Era of Muhammad, Caliphate, Mulkan Jabriyan, Mulkan 'Adhan, and Caliphate based on Prophethood). I hope you would explain it to me. Jazakallah.

There is no verse in the Quran that clearly and unequivocally asks Muslims to establish an Islamic state. It also never asks Muslims to seek power. Everything the Quran says about governance is vague and can be interpreted in many ways. Mainstream Muslim thinkers believe that this means that the Quran leaves it to each Muslim community to decide its own governance matters according to whatever works best in their particular time and place. I will be happy to discuss any particular verse you have in mind.

As for the hadith you mentioned, the final part that says “then a caliphate will be established according to the methodology of Prophethood” is narrated by only one person (Ibrāhīm al-Wāsiṭī) whose narrations are matrūk (”abandoned”) meaning they are so unreliable as to be unworthy of being cited. Please see the study (Arabic PDF) on this by the hadith scholar Dr. Salah al-Din al-Idlibi.

So there is no authentic narration (as far as I have heard) that talks about the establishment of a utopian caliphate in the future.

There is a serious problem with hadith narrations where there is a short authentic version and a longer version that someone modified according to their own imagination. For example there is a famous hadith that says Muslims will be divided into 73 sects. This is authentic. But then someone added this to its end: “And all of them will enter the Hellfire except one.” And that completely changed its meaning and turned it into a tool for intolerant groups to claim to possess the truth and claim everyone who disagrees with them will go to Hell (see my article on this hadith).

IslamQA: Your low iman may actually be depression

assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh brother I hope you are well in sha Allah. I have recently been experiencing very low imaan, to the point where I no longer feel like praying. I don't know why but my salah feels empty, there's been a couple of times where I've purposely missed my prayers. I don't even make dua anymore either and this worries me. What can I do to fix this? I'm scared of displeasing Allah but at the same time I don't want to pray I just have to force myself.

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah wa barakatuh,

In my experience when Muslims speak of “low iman” it is not actually a problem with their faith, it is just that they are depressed and their depression makes them feel abandoned and unspiritual.

If you think you are depressed, then remind yourself that it is your psychology that has changed, not your relationship with God. Even if you get no satisfaction out of the acts of worship, continue to perform them as a proof of your faith in God. It is good to worship God when it makes you feel good. But it is even better to worship Him when you have to force yourself to do it, because remaining steadfast despite difficulties and turmoil is what distinguishes the best believers from the average ones.

If you feel as if God dislikes you and has turned away from you then realize that this is just your depression making you think these thoughts. Always think of God the way He describes Himself (the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful), regardless of how you feel. A saint is just someone who has reached a state where nothing that God does to them will reduce their love for Him. Even though they know that God is fully in charge of the universe, when they suffer they do not blame God for it and they never think negative thoughts about Him. They keep facing Him and striving toward Him regardless of what storms He sends their way, knowing that He is only giving them opportunities to prove their love for Him.

For more on getting back on the right track when you feel that your faith is low please see my essay: God has not abandoned you

You may also be interested in my essay:  Islam and Depression: A Survival Guide

IslamQA: The morality of sharing music on social media

Assalamualaikum, I saw a thread on twitter that said things like sharing music for example is a sin that will accumulate even after you die? Because people will still listen or share it once you're gone and you're responsible for that. Atm I follow the consensus that listening to music as long as it's not excessive or dirty is fine. But what is your thoughts on this? What hadiths are there about sins which carry on after you die? Jzk

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,

The Quran says:

So let them carry their loads complete on the Day of Resurrection, and some of the loads of those they misguided without knowledge. Evil is what they carry.

The Prophet PBUH repeats the same message in this hadith:

He who called (people) to righteousness, there would be reward (assured) for him like the rewards of those who adhered to it, without their rewards being diminished in any respect. And he who called (people) to error, he shall have to carry (the burden) of its sin, like those who committed it, without their sins being diminished in any respect. (Sahih Muslim 2674)

As far as I can find there are no explicit hadiths that deal with the issue of sins that continue to harm a person after death. But from the above, and from narrations that talk about good deeds that continue to benefit a person’s record after death, scholars conclude that bad deeds that continue to exert their efforts after one’s death will continue to harm that person’s record too.

Music is merely a set of ordered sounds, similar to speech (and similar to the songs of birds). And similar to speech, it is neither good nor bad by itself. It is only once we examine its purposes, effects and uses that we can decide whether it is a good thing or bad thing. Sharing music on social media is therefore similar to sharing anything else, such as a speech, picture or quotation.

Music that is beautiful (such as some classical Western or Middle Eastern music) carries a positive value according to Islamic aesthetics, meaning that it is not just morally neutral, it is morally good and beneficial. (See my essay Beauty as Pointer: An Islamic Theory of Aesthetics). There is also music that is neutral or negative in its value. Most pop music combines both music and poetry of negative value to create a message that positively goes against a pious and God-fearing state of mind.

There are also types of music that serve a utilitarian purpose, such as upbeat music for exercising. There is nothing wrong with that.

For more on music please see my article: Listening to Music is Permissible in Islam

IslamQA: What is the best way to avoid habitual sins?

Assalamu’alaykum, I wanna ask how to find myself and get back on the right path back? Im lost. Like so lost. Ive been feeling so tired with life and everything but i still keep on sinning. Like why is it so hard for me to understand that this life is temporary. Im sorry im emotional. I just needed to let this thing out. Can you please make dua for me. I just want to be a good servant of Allah ((you dont have to reply)) thank you. May Allah bless you.

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,

You cannot stop sinning just by wishing for it or by trying to use your willpower. That never works. You must instead try to become the type of person who needs no effort to avoid sins. And this can only be achieved by setting aside an hour or so every day for extra worship (Quran-reading and praying).

Being unable to stop sinning is a sign that you are distant from God. The sinning is just a sign of a bigger problem. And the solution is to come closer to God. Once you achieve this, you will automatically avoid sinful things without having to think about it. Stop worrying about sins (God forgives all sins) and start worrying about your relationship with God.

For more details please see my essay God has not abandoned you

Best wishes.

IslamQA: Can one unknowingly associate partners with God?

Salam, I asked about the false idols. Sorry if you already explained this in the first answer, but I was reading commentary of Surah Baqarah v22 which mentions false idols. It says "Will you still resist and go after your false gods, the creation of your own fancy? The false gods may be idols, superstistions, self or even glorious things like Poetry, Art or Science. When set up as rivals to Allah" Does this mean as long as it doesnt interfere with religious duties you can still love such things?—and just to add on to the false idols questions how can you be sure you’re not setting up rivals to Allah swt unknowingly? Jazak Allah Khairun.

—and just to add on to the false idols questions how can you be sure you’re not setting up rivals to Allah swt unknowingly? Jazak Allah Khairun.

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,

The Quran says:

Be pious according to the best of your ability. (The Quran, verse 64:16)

The Quran never asks us to be super-human. It acknowledges our humanity while always asking us aim for a higher ideal.

Thinking in terms of whether you are setting up rivals to God or not, as if it is an either/or situation, is an incorrect way of thinking. You should think of the matters in terms of how close to God you are or how faraway you are from Him. It is not a black and white issue, it is a spectrum. The closer you are to God, the less important worldly concerns become, while the more distant you are from God, the more important the worldly life becomes until, at some point, one can honestly say that you are setting up rivals to God, for example by worshiping fame or money.

It is also important to keep in mind that God guides those who sincerely seek Him. Some people mistakenly think that since there are a million ways one could go wrong and only one “truth”, this must mean that being rightly guided is extremely difficult and unlikely. The reality is quite the opposite. God exists, He is present in our lives, and every day He presents us with dozens of opportunities to come closer to Him. At the beginning of every book of Quran we see this verse:

This is the Book in which there is no doubt, a guide for the righteous. (The Quran, verse 2:2)

This verse makes it sound like you need to be righteous first before you can be guided by the Quran. Many verses make similar statements, for example:

and He guides to Himself whoever repents. (The Quran, verse 13:27)

The truth is that the more you try to be good, the more God increases you in guidance by causing you to run into exactly the right circumstances or individuals to help you come even closer to Him.

Setting up rivals to God is not like a well that you can fall into when you are not looking. If you are always trying to stay close to God and seek Him with all your heart, then you can be assured that He will not let you unknowingly fall into a gross error like worshiping something besides Him without realizing it. Every effort you make toward Him will by rewarded by Him with an increase in your knowledge and guidance. God is like a mentor who constantly teaches us and correct us, every hour of every day.

Best wishes.

Ijmāʿ as Scientific Consensus: Defining Consensus in Islam and Ending Its Abuse

Ijmāʿ  (“consensus”) is one of the most abused concepts in Islam, used as a weapon by many in order to claim that no one has the right to disagree with them. It helps shut down free discussion and intimidate independent Muslim thinkers into keeping silent about their views. Ijmāʾ, as it is used in scholarly rhetoric today, often means nothing more than:

Everyone who agrees with me agrees with me. Therefore you do not have the right to disagree with me.

By stating that there is a consensus on any issue, it is implied that those with whose opinions differ from the supposed “consensus”, meaning that they are deviants, hypocrites and unbelievers in their hearts.

This is a rather sad state of things for a civilization that invented the concepts of academic freedom and the doctoral thesis (see George Makdisis The Rise of Colleges).

There is therefore a strong need for reaching, well, a consensus, on the meaning of consensus in Islam. Based on my conception of the mainstream Muslim community as a “consensual community” (see my essay Consensual Communities), I hereby define ijmāʿ as:

A consensus reached by all respected scholars belonging to a community working in full independence of conscience and seeking the truth and nothing but the truth.The presence of any form of pressure and intimidation for scholars to reach a pre-defined conclusion makes the ijmāʿ null and avoid. The presence of a single respected scholar, working independence of conscience and seeking nothing but the truth, who reaches a conclusion different from the conclusion of the majority makes the consensus null and avoid, because consensus only applies when the solution to an issue is so clear and obvious to every knowledgeable truth-seeker that not a single one of them finds a reason to disagree.

A more summarized definition is:

Ijmāʿ is nothing more or less than the autonomous concurrence of ijtihāds.

When multiple scholars perform ijtihād (independent investigation of a particular matter) and all come to the same conclusion independently, then they have ijmāʿ on that particular matter.

There can be different groupings of consensus. For example, there can be a consensus among the Maliki scholars on a certain issue, if all respected Maliki scholars, working independently, seeking the truth and fearing no repercussions for disagreement, reach the same conclusion in their ijtihāds on a certain question. The great 20th century Egyptian scholar Muhammad Abdullah Draz (1894 – 1958) writes:

The job of consensus is to make a ruling on a new question on morality, legislation or worship. The questions that consensus seeks to answer are subsidiary matters (furūʿ) rather than matters of belief (ʿaqīda). A Muslim does not require the authority of others to justify his own beliefs. If consensus is reached on a certain matter then that is what is desired; the external shape of the body of scholars that reached the consensus is not important. Whether they are official members of a legislative body appointed by the government, or members elected by the people to give a ruling on a specific issue. And it is not important whether those legislators are all in the same region or whether they give their rulings separately. None of this affects the value of the result they reach, provided that they reached it in the correct way. The essence of the matter is that every member should feel his own complete independence in thought and in moral responsibility and he must express his opinion freely after examining the issue from all angles. We should note that those whose opinions are sought for consensus are scholars who are experts in the questions that have been referred to them. They must also have the necessary documents and other evidence needed for making a ruling, and they must be well-versed in the history of Islamic law (fiqh), being familiar with its formation and stages of development.

Therefore consensus, in Islamic legislation, is not as some Orientalists say, is not a made up of arbitrary opinions given haphazardly. It rather represents the unity that comes from persuasion. Truth is what obligates this persuasion on enlightened minds. When scholars reach consensus on a certain question, that is due to nothing other than their going back to the Quranic texts and Prophetic traditions, striving to extract the best opinion from them. When they agree on a particular opinion after their careful evaluation of the texts, this means that this opinion is the correct one, or that it is the closest one to correctness, and based on this all Muslims adopt it.1

When it comes to the mainstream Muslim community, matters of consensus are those that all respected scholars of all the respected schools agree on. We cannot, of course, survey every single existing scholar’s opinion. Consensus is therefore always approximate rather than absolute. If there is a particular question of law and every respected scholar of every school freely gives the exact same answer, then we can considerate that an approximate consensus, and we can be fairly certain that disagreement with it is forbidden unless a respected scholar is found who disagrees with the consensus, thus nullifying it. A single respected scholar’s opinion is sufficient to make it a lie to claim the existence of consensus.

Dead consensus and living consensus

Another form of the abuse of consensus is to claim that since all the scholars who lived before a convenient cut-off date agreed on a certain matter, therefore disagreement on the matter is now forbidden.

Such a claim of consensus almost always encapsulates a double lie:

  1. There is no consensus on the cut-off date (do we put the cut-off date at the first three generations, or before the year 1000, or perhaps 1750 so that my favorite scholar’s opinions can also be included?). Since there is no consensus on this supposed basis for consensus, it cannot be a basis for claiming consensus.
  2. Anyone who studies almost any question deeply enough will find respected scholars from Islam’s earliest periods who disagreed with the supposed consensus.

Beyond that, I will also argue that

  1. Living consensus should trump dead consensus.
  2. Disagreement of dead scholars does not nullify living consensus

In other words, if all living scholars freely agree on a certain question, even if there was a consensus or near-consensus among dead scholars on the question, the living consensus rules. This does not meant that we throw out that opinions of dead scholars. Rather, the opinions of dead scholars live on in the minds of living scholars. Each scholar, to be a scholar, must be very familiar with the Islamic scholarly tradition and must love it and accept it rather than rejecting it. Living scholars bring us the opinions of dead scholars while improving them with new research and updating them to fit new contexts.

The reason why the opinions of dead scholars take second place to the opinions of living scholars is because we can never be sure what factors exactly went into a dead scholar’s opinion. They may have held onto a certain opinion out of loyalty to a school of thought, out of loyalty to their teachers or friends, or out of having access to limited knowledge. Throughout history, until very recently, books were very expensive and each Islamic school of thought (madhhab) had its own libraries that largely held books from the madhhab itself, in this way limiting the access of scholars to the works of outside scholars. It is nearly always possible that a dead scholar would have changed his opinions had he had access to better research tools.

When it comes to the opinion of a dead scholar compared to that of a living scholar, assuming that both are equally intelligent and sincere, the living scholar may either be convinced by the dead scholar’s arguments, in this way bringing back the dead scholar’s opinion to life, or they may not be convinced by it and know better opinions. The acceptance of living scholars for the opinions of dead scholars can be considered as the validity test for those opinions. The opinions of living scholars therefore represent our living tradition, made up of the knowledge of the past enhanced by better research and perspective.

There are some people who read books by medieval Islamic scholars (say Ibn Taymiyya), and when they find that the opinions of most living scholars are different from the opinions of this dead scholar, they conclude that since the dead scholar lived so many centuries in the past, they must be closer to the truth, having opinions that are more “authentic”. The problem with this is that they ignore the opinions of the hundreds of scholars who came after Ibn Taymiyya, critiqued his opinions like they critique every scholar’s opinions and accepted some of them, improved some and rejected some. By ignoring the living Islamic scholarly tradition and jumping to some random point in history, we throw out centuries of intelligent discussion and development. A person who does this can fall into the grossest errors, unless they spend decades in research and study, only to discover at the end that the living Islamic scholarly tradition is itself the result of the same process of research and study. It is similar to rejecting modern advanced mathematics, going back to medieval mathematics as the more authentic and original mathematics, then spending decades developing those mathematics. At the end of that path a person may discover that they have wasted decades arriving at conclusions that were all easily accessible in modern books of mathematics.

Reading the books of past scholars with love and sincerity is perfectly fine. It is also perfectly fine to be skeptical of modern scholars and to compare their opinions to the opinions of past scholars. Every Muslim intellectual should be doing both of these things. What is not fine is submitting one’s independence of mind to the authority and prestige of a dead scholar, turning them into some sort of superhuman authority that cannot be critiqued or disagreed with. As Ibn Tamiyyah says:

Whoever chooses a person, whoever it may be, and constantly and steadfastly agrees with him in speech and action, then he is of: "those who have divided their religion and became sects." (The Quran, verse 30:32).

The living Islamic scholarly tradition is, or must be, a tradition of continuous and sincere critique that seeks the truth and nothing but the truth in all matters, never submitting to any authority besides Truth (which is one of the names of God).

We must all seek consensus, not through intimidation and appeals to the authority of dead scholars, but through free and independent research that seeks nothing but the truth. If scholars from around the world examine the same evidence and reach the same conclusions, freely and without being forced by one factor or another, then that is true consensus.

In this way, the Islamic scholarly tradition follows exactly the same methodology as the scientific method. In science, consensus is reached when scientists throughout the world examine the same evidence and reach the same conclusions. If two scientists examine the same evidence but reach different conclusions, then there is no consensus. Good scientists are very careful when declaring something as true, always welcoming criticism and contradicting research and theories, because that is the only way we humans, with our weaknesses and limited capacities, can be sure that we are on the right path.

Ijmāʿ, therefore, in Islam should have the exact same meaning that consensus has in science: when qualified experts examine the same evidence and reach the same conclusion, freely and without being forced, then we call that a consensus. Even if a hundred respected scientists agree on the truth of something, the presence of a single respected and qualified scientist that disagrees is sufficient to disprove the existence of consensus.

I am sure that not all Muslims will accept the above way of thinking, which may suggest that talking about consensus is futile since there can be no consensus about the concept of consensus. But my aim in writing this essay is not to convince all Muslims. My aim is to arm intelligent Muslims against these evils:

  1. False claims of consensus that are used to intimidate and silence respected scholars from voicing their opinions, in this way destroying the all-important scientific process by which the Islamic scholarly tradition develops and weeds out errors and falsehoods.
  2. False claims of consensus that are used to destroy the reputation of dead scholars and deprive the Islamic tradition of their works (such as Muqatil bin Sulayman).
  3. Appeals to the prestige of dead scholars that are used by the ignorant to unfairly attack the reputation of living scholars.

وَمَا أُرِيدُ أَنْ أُخَالِفَكُمْ إِلَى مَا أَنْهَاكُمْ عَنْهُ إِنْ أُرِيدُ إِلَّا الْإِصْلَاحَ مَا اسْتَطَعْتُ وَمَا تَوْفِيقِي إِلَّا بِاللَّهِ عَلَيْهِ تَوَكَّلْتُ وَإِلَيْهِ أُنِيبُ

I have no desire to do what I forbid you from doing. I desire nothing but reform, as far as I can. My success lies only with God. In Him I trust, and to Him I turn. (The Quran, verse 11:88)

The Muslim view of Orientalists

Brother, I've heard that orientalists are westerners studying Islam and their purpose is to cause distortion of knowledge among people about Islam. My question is, what orientalists really are and for what purpose do they study Islam? Thank you.

“Orientalist” is a word that was used to refer to Western scholars of Islam until the middle of the 20th century. It is true that some Orientalists had negative views of Muslims and this affected their research. But on the whole, Orientalists were like any group of Western academics (social scientists, historians), trying to objectively study Islam. The work of Orientalists was perhaps the greatest contribution to the field of Islamic studies in the 20th century. They helped solve various mysteries that Islamic scholars had not solved, for example the origins of the Islamic schools of thought (madhhabs).

Orientalists like Ignaz Goldziher (d. 1921) and Joseph Schacht (d. 1969) had a low opinion of Islamic scholars and they believed that the vast majority of authentic hadith narrations were fabricated by them. Their theories upset many Islamic scholars and made them think there was some sort of conspiracy against Islam (especially since Goldziher was Jewish). Regardless of their motivations, since they were working within a Western academic field, the field continued to develop and refine its theories, so that by 2000 the theory of widespread fabrication of hadith was disproven by other Orientalists (who are no longer called Orientalists), especially the scholar Harald Motzki.

Louis Massignon

The French Orientalist Louis Massignon (1883 – 1962), a Catholic priest, was one of the greatest servants of the Islamic scholarly tradition in the 20th century and worked hard to increase Western respect for Islam. His students include important Islamic scholars and thinkers like Muhammad Abdullah Draz and Ali Shariati, and important Western scholars like George Makdisi who continued his tradition of respecting Islam and Muslims.

So it is unjust to color all Orientalists with the same brush. They were humans with different motivations, but the majority were trying to be objective in their study of Islam.

Additionally, their Western method of study is extremely valuable because it helps encourage balanced and objective discussion of the issues. Their method of study is now being adopted by Islamic scholars throughout the world since it is so valuable. In the past scholars from one school would often refuse to study the works of other schools and would defend their own ideas even if there was evidence that contradicted them. But the Western method of study, which requires publishing one’s ideas in papers that are peer-reviewed by other scholars, makes it impossible to defend false ideas for very long.

In this way, today’s Western field of Islamic studies, which was established by the Orientalists, is helping make the life of Islamic scholars much easier because their research is so objective and high in quality. Examples are the works of Frank Griffel and Kenneth Garden on Imam al-Ghazali, which have helped completely change how we understand this important scholar (they show that he was not against philosophy, quite the opposite).

Why Digital Piracy is Ethical and Necessary

Disclaimer: This is an academic essay on the ethics of digital piracy. It is not a call for breaking the law by pirating. Some jurisdictions punish piracy severely, therefore the risk is entirely your own if you choose to break the law by pirating content.

For my proposal for a digital library that makes piracy unnecessary please see my essay The Universal Digital Library.

It is very strange that in these enlightened days there isn’t a single major philosophical voice to be heard that can talk intelligently about digital piracy. Publishers of software, films, songs, ebooks and scientific papers like to maintain that piracy is theft. The famous “You wouldn’t steal a car” ad is a typical example of publishers wanting to pressure digital pirates into ceasing piracy by likening piracy to the theft of cars and handbags. As I will explain, the amount of hubris and solipsism in the creators of such ads is breathtaking; the only reason piracy is rampant is because publishers are refusing to sell their digital products the way ordinary goods are sold. Since they can make more money by pretending that digital goods cannot be sold but only hired, they prevent functional digital libraries from existing, and this creates a very strong need for piracy as the only way such a library can be created.

Publishers are dead set on preventing the needy from pooling their resources to acquire the digital goods they need. The pretense that digital goods are only for hire enables publishers to legally create a  new type of oppressive and dystopian market dynamic where all the power belongs to the publishers and none to the consumers. Piracy is a natural and moral human reaction to this illicit power grab.

Copyright: the two aspects

In the digital world, “copyright” is the “right” of creators to two things:

  1. To not have their works used commercially without their permission.
  2. To not have their works lent freely and added to a worldwide library that anyone can access freely.

The first right is a moral right. Imagine if a person writes a great book and publishes 1000 copies of it, only for a big corporation to come and reprint millions of copies of it for its own profit. A person has some sort of moral right to dictate how their works are used in commercial settings. A photographer should get paid if their photo is used on someone’s book cover. The same applies to using someone’s music track in a film. In these cases, piracy is clearly “stealing” and people recognize it as such intuitively. YouTube channels that copy content from other channels without permission are incessantly charged with stealing by other YouTube users, showing that one does not need special powers to recognize the essential injustice in the commercial use of other people’s digital work without their permission.

Before the advent of printing, copying books by hand was accepted as a normal and moral practice. The only cases I can think of where writers objected to copying is where they had privately shared a book that they did not want to spread, as in Sir Isaac Newton’s private work The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms. This was a short book that he had written for the private use of Princess Caroline, later the Queen of England. It was pirated by the Parisian publisher Guillaume Cavalier and printed without his permission in 1725. In this case, two moral rights of Newton were violated: his right to privacy and his right for his work not to be used commercially without his permission.

I support the right of writers and other creators to have their privacy respected. However, once a book is released to the public, then the right to privacy is no longer applicable.

Once printing became easy, the problem arose of publishers “stealing” people’s writings and publishing them for profit, for this reason there was a need for copyright. The sense of “stealing” applies now when it did not apply in the past. Future revenues can now be expected from books, something that only became possible through printing. Books have become trade items, and without respecting the exclusive commercial rights of the writer, those future revenues will be lost to them. Therefore common decency, and thus morality, requires that we do not profit by other people’s intellectual works until they have become part of the public domain, for example until 20 years have passed since the publication of the work.

The second aspect

It is the second “right” that concerns us here. What moral right does a writer have to force me not to lend a book to my friends and family?

And if they accept that lending to friends and family is fine, what right do they have to prevent me from placing the book in a library so that the whole town may benefit from it?

They may concede that that is fine too, as long as the book is a legitimate copy that has been paid for. When it comes to digital books, or ebooks, writers want to import the reality of physical products into the digital world by introducing artificial limitations on how libraries can function. They want the digital library to function like a physical library so that only one person at a time can access an ebook if the library has only paid for one copy of the ebook. If the digital library wants ten people to be able to read the same ebook simultaneously, it will have to buy ten copies.

That is actually a great idea, despite its absurdity… if only publishers were decent enough to allow it. But they do not. They pretend digital goods cannot be bought, only hired. And that means they get to force all libraries to abide by the terms they dictate. Today a digital library cannot just buy an ebook and lend it out to those who want it. No, the publishers want to have their greedy hands on the entire lending process because they can–extracting every penny from it that they can.

The selling of digital goods similar to physical goods would have enabled the creation of a universal Internet library that all of humanity could benefit from. Henceforth I will refer to it as the Universal Library. It would have been something like the Steam platform that is currently used for video games, but it would have had all possible digital goods, and it would have only allowed one person at a time to use each copy of a product. A popular book that was demanded by 100 people simultaneously would have required that the library purchase 100 copies of it. Users would pay a monthly subscription fee that would go toward the maintenance of the library and the purchase of products.

A Universal Library would prevent any bestseller from selling more than a few hundred thousand copies, because that would be the maximum number of people throughout the world who would be interested in reading the book simultaneously during the book’s most popular phase. The library can buy a few hundred thousand copies and from there on sales would drop close to zero because anyone can access the book through the library.

Does a writer have a moral right to prevent their book from being placed in a Universal Library?

They do not. And that is why piracy is ethical when it is done by someone who cannot easily afford to buy the product (or who can only buy a highly dysfunctional version of it while the pirated version is far more useful, as in the case of viewing a book through Kindle’s cloud reader–which makes it impossible to copy and paste text–compared to viewing the same book after downloading it from a pirate site). Pirates are merely borrowing books from the “library” that publishers do not want created.

Today, in the world of piracy, we have three kinds of people:

  • Immoral publishers who abuse the law to prevent us from creating decent digital libraries.
  • Moral pirates who believe in supporting creators and do so when possible, but who use the morally-justified black market Universal Library created by the piracy scene. It is morally good for those who cannot afford a digital product to benefit from it, since it costs its creators nothing. It is morally evil for publishers to deprive such people of their products. The piracy scene helps achieve a moral good and prevent a moral evil.
  • There are also immoral pirates who can afford to buy a product easily but refuse to do so out of stinginess.

A decent human would want what is morally best for everyone involved. They should make money, but they will be happy to make less if it means a proper digital library can be created that can benefit humanity greatly. The people who need such a library are those who cannot buy the product anyway, and a decent human would be happy to share their digital products for free with those who cannot afford them (since digital products cost the creators nothing to replicate).

My thinking of online piracy therefore starts from this radical thought experiment:

What if publishers were decent humans?

The duty of sharing

A publisher will say that they want to sell (or rather lend out) their digital product according to the terms they dictate. You can take their product or leave it. If you want their product, you have to abide by their terms. This mentality uses legal constructs to work toward indecent, greedy and immoral aims. For this reason even though their thinking is legally valid, it is morally invalid. A publisher has no moral right to deprive the needy of goods that can be given away at zero cost. No one has such a moral right in this universe. They have a legal right to do these things, but if they use those legal rights, they are indecent humans.

In an ideal world of decent humans, digital products would be priced according to the paying ability of the buyer. Only those who can buy a $10 ebook without suffering economic hardship should pay for the ebook, everyone else should get it lent to them for free from a library. This is what decent humans will do, even though publishers will find it as shockingly unacceptable as Oliver Twist asking for more food.

Piracy as a market solution to publisher indecency

Digital pirates help restore the moral balance by making it possible for the needy to acquire digital products freely. The Internet piracy scene can be thought of as a black market Universal Library.

If publishers were not so greedy, there would already be a legitimate alternative to the piracy scene; the Universal Library that could lend millions of ebooks freely as the pirate Library Genesis does, a library for scientific and scholarly papers that could lend them freely as the pirate Sci-Hub does, and similar libraries for music, videos, software and video games.

That is what things would be like if publishers were decent humans. But since they are not, pirates have decided to create this library anyway since it is morally good, even if it is illegal. Pirates perform a service to humanity by making the greed and selfishness of publishers irrelevant and restoring the balance: those who can pay will pay for the products and those who cannot will get them lent to them for free from the pirate library.

The ethical pirate is a decent human being whose actions do not cause any upset for digital creators who are also decent human beings. Yes, their actions would shock and anger the typical corporate executive. But they do not deserve our consideration. If a pirate is so poor that they cannot even buy a $10 book without suffering economic hardship, then their stance is that they can pirate anything they want without paying anyone. If they are rich enough to afford the products they want, they will support the creators with their money. They may first pirate the book or software to try it out, and if they like it, they may then go on to buy a legitimate copy or find another way of supporting the creators. Rather than buying a book from a publisher, knowing that only a small portion of the book’s price goes to the author, they may donate some money to the author directly.

In all of these cases, the goal is to make the world a better place. The world is a better place when a poor person can get the digital products they need without suffering hardship. And the world is a better place when those who are rich enough to support creators do support them.

Legal reform of copyright for the digital age

Clearly there is a problem with the legal system if it tries to enforce immoral laws. As I have suggested, a moral copyright system would make piracy unnecessary. The legal reform is quite simple: Make it a law that a library can offer any digital product to one user at a time without any sort of restriction. No digital publisher or creator should have the right, in any shape or form, to restrict what a library can do with their product as long as they have acquired one legitimate copy of the product for each user.

The current state of digital lending is utterly pathetic because it is the scrooges who are in charge of the laws. From a Boston.com article:

Publishers put restrictions not just on which ebooks libraries can offer, but how they can offer them. Some publishers only allow for an ebook to be borrowed 26 times before the library has to purchase the license again. Others opt for the license to expire after a year. And still others instead charge libraries significantly more than they do consumers for ebooks.

[...]

Nobody who buys an ebook—library, consumer, or otherwise—actually owns it upon purchase. Instead, they purchase a license to access the content. The distinction might seem like a small one, but it has presented publishers with the opportunity to explore new ways of working with libraries in the digital age. And in so doing, it’s caused massive headaches for libraries as they’ve sought to broaden their ebook collections.

Once the law is changed, a Universal Library can be created (something like Steam, but for everything) that for a monthly subscription fee enables its users to enjoy all the music, videos, software, books and scholarly papers they want. When it comes to things like video games and software, they should remain installed on a user’s machine but only a limited number of people should be able to use them at the same time, so that the library is forced to buy more copies to enable more users to use them simultaneously. Ideally the subscription fee should be variable so that needy subscribers can choose to pay a much lower fee. Once the library has purchased a digital product from a publisher, they should have zero relationship with the publisher from that moment on. The fee should only go toward maintaining the library and helping it acquire more products through purchases.

Alternative models

Allowing digital products to be lent out similar to physical products, without any licensing terms involved, is the simplest and most effective model that I know of for creating a situation where decent humans do no wrong to their fellow humans. It is not the only possible model. Today a company could create a Steam alternative that offers all kinds of digital products for a subscription fee just as the Universal Library would. But due to the need to reach licensing deals with every single publisher, their platform will not entirely remove the need for piracy because a. many products will be missing from the platform due to the inability to reach deals with every publisher and b. the overhead involved in paying licensing fees and dealing with publishers will cause the system to be too costly for users. For this reason the piracy scene will still be very necessary even if such a platform existed.

Even if a platform like Amazon’s KindleUnlimited grows to the point that every publisher is forced to put its books on it in order to avoid losses, this will lead to a whole new problem: Amazon will have too much power and will use that power to profit at the expense of both its users, creators and publishers. Therefore I do not foresee a future where content licensing can ever solve the piracy problem. Greedy gatekeepers will always try to extract rent from any content licensing scheme one way or another, making piracy necessary.

Conclusion

Some people have asked me about the Islamic stance on digital piracy. The above can be considered the Islamic stance: common decency from both producers and consumers. It is true that consumers have a moral duty to pay, but that is not the only duty in this situation. Creators and publishers too have a moral duty to freely share their products with those who cannot pay for them. I cannot envision a decent human being who refuses to perform either of these duties. These two moral duties must be balanced; both sides must fulfill their duties.

Publishers should have no right to prevent a Universal Library from being created. Until such a library is created, the ethical pirate’s stance is the proper stance morally: those who are able have a duty to support the creators by paying them for their products, those who cannot pay have the moral right (but not the legal right) to enjoy digital products for free using the informal Universal Library that is today’s digital piracy scene.

Wherever possible, pirates should punish publishers for their greed by supporting creators directly. Publishers are evil when they pretend digital goods are different from physical goods by forcing people to buy a “license” to view the content rather than selling the content, as discussed by the Boston.com article quoted above. This is what is preventing proper digital libraries from being created. Publishers are actively making the world a worse place just to satisfy their own greed.

Before any progress can be made regarding piracy, publishers and creators must stop being evil. They must allow proper digital libraries to exist so that the needy can pool their resources in order to acquire legitimate copies of the products they need.

Until then, piracy will continue to force these scrooges to do the involuntary charity of sharing their products with the needy for free. Even better, piracy punishes their greed by allowing people to get their products for free while enabling them, the pirates, to restrict their support only to those creators who do deserve support.

The two salvations: How erotic beauty is a false category of beauty

In his 2009 book Beauty, the wonderful British philosopher Roger Scruton says many insightful things about beauty. His book inspired me to create my own Islamic theory of aesthetics in which I assert that a beautiful thing is nothing other than that which brings us face-to-face with God. The reason that the most beautiful and picturesque scenes of nature and architecture bring tears to our eyes and make us feel morally uplifted is because beautiful things, in order to be beautiful, must point to God. Beauty is not some independent ideal or standard. Beauty is the power of an object to point the human soul to God. Nothing that is ugly is morally uplifting, and nothing that is beautiful fails to morally uplift us, to make us feel God’s presence and offer us a door to salvation.

This theory applies to music as well. Bach says:

The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.

Whether a composer of classical music seeks God or seeks beauty, they are seeking the exact same thing. All beautiful music has the power to cause mystical experience in us because what makes music beautiful is the fact that it can cause mystical experience in us. This is in opposition to pop music, which celebrates bodily desires and human weaknesses rather than striving toward the Creator. Some types of music can of course blend elements from both categories.

To experience beauty is to experience God in some small way. Beauty is morally uplifting because it connects us with the source that gives life meaning: the Creator. (See my essay Beauty as Pointer: An Islamic Theory of Aesthetics for more on this.) You can verify this theory on your own by looking at a set of beautiful pictures and doing your best appreciate their beauty while keeping your mind free of distractions. As you continue doing this, you will start to feel a mystical connectedness. You will get a feeling of goodness and wholesomeness, as if you are becoming a better, more admirable person.

You may realize that you are seeking some sort of climax. Each picture seems to bring you closer to something you need and desire. And that thing which beauty brings us closer to is God. If you are religious, the experience of beauty always brings with it the desire to praise God. If you are irreligious and do not believe in a God, you can still feel the mystical connectedness. Beauty will be like an open door to God that you will refuse to step through.

This essay is on the issue of erotic beauty. Scruton speaks of erotic beauty (think nude paintings of women) and its special nature. He mentions the “fall” that an observer experiences if he allows himself to become sexually aroused by the painting (as opposed to appreciating it solely for the “beauty” contained therein). For Scruton and many others, erotic beauty is a special category of beauty. It involves something that has the power to sexually attract, but that the observer can appreciate without sexual attraction.

Below I explain why I am highly skeptical of the concept and consider it a false category, or at least something to be categorized separately from ordinary beauty.

Erotic art at its most basic level is a genre of art in which mostly male artists draw sexually attractive females in meaningful and beautiful contexts. It is not the mere beauty of the human form that draws artists to erotic art. If the human form was so beautiful, we would have expected to find a very rich genre of depictions of children and anonymous males. But there is no such genre. This closely parallels the fact that while on the Internet there are thousands of websites dedicated solely to pictures of anonymous nude females, there are almost none dedicated solely to pictures of anonymous nude males. It is not the appreciation of the beauty of the human form that draws artists (and consumers of pornography) to nude females. It is the male sex drive. A man can enjoy himself for hours inside a gallery that only has paintings of nude females. But he will very quickly tire of a gallery that hosts only paintings of nude prepubescent children or nude males (assuming he only finds women sexually attractive).

All beautiful things are morally uplifting. There can be such a thing as a morally uplifting painting that includes a nude person, but the uplift always comes from something else. The painting might depict a very dramatic scene from a story that would be morally uplifting even if one took the trouble to paint clothes over the subjects. The nudity is not essential. The reason that men have created the category of erotic beauty is because of a mistake of the male brain. A nude woman does not merely represent something highly desirable (as in an expensive car). She represents salvation. Speaking biologically, a man’s highest achievement in life is to have a female give him her sexual approval through acting sexually open towards him. And a nude female in a painting is registered as that by the male viewer, because she is nude. Women are not normally nude, they only are during the prelude to sexual union.

A woman’s sexual approval (i.e. her attraction to him and her expressing that she is willing to mate with him, her nudity representing just such an approval) represents millions of years of evolution patting the man on the back, telling him he is a good and worthy male specimen. Perhaps nothing else in the world has such a power to cause a man’s ego to inflate. A woman’s sexual approval means that everything about a man is right, good and proper. He is good-looking, his social status is desirable, he is admirable, he has so much worth that a woman, despite her intense scrutiny of his weaknesses and failings, is willing to put her life and her future in his hands by accepting to procreate with him and become dependent on him.

In short, female nudity is registered by the male brain as female sexual approval, which is registered by the male brain as an invitation to the highest possible achievement in biological life.

A painting of a nude woman is intensely interesting and captivating to a male because for him a nude woman is an offer of biological salvation. A nude female is more interesting to a man than a planet full of treasure. Treasure is nothing more than a means of attaining biological salvation–of attracting a woman’s love and procreating with her. A nude female represents the end result of this process–she is more fundamental than treasure; she is the end result of treasure. Speaking from an evolutionary biology perspective, treasure is only a means toward securing her companionship.

That beautiful nude female, if only she looks at you and accepts you, can make you the happiest man on earth. The same way that beautiful architecture takes us into God’s presence who offers us otherworldly salvation, a nude painting of a female offers us worldly salvation.

Erotic art is interesting only because of a false promise; it misleads the male brain into thinking it is being promised salvation. Just as a religious man may be captivated by the hope of salvation represented by a cheap pilgrimage package to Canterbury or Mecca, any man can be captivated by the promise of biological salvation that attractive females represent (and the less dressed, the more captivating, because less dress means more nearness to the goal). The attraction for females is not a simple desire for sexual enjoyment. The reason why females are so incredibly attractive and why they are used everywhere in marketing to sell things to males is that females represent salvation and immortality because they represent an opportunity for a man’s to pass on his genes, in this way accomplishing his primary purpose in biological life.

You do not have to lustfully glance at a nude painting in order to experience this promise of salvation. Even if you try to stay classy and do your best to avoid the “fall” that comes from sexually objectifying a female, your brain registers the female promise of sexual/biological salvation perfectly: it is only the fact that a fertile-looking female is depicted in the artwork that makes the art interesting as “erotic” art.

When artists draw nude females, they seek salvation. She is the worldly deity who can forgive us our faults, make us happy and give us all that we desire. She is the ultimate aim of existence once we ignore God. It is for this reason that all irreligious male artists are partly obsessed with drawing sexually attractive females (and almost no artist is willing to paint a nude old woman, unless he is the type of person who also likes to draw pictures of unsettling things).

Religious and spiritual artists, on the other hand, focus on nature, architecture, historical scenes and other asexual things that are going to be rather “boring” to males who have fully embraced their animal nature and believe in no higher ideal than salvation through women.

Many irreligious artists worship at the foot of women. They seek salvation, but since they have closed their hearts to mystical salvation, they become enamored of earthly salvation through the female. The desire for this salvation turns the female into an infinitely powerful and infinitely worthy goddess for the male. He places her on a pedestal and prays to her day and night. Turn toward me and give this humble, worthless servant some worth!

There are, of course, artists who believe in God yet also seek salvation through female nudity, mixing their worship of God with their worship of the female.

If you look at a picture gallery that hosts a random selection of images, some of which are beautiful nature scenes and others beautiful, half-naked females, you will instantly feel the extreme conflict between appreciating a nature scene and appreciating a nude female. The female calls you to a wholly different experience compared to the nature scene. And if you give in to her call, the nature scene becomes infinitely boring because the accomplishment of your biological salvation is right before you. Your earthly goddess captures all of your attention so that you have no interest in connecting with the heavenly God. The presence of a nude or half-nude female in a gallery on a website is a very jarring element (at least for males) that can totally ruin his enjoyment in the non-erotic pictures. Classical nude paintings are better in this regard because they are not so obnoxiously sexualized, allowing a man to continue to see a woman as a person rather than an object despite her nudity. However, no matter how well the artist manages to prevent us from sexualizing his nude subject (as Botticelli manages in his Birth of Venus), the fact remains that the painting is made up of two elements: the non-erotic beauty that points to God, and the eroticism that points to biological salvation.

To put it another way, had Venus been properly clothed, the painting would have been a better conduit of beauty. Her nudity conflicts with the moral uplift. It is a jarring element that causes a confusion in the male brain between his desire for spiritual salvation and his desire for biological salvation.

Below is Botticelli’s Venus with an abaya on, probably done by a Persian artist. Once you get over the comical aspect of adding hijab to a nude painting, you may realize that this painting lacks nothing compared to the nude version. It is just as beautiful and meaningful. Not just that, but it is actually better, because now the jarring element of the call for biological salvation is removed. One can appreciate it solely for its beauty, its real, morally uplifting beauty.1

For these reasons, as a Muslim I feel justified in considering nude art an improper and unnecessary category of art. It is merely the expression of the rather banal activity of males seeking salvation through the female body. It is true that eroticism is incredibly captivating. But for a spiritual person it is a dead end. It points away from God. It invites us to engage in fantasies of biological salvation that at best have nothing to contribute to our mission in life and at worst cause us to fall into seeking a false deity through female-worship.

This is not an expression of some sort of moral outrage about nude art, nor is it a call to destroy existing erotic art. But as civilized, self-respecting and God-fearing men, once we realize that nudity is merely a call to biological salvation, we should give preference to the higher salvation by avoiding nudity, whether in its production or consumption, and by seeking God through seeking beauty that lacks the jarring erotic element.

To experience beauty is to experience God. To experience eroticism is to experience your body’s desire for immortality through biological reproduction. To experience erotic beauty is to experience a beautiful thing with eroticism added on as a distraction. Removal of the eroticism removes the distraction without removing the beauty.

This essay is written from a male perspective since the key driver behind erotic art is (or so far has been) the male sex drive. It will be interesting to read a female philosopher’s take on the issue.

Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah Draz on saints

Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah Draz (1894 – 1958) with a granddaughter.

In fact, what a saint strives for is not so much to avoid the gross sins, to prevent himself from slipping into the lower strata of morality, as to guard against remaining at an average degree of self-perfection, and always to raise himself to superior levels. The morality of the saints is not a struggle; it is rather a life, with all that life bears in the battle for progress. This is why, during the short intervals in which they rest, they feel called to recommence the task. In the Qur'an, this inner call takes on the form of an express invitation to the Prophet:

When your task is done, start again and strive towards your Lord. (The Quran, verses 94:7-8)

This shows us that, far from allowing a creature to dispense with its struggle, an infinitely broader perspective opens up to pure souls in which to apply their effort. Even when one no longer has to fight against inclinations contrary to the law, one will always have to conquer the inertia of matter, to triumph against the weight of nature in order to soar higher and higher into the heavens.

Muhammad Abdullah Draz, The Moral World of the Qur'an (1951)

 

A Hadith Scholar Presents New Evidence that Aisha was Near 18 the Day of Her Marriage to the Prophet Muhammad

The age of Aisha bint Abu Bakr, may God be pleased with her and her father, at the time of her marriage to the Prophet Muhammad PBUH is one of the thorny issues in modern Islam, used as one of the main talking points against Islam by Islam’s detractors. How could God’s Prophet, a widower over the age of 50, accept to engage a 6-year-old and go on to wed her when she was 9?

Even Western-educated Islamic scholars like Yasir Qadhi and Jonathan Brown find themselves unable to critique the official narrative because they follow the traditional methodologies of the field of hadith, in which the authenticity of a hadith’s chain of narrators is the most important fact about it. Since Aisha’s age is explicitly stated by Aisha herself in Sahih al-Bukhari and Muslim, most scholars consider themselves unable to critique it. While many Muslims are satisfied by the commonly accepted narrative, it remains a fact that for many non-Muslims the Prophet’s marriage to a 9-year-old remains an insurmountable barrier to them accepting Islam as a respectable doctrine. And what a waste if the historical evidence shows us that the Prophet did not actually marry a 9-year-old, but a young woman who was almost 18!

Dr. Salah al-Din al-Idlibi

A new challenge to the traditional narrative of Aisha’s marriage comes from the Syrian hadith scholar Dr. Salah al-Din al-Idlibi, an expert in the new field of matn criticism. He has taught as a professor at the prestigious al-Qarawiyyin University in Morocco, Imam Muhammad bin Saud University in Riyadh, College of Islamic and Arabic Studies in Dubai and al-Makkah al-Maftuha University in Jeddah. Unlike traditional hadith criticism, which focuses almost solely on verifying the trustworthiness of the people who transmit a certain hadith, matn criticism compares the contents of hadith narrations to the contents of other hadith narrations and any other available historical evidence in order to try to reconstruct the objective historical reality of the event that the hadith describes. We know that even Imam al-Bukhari used this method to reject authentic narrations that clearly conflicted with observed reality (see Dr. Jonathan Brown’s 2008 article “How We Know Early Ḥadīth Critics Did Matn Criticism and Why It’s So Hard to Find” Islamic Law and Society vol. 15, no. 2). The field of matn criticism (matn means the text of the hadith, as opposed to its chain of narrators) expands and standardizes this method of analysis that previous scholars only rarely engaged in.

According to Dr. al-Idlibi’s study of the issue of Aisha’s age, while the hadith in which she mentions her age as 9 at the time of her wedding is clearly authentic, there is a great detail of evidence that contradict her statement, and in his judgment, the evidence is sufficient for us to conclude that Aisha was simply mistaken due to the fact that she made that statement in her old age. For one reason or another, Aisha, in her old age, had the mistaken belief that she was 9 at the time of her wedding. Since we only have her word for it (there is no other evidence that backs up her statement), and since all the other evidence from many different sources point to her actually having been closer to 18, it is concluded by Dr. al-Idlibi that while the hadith is an authentic narration, since it is contradicted by historical reality, it must be rejected in favor of alternative theories.

The cover of Dr. al-Idlibi’s 1983 book Manhaj Naqt al-Matn (The Methodology of Matn Criticism)

Below is a translation of Dr. al-Idlibi’s 2018 paper (published on his website at idlbi.net) in which publishes his research on this matter and responds to the objections of other scholars. [link to the original Arabic PDF]

This translation is only a rough draft. I am making it public since I believe this will be more beneficial than waiting many months before I can get to rewriting it (since I am busy with other projects). Translator’s notes are in double square brackets [[like this]] due to the fact that the author uses square brackets in some places. I have also added some notes as footnotes (there are no footnotes from the author). I will need to review the translation to make sure all of my notes are separated in double square brackets, because there might a few places where I added notes in other ways.

 

Start of Translated Paper

The Age of the Lady Aisha On the Day of Her Marriage Contract and the Day of Her Wedding

The Hadiths on Calculating the Age of the Lady Aisha the Day of Her Marriage and the Day of Her Wedding

by Dr. Ṣalāh al-Dīn bin Aḥmad al-Idlibī

In the Name of Most, Most Compassionate, Most Merciful

Praise be to God in blessedness and abundance, as He desires and pleases, and praise be to God by whose bounty all good deeds are completed, O God, help this matter come to a good conclusion, and help us finish in goodness, by Your bounty and grace O Most Gracious among the gracious.

Hadith has come to us from the Prophet PBUH that he concluded a marriage contract involving Aisha, may God be pleased with her, when she was six years old, and that he married her when she was nine. Is this hadith sound when it comes to its isnād [chain of narrators] and matn [content]? A study is indispensable.

I had read an article on this topic written by a researcher in which he made efforts to prove this hadith to be unsound both in terms of its isnād and its matn. I decided that it was possible to benefit from his article for what it contained of useful research ideas while pardoning its weak points, in order to work towards reaching a correct conclusion based on sound evidence, by God’s leave, because of the importance of elucidating the correct perspective on this matter of Prophetic biography and hadith. This is a study supported by evidence on Aisha’s birth and the calculation of her age at the time of her marriage contract with the Prophet and at the time of her wedding. There are two opinions on this matter:

The first and most famous opinion: It is the opinion that he concluded the marriage contract when she was six and wed her when she was nine, relying on what is mentioned in Sahih al-Bukhari and other collections. This implies that she was born six years after the start of the Revelation.1

Abū Nuʿaym [al-Iṣfahānī, d. 1038 CE, Persian hadith scholar and historian, student of al-Ṭabarānī and teacher of al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdadī] in his Maʿrifat al-Ṣaḥāba that Aisha was six then [at the conclusion of the marriage contract].

Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr [d. 1071, an Andalusian Mālikī scholar] says in al-Istīʿāb:

The Prophet PBUH married her [concluded the marriage contract] in Mecca before the hijra when she was six years old, and some say seven, and consummated the marriage with her in Medina when she was nine. I do not know of any disagreement on this matter. The Prophet died when she was eighteen years old.

Ibn Ḥajar [d. 1449 CE, an Egyptian hadith scholar] says in Fatḥ al-Bārī [his commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari]:

She was born in the age of Islam, eight years or so before the hijra. The Prophet PBUH died when she was about eighteen years old.

The second opinion: This opinion is that the Prophet PBUH concluded the marriage contract when she was fourteen years old and wed her when she was seventeen, approaching eighteen. This would mean that she was born four years before the Revelation. The writings of Ibn Isḥāq [d. 770 CE, a biographer of the Prophet] and al-Ṭabarī [d. 923 CE, a Persian historian and Islamic scholar] point toward this, as will be mentioned in the fourth and fifth section below on the evidence behind the second opinion.

Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr says in his book al-Durar fī Ikhtiṣār al-Maghāzī wa-l-Siyar when recounting the names of the earliest Muslims: “And Asmāʾ bint Abū Bakr, and ʿĀʾisha bint Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq while she was a little girl.” This goes against what he mentioned in al-Istīʿāb.

Evidence for the first opinion

Al-Bukhārī, Muslim and others narrate through various transmitters from Hishām bin ʿUrwa, from his father, from Aisha, that the Prophet PBUH married her when she was six years old and wed her when she was nine. Muslim narrates it through Maʿmar, from al-Zuhrī, from ʿUrwa, from Aisha. Ibn Ḥanbal and Muslim also narrated through al-Aswad bin Yazīd al-Nakhaʿī from Aisha. There are also other chains that go back to her for this hadith.

The word tazawwajahā can be used to mean the concluding of a marriage contract, and this is what is meant in this hadith.

This hadith’s chain of narrators is authentic, so they are mistaken who think that this hadith only comes to us through Hishām bin ʿUrwa and that it might be his mistake or delusion.

Ibn Abī Shayba [d. 849 CE, an early Persian scholar of hadith and hadith collector] narrate through al-Aswad from Aisha that the Prophet PBUH wed her when she was nine and that he died when she was eighteen.

Abū ʿUwāna [d. 928 CE, a Persian hadith transmitter] narrates in al-Mustakhraj  from Urwa, from Aisha, that Prophet PBUH concluded the marriage contract with her when she was six or seven and that he wed her when she was nine while she still had her toys, and that he died when she was eighteen.

This narration has a supporting piece of evidence in a hadith of [the Companion] Ibn Masʿūd which might be thought to affirm Aisha’s hadith above, but it is actually unauthentic. Al-Tirmidhī narrates in al-ʿIlal al-Kabīr from Yaḥyā bin Aktham from Yaḥyā bin Ādam from Isrāʾīl bin Yūnus from his grand father Abū Isḥāq from Abū ʿUbayda from his father ʿAbdullāh bin Masʿūd that he said: “The Prophet PBUH concluded the marriage contract with Aisha when she was six years old and consummated the marriage with her when she was nine, and he passed away when she was eighteen.” Al-ʿUqaylī [d. 934, a hadith scholar] mentions this narration in al-Ḍuʿafāʾ [his collection of unauthentic narrations] from Muḥammad bin Mūsā al-Balkhī from Mālik bin Sulaymān al-Harawī from Isrāʾīl. And al-Ṭabarānī narrates it in al-Kabīr from Muḥammad bin Mūsā bin Ḥammād al-Barbarī from ʿAbd al-Raḥmān bin Ṣāliḥ al-Azdī from Yaḥyā bin Ādam from Shurayk from Abū Isḥāq from Abū ʿUbayda from Ibn Masʿūd.

In the first chain [al-Tirmidhī’s] there is Yaḥyā bin Aktham, who has been declared a weak [untrustworthy and unsound] transmitter [ḍaʿīf], for he steals hadiths [he takes a hadith and claims to have heard it directly from a reliable transmitter when he has not]. In the second chain [Al-ʿUqaylī’s] is Muḥammad bin Mūsā al-Balkhī, who I could not find in the biographical dictionaries. In it there is also Mālik bin Sulaymān al-Harawī, who is weak. In the third chain [that of al-Ṭabarānī] there is Muḥammad bin Mūsā bin Ḥammād al-Barbarī (d. 294 AH), whom al-Daraquṭnī declared non-authentic (laysa bi-l-qawī). In it there is also ʿAbd al-Raḥmān bin Ṣāliḥ al-Azdī, who was from Kūfa but resided in Baghdad. He was considered trustworthy and died in 235 AH. In the chain there is also Yaḥyā bin Ādam (d. 203 AH), who is another Kūfan. In the chain there is also Shurayk bin ʿAbdullāh, a transmitter who has a trustworthy character but who erred often and engaged in tadlīs.2 He died in 177 AH. And in both chains there is Abū Isḥāq al-Sabīʿī, who is a trustworthy Kūfan who also engages in tadlīs. In the chain there is also Abū ʿUbayda who is trusted but who never heard anything from his father. Therefore this chain is weak.

Additionally, Imam al-Bukharī considered narrations from Isrāʾīl bin Yūnus from his grand father Abū Isḥāq maʿlūl [problematic and questionable]. It is also mentioned to be this way in al-ʿIlal al-Kabīr of al-Tirmidhi. It is also mentioned thus in al-ʿUqaylīs al-Ḍuʿafāʾ al-Kabīr but without giving a citation for his source.

Therefore since this hadith of Ibn Masʿūd is weak, it is incorrect to use it as support for Aisha’s hadith.

The above is what I had written about the authenticity of the chains leading to Ibn Masʿūd’s hadith. Then I ran into commentary by the honorable brother Sheikh Ḥātim al-ʿAwnī, may God preserve him in goodness and good health, in which he mentions two other chains leading to Ibn Masʿūd’s hadith in the Sunan of Ibn Māja and al-Sunan al-Kubrā of al-Nasāʾī. According to this new information, I will update my judgment of the hadith as follows:

Al-Tirmidhī reports in al-ʿIlal al-Kabīr and al-Nasāʾī in al-Sunan al-Kubrā from two narrators, from Yaḥyā bin Ādam from Isrāʾīl bin Yūnus from his grandfather (Abu Ishaq) from Abu Abaydah from his father (Abdullah ibn Masud) that he said: The Messenger of God, peace and blessings of God be upon him, married Aisha when she was a girl of six years, and consummated the marriage with her when she was a girl of nine years, and he passed away when she was a girl of eighteen. Ibn Maja and al-Uqayli narrated in the al-Du`afaa’ (their collections of unauthentic narrations) from two other chains from Israil. Al-Uqayli also reports it in al-Du`afaa’ from Abdullah bin Rajaa’ from Israel in a broken chain (mursal) that does not mention “from Abdullah ibn Masud”.

Al-Tabarani narrates it in al-Kabir from Muhammad bin Musa bin Hammad al-Barbari from Abdul Rahman bin Salih al-Azdi from Yahya bin Adam from Shurayk from Abu Ishaq from Abu Ubaydah from Ibn Masud. (Al-Tabarani mistook Muhammad bin Musa bin Hammad al-Barbari when he said “from Yahya from Adam from Shurayk” since he is not reliable (qawi), as al-Daraqutni has said, and he went against two other hadith collectors who narrated the hadith using the chain “from Yahya from Adam from Israil”.

And al-Nasāʾī narrates it in al-Sunan al-Kubrā from Qutayba bin Said from Ubthur from Mutrif bin Turayf al-Kufi from Abu Ishaq from Abu Ubayda from Aisha along the same lines. [Qutayba bin Said is from Balkh and reliable (thiqa). He died in 240 AH. Ubthur bin al-Qasim al-Kufi is reliable (thiqa) and died in 178 AH. Mutrif bin Turayf al-Kufi is reliable and died in 142 AH].

[Abu Ishaq al-Sabi`i Amr bin Abdullah bin Ubayd is a Kufan and reliable but would engage in tadlis and his memory changed near the end of his life. He was born in 32 AH and died around 127 AH. Abu Ubayda Aamir bin Abdullah bin Masud is a Kufan and mostly reliable (fihi lin) died in 81 AH, and did not hear any narrations from his father due to his young age at the time of his father’s death]. Therefore this is a weak chain.

In summary, regarding the chains going back to Abu Ubaydah bin Abdullah bin Masud:

The chain of Shurayk bin Abdullah from Abu Ishaq is a mistake of the hadith collector.

As for the chain of Israil from Abu Ishaq, regarding it al-Bukhari said, as is mentioned in al-Ilal al-Kabir of al-Tirmidhi:

"This is an error. The chain is instead Abu Ishaq from Abu Ubaydah that the Prophet PBUH married Aisha..." This is how they mention Israil's narration(s?) from Abu Ishaq, and they say: "From Abu Ubaydah from Aisha" also.

The chain of Mutrif bin Turayf from Abu Ishaq from Abu Ubaydah from Aisha is the one that correctly mentions the Companion names, and if it is so then the chains of Abu Ubayda go back to Aisha.

Since the narrator that narrates from Ibn Masud is unreliable and problematic, it is incorrect to strengthen Aisha’s hadith by it.

Evidence for the second opinion

1. Aisha is younger than her sister Asmaa’ by ten years. Asmaa’ was born 27 years before the hijra, or 14 years before the start of the Revelation. This means that Aisha was born four years before the start of the Revelation.

Ibn Abd al-Barr in his al-Isti`aab and Ibn Asaakir in Tarikh Dimashq narrate from two chains from al-Asma`i from Ibn Abi al-Zinad that he had said: “Asma bint Abu Bakr is about ten years older than Aisha.” And this is a good (jayyid) isnad.

And Abu Nu`aym says in his Ma`rifat al-Sahaba in his article on Asmaa’: She was born before the start of the Islamic calendar by 27 years, and she died in 73 AH in Mecca days after her son Abdullah bin al-Zubayr was killed when she was 100 years old.

What corroborates this narration with regards to knowing Asmaa’s year of birth is what Abu Nu`aym narrates from her, that she had said: “I saw Zayd bin Amr bin Nufayl with his back to the Ka`ba saying: “O gathering of Quraysh, none among you follows Ibrahim’s religion except I.” Zayd had died when Quraysh was rebuilding the Ka`ba before the Revelation came to the Messenger by five years, as Ibn Sa`d mentions in al-Tabaqat from Saeed bin al-Musayyab, meaning 18 years before the hijra. That makes her age 9 at the time she heard him (i.e. Zayd bin Amr). This makes sense, since one who remembers such details cannot be much younger than nine.

Ibn al-Athir says in Usud al-Ghaaba:

Abu Nuaym says: "She was born before the calendar by 27 years." Ibn Abd al-Barr says in al-Isti`ab: "Asmaa' died in Mecca in the month of Jamadi al-Ula in the year 73 AH. She died when she had reached 100."

2. Al-Bukhari narrates from Aisha, may God be pleased with her, that she had said:

The verse "But the Hour is their appointment [for due punishment], and the Hour is more disastrous and more bitter."3 was sent down upon Muhammad, peace and blessings of God be upon him, while I was a little girl4, playing. The suras al-Baqara and al-Nisaa' had not been sent down until I was with him.

Al-Qurtubi says in his tafsir: Ibn Abbas said: “Between the revelation of this verse and the Battle of Badr passed seven years.” If that is so, this means that it was sent down before the hijra by five years, and eight years after the start of the Revelation.

Ibn Sida says in al-Muhkam and Ibn Manzur in Lisan al-Arab: al-Jariyah: A young women (fatiyyah). A fatiyya is another word for al-shabba (a pubescent woman). It appears that they use this word to refer to a girl at the very beginning of her puberty.

So how old was Aisha when 54:46 was revealed, which was revealed eight years after the Revelation?

According to the first opinion above she would have been four years old. A four-year-old is never referred to as a jariyah. Therefore the conclusion from this is that the first opinion is wrong, while according to the second opinion she would have been 12 at the time of this revelation, and this is what fits the meaning of jariyah as used in the language.

3. Al-Bukhari narrates from Aisha that she has said:

I never knew my parents except as Muslims (i.e. she had no memory of their being pagans due to being born so close to their conversion to Islam). Not a day would pass except that the Messenger of God, peace and blessings of God be upon him, would come to us at the two extremities of the day, early and late. Once the Muslims started to face trials, Abu Bakr left toward Abyssinia, until he reached Barak al-Ghimad and met Ibn al-Dughna..."

These two narrations are clues toward two things:

The first is that a child cannot comprehend her parents having a religion different from the religion of the people around them before the age of four. If Aisha had been born four years after the Revelation, and her first comprehension of her religious environment was at the age of eight, then her saying “I never knew my parents except as Muslims” is a useless statement since it is well known that Abu Bakr converted early and that Umm Ruman (Aisha’s mother) had also converted early in Mecca as Ibn Sa`d mentions.

But if she had been born four years before the Revelation, and she only started to be aware of her religious environment at the first year of the Revelation, then this statement is a useful statement: Once she became aware of her surroundings, both her parents were Muslim (rather than just Abu Bakr).

This is a clue that suggests she was born around four years before the Revelation, which is what the other clues suggest.

And the second clue is that when she says “Once the Muslims started to face trials, Abu Bakr left toward Abyssinia”, the passage expresses that this happened after she became aware of her parents being Muslim. There is in this a suggestion that she was able to comprehend her surroundings when this event took place, and we know that the migration of the Companions to Abyssinia took place near the middle of the fifth year of the Revelation, and their second migration took place at the end of the fifth year and the beginning of the sixth year.

Had Aisha been born in the fourth year of the Revelation, she would not have able to understand what was going on at the beginning of the sixth year. But if she had been born four years before the Revelation, she would have clearly comprehended this events.

4. Ibn Ishaq says in his biography of the Prophet (sira) when mentioning the names of those who converted to Islam the earliest:

Some people of the Bedouin tribes converted, among them Said bin Zayd bin Amr bin Nufayl, and his wife Fatima bint al-Khattab, and Asmaa' bint Abu Bakr, and Aisha bint Abu Bakr while she was a little girl... then God Almighty ordered His Messenger, peace and blessings of God be upon him, to proclaim his message publicly and to call people and invite them to God Almighty. Perhaps he had been secretive until he was ordered to make his message public, so that he spent some years after the Revelation until the command came: "Then declare what you are commanded and turn away from the polytheists"5

Ibn Kathir transmitted some of this text, paraphrasing it, saying:

Ibn Ishaq said: God ordered His Messenger PBUH three years after the Revelation to proclaim what He had order him, and to be patient toward the hurtful things the polytheists did.

Ibn Ishaq’s words mean that Aisha was among those who converted to Islam during the period of the Secret Call after the Revelation (i.e. the first three years), and that she was a little girl at this time. If that period lasted three years, then perhaps she attended some of the secret gatherings during that latter days of that period. According to the saying that she was born four years after the Revelation then this does not fit at all. But according to the second opinion (her being born four years before the Revelation), then her age at that time would have been six or seven. Perhaps Ibn Ishaq mentioned her among the earliest Muslims due to the stature of her father Abu Bakr, may God be pleased with him, and because of Ibn Ishaq’s desire to mention her alongside her sister Asmaa’ who was ten years her senior.

5. Al-Tabari says in his Tarikh:

Abu Bakr married during the pre-Islamic period Qutayla bint Abd al-Uzza and from this marriage Abdullah and Asmaa' were born to him. He also married Umm Ruman bint Amir during the pre-Islamic period and from this marriage Abd al-Rahman and Aisha were born to him. All of these four children were born to his two wives that we mentioned in the pre-Islamic period.

Al-Tabari explicitly states that Abu Bakr married his two wives during the pre-Islamic period. But there is no use in him mentioning “in the pre-Islamic period” at the end of the passage (because he had already mentioned that at the beginning) unless the last “in the pre-Islamic period” refers to his children having been born before the Revelation.

This is then an explicit and clear historical text that Aisha was born before the Revelation.

6. Ibn Abi Aasim mentions in al-Aahaad wa-l-Mathani and al-Tabarani in al-Mu`jam al-Kabir and al-Haakim in al-Mustadrak from Aisha, may God be pleased with her, that Khawla bint Hakim, wife of Uthman bin Mazdh`un, may God be pleased with them, said in Mecca to the Messenger of God PBUH: “O Messenger of God, will you not marry?” He said: “Who then?” She said: “A virgin if you want, or a non-virgin.” He said: “And what virgin is there?” She said: “Daughter of the most beloved of God’s creation to you, Aisha bint Abu Bakr.” He said: “And what non-virgin is there?” She said: “Sawda bint Zum`a.” He said: “Go and mention to them my interest.” And this was after the death of Khadija, may God be pleased with her, as the other narrations show.

The passage shows that Khawla, may God be pleased with her, wanted to find a wife for the Messenger PBUH because he had become wifeless after Khadija’s death. It is extremely far-fetched for a six-year-old’s hand in marriage to be sought for him in such a situation. But if she had been fourteen at the time, then that is sensible.

There is no doubt that the concurrence of all of these clues supporting the theory that the Prophet PBUH had engaged Aisha when she was 14 and married her when she was close to 18 is strong evidence that this indeed is what really happened.

As for what has been reliably narrated from Aisha that the Prophet PBUH married her when she was nine, this must be a delusion (wahm). According to the preferable opinions on the dating of this hadith, she had lived for 75 years at the time, so perhaps some forgetfulness had afflicted her so that she reported according to her delusion.

It appears that there is no escape from concluding the Aisha’s hadith is a delusion because of the concurrence of all of those pieces of evidence that contradict it.

Conclusion

The preferable opinion, from the concurrence of all those clues, is that Aisha, may God be pleased with her, was born four years before the Revelation, and that the Messenger of God PBUH engaged her in the 10th year of the Revelation when she was 14, three years before the hijra, and that he married her at the end of the first year of the hijra when she was close to 18 years.

The hadith that mentions that Aisha was six at her engagement and nine at her marriage has a sound chain of narrators, but it contradicts these reliable historical pieces of evidence, therefore it is aberrant (shadh) and likely to be a delusion.

Along with those, the great scholars of hadith, may God have mercy on them, have stated that when a hadith’s content (matn) is contradicted by that which is more reliable historically, then it is rejected, because that shows that an error had crept into the hadith due to the delusion of one of the hadith’s narrators. And God knows best.

Below is a new piece of evidence that I ran into today:

7. Al-Tahawi narrates in Ahkam al-Qur’an from Ali bin Abd al-Rahman from al-Munjab bin al-Harith al-Taymi, and from Fahd bin Sulayman from Muhammad bin Saeed al-Asbahani, both from Ali bin Mus-hir from Hisham bin Urwa from his father from Aisha, may God be pleased with her, that she said:

And what knowledge do Abu Said al-Khudri and Anas bin Malik have of the hadith of the Messenger of God PBUH? They were two little boys.

[Ali bin Abd al-Rahman bin Muhammad bin Mughira is a Kufan who lived in Egypt. Reliable. Died 272 AH. Al-Munjab bin al-Harith is a Kufan. Mentioned in Ibn Hibban’s al-Thiqqaat (his collection of reliable narrators), Muslim also narrated many narrations from him in his Sahih. Al-Dhahabi and Ibn Hajar considered him reliable. Died 231 AH. Fahd bin Sulayman is a Kufan who went to Egypt. Reliable. Died 189 AH. Hisham bin Urwa bin al-Zubayr is a Medinan who went to Iraq. Reliable but perhaps engaged in tadlis of his father’s narrations (saying he had heard something directly when he had actually heard it from his father). Died 146 AH. Urwa bin al-Zubayr is reliable. Died around 94 AH.]

Al-Tabarni narrates it in his al-Mu`jam al-Kabir from Muhammad bin Abdullah al-Hadrami from Munjab bin al-Harith from Ali bin Mus-hir from Hisham bin Urwa that he had said that Aisha had said so. [Muhammad bin Abdullah al-Hadrami Matin (?) is a Kufan. Reliable and hafidh (a hadith master). Died 297 AH and lived 95 years.] This chain is broken between Hisham bin Urwa and Aisha.

Ibn Asakir narrates it from Abu al-Hasan Ali bin al-Hasan al-Mawazini from Abu al-Husayn bin Abi al-Nasr from Abu Bakr Yusuf bin al-Qasim from Ahmad bin Muhammad bin Saakin from Ali bin al-Haytham from al-Mu`alli bin Mansur from Ali bin Mus-hir from Hisham bin Urwa from his father from Aisha.

[Ali bin al-Hasan al-Mawazni is a Damascene. Reliable. Died 514 AH. Muhammad bin Abd al-Rahman bin Abi al-Nasr is a Damascene, highly trusted. Died 446 AH. Yusuf bin al-Qasim al-Miyanji is reliable, born before 290 AH and died 375 AH. Ahmad bin Muhammad bin Saakin al-Zanjani is trusted, died 300 AH. Ali bin al-Haytham is a Baghdadian. Al-Bukhari transmitted a narration from him. Ibn Hajar says he is acceptable. Al-Mu`alli bin Mansur is from Rayy, lived in Baghdad. Reliable with minor issues. Died 211 AH.] Ibn Abd al-Barr mentions it in Jami` Bayan al-Ilm from Ali bin Mus-hir in an unbroken chain. Therefore perhaps it can be said that this narration is reliably transmitted from Aisha.

If it is so then it is important to know the year of birth of Abu Said al-Khudri and Anas bin Malik, may God be pleased with them, because they were both born about ten years before the hijra, and Aisha, according to the common narrative, is younger than these two Companions by a year. It does not fit that she should say “they were two little boys” if she was a year younger than them.

But according to the second opinion (her being born four years before the Revelation), she was seven years older than them, so that on her wedding day, which was about a year after the hijra, both of them were 11 years old while she was about 18, so that she had a better understanding of the events of that time. It therefore makes sense that she should say they were two little boys.

Below is another piece of evidence I discovered after the above:

8. Ibn Abi Aasim mentions in al-Aahaad wa-l-Mathani and al-Dawlabi in al-Dhurriyya al-Taahira and al-Tahawi in Mushkil al-Aathar and al-Tabarani in al-Mu`jam al-Kabir and al-Bayhaqi in Dalaa’il al-Nubuwwa by the way of Muhammad bin Abdullah bin Amr bin Uthman from his mother Fatima bint al-Husayn that Aisha, wife of the Prophet PBUH, spoke to her saying:

"The Messenger of God PBUH in his illness in which he passed away said to Fatima, "Daughter come bend forward." So she did, so he spoke to her in whispers for an hour. Then she rose up, crying. Then he said to her: "Daughter come bend forward." So she did. So she did and they spoke in whispers for another hour. Then when she rose up she was smiling." Aisha said: "O daughter, tell me what your dad whispered to you about." Then when God had taken his soul, Fatima said: "As for now, very well. He whispered to me the first time, telling me that Gabriel used to review the Quran with him once a year and that he had reviewed the Quran with me twice this year. That made me cry. Then he whispered to the last time saying that I would be the first of his family to be reunited with him and he said: "You are the first lady of the women of Paradise except for (?) the Virgin Mary daughter of Imran." So I smiled at that.

[Muhammad bin Abdullah bin Amr bin Uthman bin Affan is a Medinan. Unreliable. Died 145 AH. His mother Fatima daughter of the Martyred al-Husayn, may God be pleased with him, narrated from many Companions and many reliable narrators narrated from her. Ibn Hibban mentioned her in his collection of reliable narrators. Ibn Hajar considers her reliable.] This chain is therefore unsound.

The clue is that Aisha called Fatima “O daughter”. According to the most common views Fatima was born five years before the Revelation, or close to the Revelation or soon after it. If Aisha had been born after the Revelation by four years, this would mean that Fatima would be eight to four years older than her. It is very strange and unlikely that the younger would refer to the older as “O daughter”, even if the younger was the older’s father’s wife.

But if Aisha had been born four years before the Revelation, then this would mean Fatima would be one year older than her, or perhaps three years younger than her or thereabouts. If one prefers the opinion that Fatima was younger by three years, then it would not be far-fetched for the older to say “O daughter” to the younger, while if one prefers the opinion that Fatima is one year older than Aisha or thereabouts, which is the more common view, then this small difference in age would not make it very unlikely that the younger would say “O daughter” to the slightly older one if the younger was the older’s stepmother.

In this narration there is a clear clue that Aisha was born before the Revelation by four years and not after it by four years. This narration, although it has an unsound chain, it has many corroborating narrations (shawahid).

Below is a new clue I discovered after the above one:

9. Ibn Abi Asim narrates in al-Aahaad, and Ibn Rahawayh and Ibn Hanbal and al-Tabari in al-Tarikh and al-Tabarani in al-Kabir and al-Hakim and al-Bayhaqi from many sub-chains (turuq) from Muhammad bin Amr bin Yahya bin Abd al-Rahman bin Haatib from Aisha that she had said:

When Khadija died, Khawla bint Hakim wife of Uthman bin Maz`un said: “O Messenger of God, will you not marry?” He said: “Who then?” She said: “A virgin if you want, or a non-virgin.” He said: “And what virgin is there?” She said: “Daughter of the most beloved of God’s creation to you, Aisha bint Abu Bakr.” He said: “And what non-virgin is there?” She said: “Sawda bint Zum`a.”

In this hadith it is mentioned that Khawla said to Abu Bakr: “The messenger of God sent me to ask for Aisha’s hand in marriage.” He said to her to her: “Wait,” then he went out. Umm Ruman mother of Aisha said to her: “Mut`im bin Adi had asked for her hand for his son. By God, Abu Bakr has never made a promise that he broke later.” Abu Bakr went to Mut`im bin Adi while his wife was there, mother of the young man. She said: “O Ibn Abi Quhafa (i.e. O Abu Bakr), perhaps you will require our companion [[referring to her son?]] to apostatize to your religion if he marries your daughter.” Abu Bakr said to Mut`m bin Adi: “Yes, what do you say?” He said: “She says such and such.” So he left them, his heart content that the promise he thought he had made was no longer in force.

Some researchers believe that Aisha was engaged to Jubayr bin Mut`im bin Adi before her engagement to the Prophet PBUH. This is a piece of evidence that she was much older than six at the time of her engagement to the Prophet.

I believe this is inaccurate, because Aisha was not engaged to Jubayr bin Mut`im. Rather, Mut`im bin Adi had merely mentioned his interest in having his son marry her and had secured a promise from Abu Bakr that he would approve of such a union. Such agreements take place often among people even if the two are small children, even infants and toddlers.

I heard a brother using this as evidence that Aisha had been engaged to Jubayr bin Mut`im, but I did not mention it among the pieces of evidence I mentioned above because I did not find it very convincing. But then I realized that it contained a clue toward Aisha having been born before the Revelation:

The story shows that Mut`im bin Adi and his wife were followers of polytheism at the time and disliked to become Muslims and disliked that their son should convert to this religion if he married Aisha. It is well-known how ardent Abu Bakr was toward calling people toward this religion, so it is highly unlikely that, had Aisha been born after the Revelation, for Mut`m bin Adi to mention his interest in her with his strong adherence to polytheism to Abu Bakr and for Abu Bakr to agree to the prospect of such a union. Therefore no explanation remains except that Mut`im bin Adi’s mention of his interest in marrying Aisha to his son and his securing a promise to that effect from Abu Bakr had happened before the Revelation. This means that Aisha had been born before, and not after, the Revelation.

10. Al-Bukhari narrates from Anas, may God be pleased with him, that he had said:

On the day [[of the battle]] of Uhad when [[some]] people retreated and left the Prophet, I saw `Aisha bint Abu Bakr and Um Sulaim, with their robes tucked up so that the bangles around their ankles were visible hurrying with their water skins [[in another narration it is said, "carrying the water skins on their backs"]]. Then they would pour the water in the mouths of the people, and return to fill the water skins again and came back again to pour water in the mouths of the people.

It is similarly narrated in Sahih Muslim. Ibn Hajar also mentions it as such in Mustakhraj al-Ismaili.

According to the common view, Aisha’s age at the time of the Battle of Uhud was 11, and according to the second view it was 19.

Al-Khattabi says in his book A`laam al-Hadith:

Regarding his saying tanquzaan, naqz means to skip or jump, but I consider it to have been tazifraan, and zafr means to carry heavy containers, and the container itself is called zifr.6

I say: Tanquzan al-qirab7 has no meaning here. Al-Khattabi did well to interpret zafr as carrying heavy containers. In Ibn Manzur’s Lisan al-Arab‘s there is that which indicates that the expression points toward that.

If it is so, then this does not make sense according to the common view, because a 11-year-old wouldn’t be able to carry heavy water containers to carry it to the wounded, empty the mouths of the wounded than go back to refill them and come back again, as opposed to a 19-year-old. This means that the second opinion is the preferable one.

Perhaps none of the above clues by themselves are sufficient to prove that there was a delusion in the narration in which Aisha is mentioned as having been six years old at the time of the engagement and nine on the day of her marriage, and to prove that the second opinion that she was 14 at the time of engagement and 17 at the day of her marriage is the preferable one. But the concurrence of all those clues together is a strong piece of evidence toward that.

Answer to a debate on this study

The Quran mentions the iddah (waiting period) of women who have not menstruated yet, saying: “And those who no longer expect menstruation among your women – if you doubt, then their period is three months, and [also for] those who have not menstruated.”8 The intent of the Quranic text is that the `aqd [[engagement contract]] has been completed before their puberty. This meaning is obvious and there is no debate about it, and there is doubt about its permissibility, but it is not meant for all people.

The question that my arise is whether there is a fault or shortcoming in the marriage of the Prophet PBUH to Aisha as a young girl, so that we desire to prefer the second opinion9 in order to absolve the Prophet’s station PBUH from that?

I say: There is no deficiency in the marriage of the Prophet PBUH to Aisha before her puberty, if that is proven. If it were to be proven, then it is obligatory to submit oneself and have complete faith that it took place for some wisdom, whether we understand it or not.

Whoever thinks that verifying this historical information is done with the intent of contradicting the intent of the Quranic text is far off the mark. The question of Aisha’s age at the time of her marriage is not in such a category. It is, rather, a historical question, something that may be correct or incorrect. There is a great difference between the permissibility of something taking place and its actual taking place.

The purpose of studying this historical subject should not be the fact that today’s culture has stopped accepting such differences in age between married couples. What comes to us from the Prophet PBUH, his words and his deeds, is the scale by which we weigh ideas and opinions, not the other way round:

But no, by your Lord, they will not [truly] believe until they make you, [[O Muhammad]], judge concerning that over which they dispute among themselves and then find within themselves no discomfort from what you have judged and submit in [[full, willing]] submission.10

Historical narrations regarding her age being greater than 9 by some years are many. We cannot call any of them independent proofs, but together they form a strong and clear pieces of evidence that cannot be ignored. We also cannot prefer what Aisha says over the sum of those pieces of evidence, because numerous clues, when they reach such a magnitude, are strong than the word of one Companion, who is not protected from confusion, error and forgetfulness.

It is unlikely that Aisha, may God be pleased with her, should be ignorant about such an important matter in her life that concerns her personally. But if she suffered forgetfulness due to old age, then that makes it possible.

The books of hadith are stronger in reliability than the books of history and revolve around the soundness of chains of narrators. And it is so when it comes to knowing narrations that come from only one narrator and those that come from multiple chains. The matter here is not a comparison between the books of hadith and the books of history. It is a comparison between a hadith that comes authentically from one Companion in the books of hadith and ten pieces of evidence from the books of hadith and the books of history. My opinion is that we must prefer the sum of those clues to that single narration that comes from one Companion in the books of hadith.

I finished writing the original study with the first six clues many years ago. I finished writing the additions on April 7, 2015.

A debate with a brother on Aisha’s age the day of her marriage

There is a respected brother who thinks that what I wrote on calculating Aisha’s age the day of her marriage is a help toward secularists and rationalists who wish to sow doubt about authentic  narrations and who wish to reduce the stature of the Sahihayn [[Sahih Bukhari and Muslim.], especially Sahih al-Bukhari, and who wish to doubt its contents using false arguments. He said he had expected me to be the first one to stand up to the vicious attack of those corrupters on Aisha’s age at the time of her marriage to the Prophet PBUH which is mentioned in two most authentic books of hadith, and refute them with strong pieces of evidence and arguments.

I say:

Secularists use various means to try to attack authentic narrations. There is a vicious attack from corrupters on the books of hadith and on our scholars and leaders who have spent their lives in the service of these books. These facts are obvious. Perhaps what will come will be worse than what has passed if we remain asleep. I consider it one of our primary duties to respond to those attacks with powerful proofs and arguments.

The person who engages in this [[who engages in responding to attacks on hadith]] is only one of two kinds as far as I can tell, and God knows best. Either they believe the narrations in the Sahihayn represent indubitable authentic texts except for minor issues pointed out by Ibn Salah [[a major hadith scholar, d. 1245 CE]], may God have mercy on him. Or they behave as searchers after truth, seeking guidance in the Radiant Book about which our Lord says: ‘Say: “Come bring your evidence.”‘[[Verse 2:111 and two others.]]

I am not, by God’s grace, of the first kind of person [[i.e. he is not one who treats Sahih al-Bukhari and Muslim as if they are beyond all doubt and criticism]]. So that the reader may know why I am not of that type, they should read my article “Ahadith al-Sahihayn hal Da“afa l-Ulamaa’ Ba`duha?”[[“The hadiths of the Sahihyan: Did the Scholars Consider Some of them Unauthentic?” Link to the article in Arabic]] In it there are the names of tens of scholars who considered some of the narrations in the Sahihayn unauthentic, starting with the generation of al-Bukhari and Muslim’s teachers, then their peers, then those who came after them through Ibn Abd al-Barr, al-Nawawi, Ibn Hajar and others.

I, respected brother, seek evidence and proof, because this is what is required of all of us if we were to make the Quran, the guidance, radiance and healing, our source of judgment.

Today it is as if we are besieged by the criticisms and suspicions that the launchers of that vicious attack subject us to, and many people become lost in it. Generations will be lost and will perish if they see weak responses to those attacks, thinking that this is what religion is [[i.e. thinking that Islam has no good and satisfactory responses to the criticisms of its critics]], so that they wholly distance themselves from it and abandon it. May God protect us.

The reasons for that are many. Both of us understand many of the reasons and the ways toward fixing them. But there is something that some of us may be heedless of, which is to come short when it comes to scientific research and to fixedly and blindly adhere to certain unproven views [[of the past scholars]], treating them as unquestionable truths when they are not.

I repeat that the reader of this debate may have difficulty understanding it unless they read my article “The hadiths of the Sahihyan: Did the Scholars Consider Some of them Unauthentic?”.

Example:

Al-Bukhari and Muslim narrate in their Sahih collections from Anas bin Malik that:

A Bedouin man came to the Prophet PBUH and said: "O Messenger of God, when will the Hour [[i.e. Judgment Day]] be held?" He said: "Woe to you! What have you prepared for it?" He said: "I have prepared nothing except that I love God and His Messenger." He said: "You are [[or will be]] with those you love." We asked: "Will we be the same?" He said; "Yes." We were overjoyed at that. A young manservant of Mughira passed by who was of my age. Thereupon he [[the Prophet]] said: "If he lives long he would not grow very old till the Hour would come."

Many of the latter-day scholars say regarding such narrations “It is mentioned in al-Bukhari and Muslim,” and they stop there. They also often say that everything in the Sahihayn is authentic. And today we repeating the fruits of our shortcomings in studying those narrations.

Every person of sense can see that this narration contradicts observed reality, since that boy lived and died and many generations died after it, yet the Judgment Day has not yet been held.

The attackers have become emboldened because of that, saying it is a lie made in the name of the Prophet PBUH, and that the two scholars [[al-Bukhari and Muslim]] were at fault to include the likes of such fabricated narrations in their Sahihayn.

To know the correct phrasing that is reliably attributable to the Prophet PBUH we must know the other narration of this hadith, which is also in the Sahihayn. Al-Bukhari and Muslim narrate from Aisha that she said:

Some rough Bedouins used to visit the Prophet PBUH and ask him, "When will the Hour be?" He would look at the youngest of all of them and say, "If this should live till he is very old, your Hour (the death of the people addressed) will take place."

The hadith, according to this narration, informs them that if this boy lives then he will not die until your Hour will come, meaning your death. By that he meant that none of them will be alive once that [[boy’s]] generation passes, and the death of a human is their Hour, which is what a sensible human should be concerned about. As for the coming of the Hour that refers to the end of the world then this is not something one should busy themselves with. This hadith as narrated from Aisha, may God be pleased with her, is sound both according to its chain of narrators and its content (matn).

As for the narration from Anas bin Malik, in it there is a flaw in the wording of saa`atukum [[“your Hour”]], so that it has become hatta taqum al-saa`a [[“till the Hour would come”]], which have very different meanings.

I have not found Anas’s hadith in al-Daraqutni’s Kitab al-Tatabbu` nor in other works of `ilal [[works that list the flaws in hadith narrations]]. Would Ibn Salah and those who agree with him that this hadith is sound beyond doubt?

Here there is an important matter that deserves consideration, which is that that the imams al-Bukhari and Muslim, may God have mercy on them, referred to the thubut [[provenness or extreme reliability]] of the narration from Aisha and the lack of thubut in the narration from Anas, each of them does this in his own way. [If you wish, check out our article “In Ya`ish Hadha al-Ghulam falan Yakun al-Haram Hata Taqum al-Saa`a”] [[“If this boy lives long he would not grow very old till the Hour would come.” link to Arabic article.]]

Since many scholars say that everything in the Sahihayn is sound, and since people find in them a narration that contradicts observed reality, what is the expected result? The result is that the trust that many generations have in the word of scholars is shaken. And even more dangerous than that is the shaking of people’s trust in all of the narrations in the Sahihayn, and this is the true catastrophe.

When a person insists on denying the deficiencies and shortcomings that exist, he gains the approval of those people whose feelings make it impossible for them to accept that some of the inherited traditions may contain errors, but he loses the trust of a great many people who no longer accept statements without evidence, and perhaps the trust of the current generation and those that will come after. I believe the loss here is much greater. But when a person admits the shortcomings that have existed, then while he loses the respect of the minority of people who cannot accept the possibility of error in the inherited traditions, he gains the trust of a great many people who do not accept statements without evidence, and perhaps the trust of the current generation and the generations that will come after, and I believe the gain here is great.

The important thing is not gain or loss. What matters is to seek the truth based on evidence and following where it leads regardless of what people may say.

The brother said:

The main goal of those distorters of the truth who doubt that the age of Aisha at the time of her marriage was nine is to slander a legal ruling that the Quran mentions, which is the marriage of little girls that God's refers to: "And those who no longer expect menstruation among your women - if you doubt, then their period is three months, and [also for] those who have not menstruated," which the scholars are on consensus about according to legal forms.

I say:

The matter of the Prophet’s marriage to Aisha when she was nine is a historical question. We want to know whether it took place in this way or not. What matters to us is the result of the research, not the question of the marriage of little girls and its concomitant proof-texts and legal forms, nor what the doubters desire.

The brother said:

We have not heard from a single scholar of the past that says such a thing.

Meaning one who says Aisha was born before the Revelation.

I say:

Past scholars had authentic and explicit narrations from Aisha that the Prophet engaged her when she was six and married her when she was nine. It is logical that they say that it was so. But the related evidence [[on her age]] requires collation and comparison, and since to them it was a fact of history [[that she was born after the Revelation]], they had no motivation to look further into it.

I have not found anyone who has compared Aisha’s hadith with contradicting historical evidence other than Imam al-Dhahabi, may God have mercy on him, as will be mentioned. But he did not look deeply into it.

The respected brother believes that al-Tabari mentioned the narration that mentions Aisha being born in the pre-Islamic period from Ali bin Muhammad from “one who spoke to him”, and this “one” is unknown, and al-Waqidi and al-Kalbi agree on this.

I say:

Ali bin Muhammad al-Madaa’ini is trustworthy (sadduq), died in 224 AH. Al-Tabari says regarding this narration: “Ali bin Muhammad narrated from one who spoke to him, and one whom I mentioned among his teachers, and al-Waqidi and al-Kalbi agreed with him [[they narrated the same narration]].” Then he places the text of the narration. So the narration is narrated by al-Madaa’ini from a number of his teachers, not from one unknown narrator, and the agreement of al-Waqidi and al-Kalbi strengthen it. This makes it a historical clue without doubt.

And if it is said whether this chain of narrators is sound, I say no, but this is a clue, not a piece of evidence. Evidence is the sum of clues, and in this case, by God’s grace, we have ten clues.

The respected brother mentioned the hadith of Abdullah bin Safwan from Aisha, in which there is her saying “The Messenger of God married me when I was seven and I was sent to be with him when I was nine.” He also mentioned the hadith about her wedding and her transfer to the Prophet’s home PBUH in which similar assertions are made. He mentioned a number of narrations from her that say that she said such things.

I say:

This does not add anything to what has been authentically transmitted from Aisha from her own words [[in al-Bukhari and Muslim]]. If two hadiths or three or more come from her and if we say that some delusion happened to her in her old age, then this is nothing new. What would add something would be a narration from another Companion with a sound chain that asserts the same regarding her being nine on the day of her wedding. And this is what I have not found until now.

I mentioned in the paper what has been narrated from Abdullah bin Masud that strengthens Aisha’s saying, and I demonstrated that it is an unsound and problematic narration.

The respected brother said:

Does it befit her stature that delusion should be attributed to her?

I say:

If this really happened to her, then why does it not befit her? In this there is not an accusation of deficiency in her character. She herself pointed to Abdullah bin Umar that he was deluded about some narrations and no one blamed her for that, nor did anyone say it did not befit [[Abdullah ibn Umar that he should be deluded.]]

The respected brother said:

If Aisha fell into a delusion regarding what she said, then what about her playing with toys that none other than little children play with and that adults do not play with. If her age was greater than 20, or that her age after the Tabuk Campaign was greater than 27.

Then he mentioned three narrations that he based his argument on. He mentioned the one narrated by al-Bukhari and Muslim from Urwa from Aisha that she said:

The Messenger of Allah married me when I was six years old. Then we came to Al-Madinah and settled among Banu Harith bin Khazraj. I became ill and my hair fell out, then it grew back and became abundant. My mother Umm Ruman came to me while I was on an Urjuhah with some of my friends, and called for me. I went to her, and I did not know what she wanted. She took me by the hand and made me stand at the door of the house, and I was panting. When I got my breath back, she took some water and wiped my face and head, and led me into the house. There were some woman of the Ansar inside the house, and they said: 'With blessings and good fortune [[from Allah]].' [[My mother]] handed me over to them and they tidied me up. And suddenly I saw the Messenger of Allah in the morning. And she handed me over to him and I was at that time, nine years old.

He said that this cannot be a delusion, because it narrates events that clearly demonstrate her young age, it is not mere statements from her.

He also mentioned what al-Bukhari and Muslim narrated from Urwa from Aisha that she said:

I used to play with dolls in the presence of the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, and my friends would play with me. When the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, entered, they would hide from him and he would call them to join me and they would play with me.

He also mentioned the hadith that Abu Dawud mentions in his Sunan from Aisha that she said:

When the Messenger of Allah PBUH arrived after the expedition to Tabuk or Khaybar (the narrator is doubtful), the draught raised an end of a curtain which was hung in front of her store-room, revealing some dolls which belonged to her.

He asked: What is this? She replied: My dolls. Among them he saw a horse with wings made of rags, and asked: What is this I see among them? She replied: A horse. He asked: What is this that it has on it? She replied: Two wings. He asked: A horse with two wings? She replied: Have you not heard that Solomon had horses with wings? She said: Thereupon the Messenger of Allah PBUH laughed so heartily that I could see his molar teeth.

I say:

It has been narrated from Aisha that she playing on a swing the day of her wedding with her friends. It has also been narrated from her that she toys that she continued to play with with her friends after her marriage. It is as if the respected brother is saying: “If she was nine the day of her wedding, then these facts that she narrates about herself are not strange regarding a girl of nine. But if she was eighteen, then these facts would be unlikely for a girl of eighteen.

I say;

Yes, there is something strange about them, but I do not consider them extremely strange and unlikely. Perhaps this was in the early part of her married life.

It is fair for the respected brother to ask: What do we say about the hadith that Abu Dawud narrated? Did she continue to play with girls and a winged horse until the time of the Campaigns of Tabuk or Khaybar?

I say:

The Tabuk Campaign was in the month of Rajab of the 9 AH. The Khaybar Campaign was before that by two years and a half in the Muharram of year 7 AH. The age of Aisha the day of the Campaign of Tabukr was close to 26. But there is unsoundness in the chain of this hadith and it also has flaws:

As for the chain, in it there is Yahya bin Ayyub al-Ghafiqi al-Misri. This man was considered reliable by al-Ijli, Yaqoub bin Sufyan, al-Bazar and Ibrahim al-Harbi, and Ibn Hibban mentioned him in his collection of reliable narrators. Al-Bukhari said he was a truth-telling man. But Ibn Hanbal said that he had a bad memory. Ibn Saad said: He narrates strange/questionable narrations [[munkar al-hadith]]. Abu Hatim said: He tells the truth, his narrations should be written but not used in legal opinions [[la yuhtaj bihi]]. Al-Ismaili said: His narrations are not to be used in legal opinions. Abu Ahmad la-Hakim said: If he speaks from his memory, he errs. But if he speaks that which has written down, then there is no issue with that. Al-Daraqutni says: There are questions of reliability in some of his narrations.

Such a narrator, when he mentions something singular [[something that no one else has said]], his saying should be used as the basis of any argument.

As for flaws and confusion, Abu Dawud and al-Bayhaqi narrated this hadith from Said bin al-Hakam bin Abi Maryam from Yahya bin Ayyub from Ammara bin Ghuzayya from Muhammad bin Ibrahim from Abi Salama bin Abd al-Rahman from Aisha, and Ibn Hibban narrated it from Abdullah bin Wahb from Yahya bin Ayyub from Amar bin Ghuzayya from Salim bin Abi al-Nadr from Urwa from Aisha that she said:

[[The Prophet]] PBUH came in while I was playing with toys and raised the end of the curtain and asked: What is this? She replied: My dolls. Among them he saw a horse with wings made of rags, and asked: What is this I see among them? She replied: A horse. He asked: What is this that it has on it? She replied: Two wings. He asked: A horse with two wings? She replied: Have you not heard that Solomon had horses with wings? She said: Thereupon the Messenger of Allah PBUH laughed so heartily that I could see his molar teeth.

It is clear that Yahya bin Ayyub fell into confusion [[idtaraba]] in narrating this hadith both in its chain and its content. He was deluded into changing the names of some of the men in the chain and added to the content the story of the return from a campaign. Since he is described as having a bad memory and as there being confusion in his narrations, then this is sufficient to reject his narration.

Since the origin of the hadith is reliably transmitted in the Sahihayn in the narration of Urwa from Aisha without the extra additions, then the parts of Yahya bin Ayyub’s narration that agree with the narration in the Sahihayn are sound. It appears that he had it memorized, and that his other narration that mentions [[the Prophet’s]] coming PBUH from a campaign with changes to the chain of narrators is unsound.

I mentioned in the paper the story of the coming of Khawla bint Hakeekm to the Messenger of God PBUH after the death of Khadija and her offer to ask for women’s hand in marriage for him while he had no other wife other than Khadija. I say: The passage indicates that Khawla wanted to ask for women’s hand in marriage after the death of Khadija because he had become wifeless. It is extremely unlikely in such circumstances for her to ask for a six-year-old’s hand in marriage for him. But if she were 14 at the time, then that becomes sensible.

The respected brother said regarding me:

He concludes that it is extremely unlikely for Khawla to ask for a six-year-old's hand in marriage for the Prophet PBUH, and he summarizes the narration and does not mention its ending where Aisha explicitly mentions her age. Indeed, his conclusion also contradicts a narration from Imam Ahmad and others from Khawla bint Hakim in which it is explicitly mentioned that Aisha was nine years old.

I say:

Considering the narration far-fetched comes from the fact that it does not make sense for a man whose wife has died and who has no other wife to have a six-year-old engaged to him. [[Perhaps Dr. al-Idlibi is saying that a respected man in society, even if he were to accept a very young girl as a second wife, he would not accept her as his only wife because he would require someone mature enough to befit him.]] So take not.

As for the issue of summarizing the narration and not mentioning that it states her age, this requires a clarification.

Imam Ahmad and Ishaq bin Rahawayh narrate in their musnad books from Muhammad bin Bishr al-Abdri from Muhammad bin Amr bin Alqama from Abi Salama bin Abd al-Rahman bin Awf and Yahya bin Abd al-Rahman bin Haatib that they both said: When Khadija died Khawla bint Hakim, wife of Uthman bin Maz`un, came and said: “O Messenger of God, will you not marry?” and so on to the rest of the hadith. At the end of hadith there is: “Aisha said: So we came to Medina, and the Messenger of God PBUH came and entered our house. The Messenger of God PBUH transferred me to my own house when I was a girl of nine.”

This was narrated by Ibn Abi Aasim in his al-Aahaad wa-l-Mathaani and al-Tabarani in al-Kabir and al-Hakim and al-Bayhaqi from two other chains from Muhammad bin Amr bin Alqama from Yahya bin Abd al-Rahman bin Haatib from Aisha the like of it.

The narration in the Musnad works of Ahmad and Ishaq appear in the form of a broken-chained narration [[mursal]], but the hadith is from Aisha because at the end it is said: “Aisha said: So we came to Medina, and the Messenger of God PBUH came and entered our house. The Messenger of God PBUH transferred me to my own house when I was a girl of nine.” So this hadith goes back to a narration of Aisha herself.

I emphasize that this narration does not add anything from what has reliably come from Aisha from her own words [[i.e. while it strengthens the narrative that Aisha really stated such things, it does not help disprove Dr. Idlibi’s conclusion that she suffered from a delusion at her old age.]] What would matter is a narration from a different Companion with a sound chain of narrators that corroborrates Aisha’s claim that she was nine the day of her wedding, and this is what I have not found till now.

The brother’s saying “a narration that Imam Ahmad and others have narrated from Khawla bint Hakeem” contradicts reality, because it suggests that this hadith in the Musnad of Imam Ahmad is part of the complete-chained narrations coming from Khawla bint Hakeem, but it is not so, for Khawla bint Hakeem in this hadith in the Musnad of Ahmad and other hadith books is merely a speaker [[khaatiba]]. She never said that she heard the Prophet PBUH say such things, nor did any narrators transmit such from her. The narration is from Aisha’s complete-chained hadiths and it is her own narration. [[Dr. Idlibi’s is pointing out that Khawla is not part of the chain of transmitters for this hadith. She is merely a character mentioned in a hadith by Aisha.]]

I said in my paper that the great scholars of hadith, may God have mercy on them, have said that when a hadith’s text [[matn]] contradicts facts of history that are better attested, then the hadith is rejected, because this means an error was introduced into the hadith due to the delusion of one of the narrators.

The respected brother commented on this by saying:

If historians had reliable evidence and were agreed on dating Aisha's birth, we would have been able to reject these sound narrations from her due to the possibility of delusion and forgetfulness. But when we see that the historical evidence has been criticized, and we see that the Successors, the great hadith memorizers [[huffaz]] and hadith scholars narrating that which goes against the historical evidence, then this makes us hold on to the narrations in the Sahihayn and other hadith works and we consider it unlikely that delusion and forgetfulness were factors. Among such opinions are what al-Dhahabi says: "She, meaning Asmaa', was older than Aisha by ten years or so." (Siyar A`laam al-Nubalaa', vol 2, 188) and what Ibn Hajar said: "Aisha was born after the Revelation by four or five years." (Al-Isaba, vol 8, 16).

I say:

When he says “we see that the Successors, the great hadith memorizers and hadith scholars narrating that which goes against the historical evidence”, there is in it ignorance of those narrators who narrated hadiths containing hadith-based clues that contradict Aisha’s hadith, which the brother neglected to mention.

The saying of al-Dhahabi, Ibn Hajar and others of the past and recent scholars is based on the famous narration that is in front of them with many sound chains of narrators going back to Aisha. This is not something they said after detailed research, it is merely a saying that they repeated.

Imam al-Dhahabi says in Siyar A`laam al-Nubalaa regarding Asmaa’ bint Abu Bakr that she was ten or so years older than Aisha, and this is in his biography of Asmaa’. But after a few lines he says: ‘Abd al-Rahman bin Abi al-Zinad says: “Asmaa was older than Aisha by ten years.”‘

Al-Dhahabi then said in his Siyar in his biography of Asmaa’s son Abdullah bin Zubayr: “She was older than Aisha by many years.” Then he said: ‘Ibn Abi al-Zinad says: “She was older than Aisha by ten years.”‘ Then he comments on this by saying: ‘Then according to this her age would be 91 years, but Hisham bin Urwa said: “She lived 100 years, not missing one year of this.”‘ He mentions in Tarikh al-Islam in his biography of Asmaa’ the saying of Ibn Abi al-Zinad and he writes a similar comment to this one in it.

You see that al-Dhahabi, the great scholar and historian, mentions different, contradictory, narrations as if he is unsure which ones to prefer, and he did not engage in a deep study and comparison of them.

If the historical clues I mentioned are not sufficient, then there are many clues from the books of hadith that point to Aisha being older than what the famous narration mentions, and those clues are the clues mentioned above in 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, and 10. It appears the respected brother has ignored them.

I repeat that clues are not evidence, but that the sum of clues can become  evidence, and if they all corroborate one another, then they can become a strong piece of evidence toward what I said.

The respected brother said regarding me:

He relies on the narration of Ibn Abi al-Zinad in determining the difference between Aisha and Asmaa's ages, disregarding what has been said about it in the literature of hadith criticism.

Then he said:

It is incorrect to rely on Ibn Abi al-Zinad's narration because of what follows: 1. Ibn Abi al-Zinad (100-174 AH) is the only narrator who determines the age difference between Asmaa' and Aisha at ten years. There is much previous evidence coming from more than one Successor, and it is well known that greater amounts of evidence surpass smaller amounts. 2. The narration that Ibn Abd al-Barr narrates from him in al-Isti`aab is not conclusive; there is doubt in it, as he says: "She was ten or so years older than Aisha" His saying "or so" agrees with the other narrations that the difference between them was ten and some years [[bid`u `ashara, meaning somewhere between 13 and 19]]. 3. Many scholars have considered Ibn Abi al-Zinad unreliable. In his biography in Tahdhib al-Tahdhib (vol 6, 172) Imam Ahmad says about him: "His hadiths are confused." Ibn Ma`een says: "His hadiths are not used by hadith scholars as a basis for legal opinions." Ibn Hibban says: "Abd al-Rahman was one of those who would transmit unique narrations that were rejected and that was due to his bad memory and his frequent errors, therefore it is impermissible to use his hadiths as bases for legal opinions except in those narrations that agree with other reliable narrators." Al-Dhahabi says: "His hadiths are good [[hasan]]." It is clear from this that the hadiths that are unique to Ibn Abi al-Zinad and that contradict other reliable narrators cannot be used as bases for legal opinions.

I say:

It is impermissible to ignore a historical statement that one of the Successors of the Successors says and that is corroborated by narrations that contain many clues. The sayings of the latter-day scholars regarding determining Aisha’s age are mere transmission and copying of the famous narration’s contents.

The question now is: Is there any source on this matter other than what Aisha has said? If someone says yes and goes on to use other narrations by her, then he is corroborating a claim by itself. The actual question is whether there is any other source. His argument is begging [[dodging]] the question.

Abd al-Rahman ibn Abi al-Zinad is one of the Successors of the Successors and a teller of the truth [[sadduq]. He heard hadiths in Baghdad and transmitted them. The scholars of hadith considered the narrations he transmitted from Baghdad unsound, while they considered his narrations from Medina sound. The respected brother used Tahdhib al-Tahdhib as a reference and transmitted some opinions on considering him unsound and he ignored that which goes against those opinions. The same book mentions:

Musa ibn Salama said: I came to Medina and went to Malik bin Anas and said to him: I came to you to hear knowledge and to hear knowledge from those you tell me to. He said: "Go to Ibn Abi al-Zinad". Abu Dawud says from Ibn Ma`een: "The most authentic of transmitters from Hisham bin Urwa is Abd al-Rahman bin Abi al-Zinad." Ali bin al-Madini said: "What he transmitted in Medina is authentic and that which he transmitted in Baghad was corrupted by the people of Baghdad." Yaqoub bin Shayba said: "Reliable and trustworthy, but there is weakness in some of his hadiths." Ahmad said, according to what al-Saaji related: "His hadiths are sound." Ibn Ma`een said, according to what al-Saaji related: "Abd al-Rahman bin Abi al-Zinad from his father al-A`raj from Abu Hurayra is a reliable chain." Al-Tirmidhi and al-`Ijli say [[about him]]: "Trustworthy." Al-Aajiri relates from Abu Dawud: "He was a great scholar of the Quran and a great scholar of narrations."

There is no doubt that he cannot be legally relied upon on those narrations that he uniquely narrated, but his statement as a Medinan regarding Medinan female Companions is acceptable and I see no reason to dismiss them. Abu Dawud praised him when he said “he was…a great scholar of narrations.” If he says to us: “Asmaa’ bin Abu Bakr was ten years older than Aisha,” it is unacceptable to call his statement unsound and reject it.

As for his statement that there is much previous evidence from more than one Successor, he does not mention the evidence that comes from more than one Successor.

The statement “and she was older than Aisha by ten years or so” means that the difference was ten years more or less, that perhaps the difference is more or less by a month or year. Interpreting it as meaning that it could refer to three or more years of difference is far-fetched according to linguistic usage. If the difference was seven years or thirteen years, a person will not say “the difference is ten years or so.”

Additionally, Asmaa’ died 73 years after the hijra, having reached 100 years. This means that she was born before the Revelation by 14 years. If Aisha had been born 4 years after the Revelation as the common narrative says, this would mean that Asmaa’ was 18 years older than her. Does this fit the famous narrations?

Among the important issues is that this respected brother does not differentiate between clues and evidence, so that he treats clues as if they are evidence, then refutes them by saying they do not reach the standard of evidence. If he meditates upon my words when I say that they are only clues, I believe that his statements would have been very different. If I had thought that any of those clues were strong pieces of evidence I would have called them such, but I said they are clues, and clues do not represent [[independent]] evidence.

Where is the evidence then?

The evidence is formed by the sum of the clues. The concurrence of those ten clues that all suggest Aisha was born before the Revelation and not after it by four years is the evidence that a delusion had entered into the matter.

I hope that the respected brother and gracious readers will read those ten clues calmly and with meditation. After that, it remains to each of us his or her own effort and reward, and He [[God]] is the friend of the doers of good.

Our Lord, forgive us and our brothers who preceded us in faith and put not in our hearts [any] resentment toward those who have believed. Our Lord, indeed You are Kind and Merciful.

Written by Salah al-Din al-Idlibi on January 6, 2018.

End of translated article

IslamQA: How to pray the witr prayer

Salam, could you please explain how witr namaz is prayed and what is meant to be recited in each rakat? Because of my lack of understanding I don't pray it and therefore being sinful.

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,

The witr prayer is not obligatory, so it is not sinful if you do not perform it. It is a voluntary prayer that you can perform as your last prayer of the night. You can perform it exactly the way you perform the evening (maghrib) prayer (3 rakats, you do not have to say or do anything special during it—this is the Hanafi view). For more details and for the views of other schools please see this answer on IslamOnline.net (view as a PDF).

Terry Pratchett and “The People”

Night Watch art by Marc Simonetti

Upon re-reading (well, re-listening to) Terry Pratchett’s 2002 novel Night Watch yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised with the following passage:

People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.

As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up.

The quality of Pratchett’s thinking declined sharply from 1999 onward (the 1999 novel The Fifth Elephant is barely 5% as clever as his earlier novels). Night Watch follows the same pattern, but it still has a really good plot and atmosphere that make up for it. I am also glad that it sold so well, since it is a good argument against the Marxism-inspired utopianism that is so common in the West today. America’s Democrats are outraged that the American population dares to vote for people they do not approve of. Hidden between the lines of their rhetoric is the all-pervading assumption that they are too good for the American population.

Did Islamic scholars impede the development of science? A questionable meme

Scholar by Ludwig Deutsch (1895)

Ali Paya (an Iranian professor of philosophy) writes in a 2016 article regarding al-Ghazali’s saying that Islamic jurisprudence is a science that is superior to the non-religious sciences:

Such an attitude, which can be seen both among fuqahā’ and mystics (Ghazzali belonged to both groups) has had a continuous and seriously negative impact upon the healthy development of science and technology in Islamic culture’s ecosystem.1

Is it really surprising that religious scholars should think that their field is more important than other fields? And where is the evidence that their attitude “has had a continuous and seriously negative impact upon the healthy development of science and technology in Islamic culture’s ecosystem”?

Imagine if there had been no religious scholars at all in the Islamic areas. Would their absence have removed this supposed negative influence on the development of science? I would say the opposite is much more likely. Their activities could encouraged intellectual exploration in the following ways:

  • Since the works of Islamic scholars were by far the largest genre of literary production in the Islamic world, their activities may have been essential for the establishment of a book production culture. This culture, in turn, may have enabled non-religious scholars, philosophers and naturalists to get involved in literary production since, thanks to the Islamic scholars, a market had been established that could help them produce and sell their books.
  • Islamic scholars had a need for linguistic knowledge, helping encourage the creation of the most advanced linguistic literature ever written until Europe caught up in the past few centuries. By helping create an independent, non-religious field of knowledge that gained wide acceptance and respect, Islamic scholars helped make secular knowledge respectable and even desirable.
  • Certain Islamic scholars had a strong interest in logic and philosophy, helping maintain interest in these topics and spreading them through their books. Al-Ghazali himself helped popularize the use of Greek logic in Islamic legal theory and theology.

As far as I can tell, the theory that Islamic scholars held back scientific development is nothing but armchair theorizing. It is obvious to certain type of thinker that religious scholars should have a negative influence in this regard. But without strong empirical evidence, this should be treated as groundless hypothesizing; Islamic scholars may have been essential to all intellectual developments the Middle East enjoyed until recently.

It is true that Islamic scholars have at times opposed philosophy and science. But even more scholars have embraced these things and even promoted them. Without a statistical analysis of the number of scholars who tried to impede intellectual progress versus the number who tried to encourage, we know nothing more than the fact that some scholars tried to impede intellectual progress and some scholars tried to encourage it.

For propaganda reasons, there are many (not speaking of Paya) who like to focus on the rare Islamic clerics who espouse anti-modern attitudes while ignoring the far greater number of clerics who fully embrace modern science and knowledge.

When it comes to history, blaming the presence of a certain influence is always a dangerous business because there is no way to conduct experiments to find out whether the blame is really justified. Unless someone goes back in history, removes all or most of the Islamic scholars, then looks to see if centuries later scientific progress happens earlier or later, they should not presume to voice strong opinions on this matter (unless they find another way of empirically testing their hypothesis). For all that we know, the Islamic world may have been far more undeveloped by 1800 had it not been for the influence of Islamic scholars. And there is good reason to believe this, because there are no sustainable civilizations that lack a strong religious basis. Once the religious influence is removed, the civilization enters a phase of slow-motion collapse (low fertility rates being a very good indicator of the civilization’s unsustainbility, as is the case in all modern secularized nations). The presence and activity of Islamic scholars helped maintain Islam’s relevance through time, helping maintain its power over the Islamic world. Had they not done that, Islam could have fallen into irrelevance as happened to Greco-Roman religion.

Of course, Islamic scholars could have done more to promote science. But we can say the same regarding just about anyone.

IslamQA: On the hadiths of the punishment of image-makers (al-muṣawwirūn)

Salam, Im so glad youre answering questions again. I just wanted to ask how can I reconcile the hadith “The most severely punished people o‎n the Day of Resurrection would be the image-makers (al-musawwiroon).” [Al-Bukhaaree 7/540, no.834; Muslim 3/1161, no.5272, 5270] with the scholarly view point that drawing living things is permissible?

Due to the scarcity of the textual evidence, there is no consensus on what the Prophet PBUH may have meant when he used the word al-muṣawwirūn (image-makers). Some scholars, such as al-Nawawī, interpret it as meaning that all images of living things are forbidden, while others (such as al-Ṭabarī) interpret it as referring to pictures and statues intended for worship. Modern scholars who have looked at the evidence have noted that there are narrations where the Prophet PBUH approves of putting images of living things on cushions and garments and approves of dolls, including a toy horse with wings, therefore many have concluded that only items intended for worship are forbidden.

For a longer discussion please see this article: A Traditionalist Critique of the Islamic Prohibition on Taṣwīr

An Islamic defense of free speech (a critique of Ziauddin Sardar’s views on Rushdie’s Satanic Verses)

I have had Ziauddin Sardar’s Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim since 2010, but I only got around to reading it recently. This is one of the funniest books written by a Muslim, rivaling the books of Turkey’s Aziz Nesin. In what is perhaps my favorite scene of the book, Sardar camps out in the office of a Saudi official who is refusing to let him leave the country. In order to make a point, he reads the classic Book of the Superiority of Dogs Over Many of Those Who Wear Clothes in front of him.

A cover of Ibn Marzuban’s The Book of the Superiority of Dogs

Soon after getting into the book, it becomes clear that Sardar is not engaging in a rigorous retelling of past events. The book appears to be a fictionalized memoir. The characters he disapproves of appear comical and cartoonish, while the characters he approves of jump out of the page to lecture the reader.

Many famous characters of the Islamic history of the second part of the twentieth century show up: the Pakistani Islamist Mawdudi, Said Ramadan (father of the intellectual Tariq Ramadan), Sheikh Nazim, Ian Dallas (Abdul Qadir al-Murabit), Ibn Baz (the Saudi scholar), the Palestinian-American philosopher Ismail al-Faruqi, the Pakistani president Zia-ul-Haq, Usama bin Laden (seen by Sardar from afar according to him) and the Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim (famous for being put on trial for sodomy by Mahathir Mohamad’s government, according to Sardar a false accusation designed to destroy his career).

We see Sardar jump from one Islamic thinker or leader to another, first worshipfully following them, then discovering that their thinking has fatal flaws that makes it impossible for Sardar to continue alongside them. Maududi seems to have great ideas about freeing the Islamic world from foreign interference, but he has a medieval attitude toward women. Speaking of Said Ramadan and other Muslim Brotherhood members:

And that was my problem with the members of the Brotherhood. They see themselves as perfect; they were certain of everything. In short, they were ideologues: Islam, for them, was an ideology that allowed for no imperfections, no deviation, and, in the final analysis, no humanity. This is why I found so many of them repugnant.

Sardar looks into Sufism and finds that organized Sufism often leads to authoritarianism, made up of Sufi masters surrounded by a zealous and intolerant inner circle of worshipful followers who demand absolute and unquestioning obedience from initiates. Sardar says that he traveled to Morocco to find out if Ian Dallas’s version of Sufism really had its origins in the authentic Sufism of that country, but he fails to make any investigations, suggesting that that may not have been the (main) reason for his trip.

Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and censorship

In one of the worst parts of the book, Sardar spends many pages trying (and failing) to convince readers that what Rushdie wrote about the Prophet Muhammad PBUH in his 1989 novel The Satanic Verses is somehow simply unacceptable. He does not bother to present a framework within which a pluralist society may decide what is and what is not acceptable to say. To a skeptical reader, it almost appears as if Sardar is saying:

We Muslims are simply too immature and uncivilized to deal with criticism and mockery, so please do not criticize or mock what is dear and holy to us or else we will flip out!

He compares the Satanic Verses to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, saying that books and ideas can be dangerous—the usual patter that today America’s democrats use to tell us why it is such a great idea to put them in charge of censoring the nation’s media.

Sardar also makes the pitiful argument that similar attacks on Jews would have never been accepted in the West. True, we all know the double standards. We have songs by a Jewish singer on YouTube calling Mary mother of Jesus a whore. We have the Jewish comedian Sarah Silverman saying she would happily crucify Jesus again without anyone batting an eye. But just because Jews enjoy an unfair advantage does not mean we should ask for the same. We should join the Christians in insisting on the rule of law and equal standards rather than clamoring for special treatment like little children.

According to Sardar, Muslims should get special protection for what they hold holy and dear because…because… they can’t handle things otherwise. This is especially bad because Sardar presents himself as a futuristic liberal Muslim who has risen above the pack. If this enlightened Muslim is so narrow-minded to be incapable of seeing the dangerous implications of his support for censorship what hope is there for the rest of us?

Sardar is unable to appreciate the fact that placing limitations on free speech will mean that politicians, with their all too obvious short-sightedness and hunger for power, will end up deciding who can say what. Whatever the harms of free speech, allowing politicians to limit it is breathtakingly naive. It is amazing that Sardar can spend a lifetime in the West and fail to get the memo on this. In Islam, when faced with two evils, we are required to choose the lesser one. It shouldn’t take a genius to recognize that free speech is the lesser evil compared to censorship. I do not want anyone, no matter how pious or wise, to decide for me what books I can and cannot read. There is no way to make censorship better than free speech. The censorship department, even if full of democratically elected people, will inevitably make decisions based on political considerations and personal alliances. You cannot neglect the human element when designing any political institution, something too many Muslim political thinkers of the past kept failing to learn.

I am sure Sardar, in his private life, would not want anyone telling him what he can and cannot read. As is typical of many 20th century thinkers and leaders, he probably thinks he personally should be free to read what he wants while also thinking he has the right to limit other people’s reading rights. Regardless of how vile Rushdie’s book was, if his work is truly worthless then he should be given no power to ruin freedom of speech for us by prompting us to create an authority that can censor books.

What exactly is the harm of Rushdie’s book?

Sardar, other thinkers, and Islamic preachers who inflame people’s feelings about anti-Islam books and cartoons promote hysteria to satisfy their own desire for revenge. Ask them why the Satanic Verses should be banned and you will hear vague phrases like the “protection of the honor and dignity of Islam”. So Rushdie wrote a book that disgusts Muslims; what exactly is its harm beyond making you feel upset if you try to read it? If you are afraid it will give people negative impressions of Islam, the reality is that people’s impressions of Islam are already as negative as they can get. If you are afraid it will cause people to leave Islam, it is actually far more likely to inflame feelings of allegiance to the ummah by making Muslims feel that their identity is unfairly under attack.

At the end of the day, what Rushdie’s book achieves is close to nothing. It will not cause people to leave Islam. It will affirm the negative views of those who already had negative views about Islam. And as for those who have no firm beliefs about Islam, it will merely be one influence among countless others on their thinking and they will soon forget most of it. And among the non-Muslims who have a positive view of Islam, they will either see it as an unfair attack or as something strange and difficult to understand. Rushdie’s book will soon be nothing more than a footnote in history, and the only reason it will keep being remembered is that too many Muslims were immature enough to make such a big deal of it as to make it a worldwide bestseller.

Metaphorical interpretation

Sardar firmly plants himself within the liberal, non-mainstream camp within Islam by supporting a metaphorical interpretation of the Quran. He seems to think, along with many Westerners, that taking the Quran too literally is bound to lead to narrow-mindedness and extremism. I understand where they are coming from. If the Quran was a man-made book like the works of Plato and Marx, then it would have been true that taking it literally would lead to serious problems, since it would mean that one man’s limited and potentially misguided thinking would control the fates of millions of people. Isn’t it so much more sensible to open the door for updating the book so that Muslims can move with the times?

Sardar thinks the Quran should be read historically, as if God was not intelligent enough to foresee that humanity could very well continue for the next 100,000 years. According to Sardar God gave humanity a book that is stuck in the mindset of 7th century Arabia. That is a rather low opinion to have of the God who invented this universe. Shouldn’t a real God be capable of giving us a book that can stand the tests of time?

The reality, as I will explain, is that the Quran is just such a book. The more literally you take it, and the more firmly you try to follow it, the more moderate you become. You don’t have to take my word for it, just look at the historical evidence. The most kind, peaceful and moderate Islamic leaders in modern history have all been ardent lovers of the Quran who treated it not as a historical artifact but as if it was sent down the very day they were reading it: the Pakistani poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, the Turkish revivalist Said Nursi, the greatly loved Egyptian scholar Mohammed al-Ghazali (not to be confused with the more famous medieval al-Ghazali), the Kurdish leader Ahmad Moftizadeh. These were not extremists. In fact many of them have been subject to constant attacks by extremists for being too liberal and open-minded. A US government officer recently published a book on how Moftizadeh’s Quran-centered version of Islam can be used a role model for fighting extremism (see The Last Mufti of Iranian Kurdistan).

The Quran has a special status which Sardar has apparently failed to grasp. He thinks that admitting that the Paradise described in the Quran is really a physical Paradise is something that can only be done by an ignorant literalist. This is a rather insulting view to have of the majority of the world’s Muslims who do believe in a physical Paradise. Unfortunately, the path he recommends, of giving Paradise-related verses a metaphorical interpretation (they are apparently really about a mystical reality that cannot be described in words) leads to turning Quran-interpretation into a free-for-all. He offers no convincing explanation for why he thinks this is a valid way of interpreting the book apart from the fact that he really wishes things to be that way. He is doing the same thing that extremists do; reading his own prejudices into the Quran rather than letting the book speak for itself.

God’s speech plainly tells me about a physical Paradise. Sardar and some others say that these are actually references to a non-physical reality. I will take God’s words about Paradise any day over any human’s.

Conclusion

Sardar is a good intellectual and his skepticism toward the Islamic thought of the second half of the 20th century was justified and necessary. He, however, is stuck in the mindset of the Muslims he despises; he believes in hurling insults and making caricatures of his intellectual opposition, rather than rising above the argument and treating those who disagree with him as full humans, to be respected and treated with an open heart. If you close your heart to those who disagree with you, you are no better than them no matter how enlightened you think you are (see my essay Consensual Communities). Sardar is a liberal who attacks the (supposedly) narrow-minded conservatives/literalists. As I explain in the linked essay, one can rise above this argument to find a third path that can actually lead to positive outcomes.

Jordan Peterson eclipsed Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris in 2018 when it comes to search interest

Jordan Peterson doesn’t really have too many insights to offer, he tries to teach what the best religious mysticism teaches but without the religious ingredient. He may change a few lives, and he may have a good influence on changing many people’s notions about leftism. But I do not expect him to have a lasting effect, because his teachings lack the essential aspect of replicability which religion has. Without replicability, teachings like those of Peterson will fail to spread beyond a small group of true believers.

It is very difficult for parents to ensure that their children grow up morally upright because, as the sociocultural evolutionists Richerson and Boyd point out, the effects of non-parents on children’s values and beliefs are much stronger than the effects of parents.

In Small Gods (1992), the atheist writer Terry Pratchett expresses his belief that it is possible to be a nice and decent human being without having to carry all that religious baggage:

What have I always believed?
That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right.
You couldn’t get that on a banner. But the desert looked better already.

Maybe it would have been great if things were really like that. But the reality is that atheists suffer what might be termed the generational devolution of morality. An atheist born to religious parents can perhaps be just as upright as his parents while abandoning their religious ideas. But that is not the true test of irreligious morality. The true test is this: can the atheist bring up children just as morally upright as themselves? And can their children bring up grandchildren just as morally upright as the children?

While a minority will likely be able, through much hard work and care, to bring up morally upright children, for example by having them read the classics, when it comes to the majority, the abandonment of religion always, generation after generation, leads to the abandonment of moral uprightness.

The scientific reason for this might be that religion enables parents to “outsource” the transfer of moral uprightness. The hard work of ingraining all those moral ideals into the brains of your children is done through a society-wide mechanism that is all-pervading, always-on and self-perpetuating (the child acquires the “virus” of religion, likes it and passes it on). Atheists have to “reinvent the wheel” by bringing up morally upright children who believe in the same principles as they themselves believe, without enjoying this vast system of persuasion and perpetuation. If the religious mechanism sounds scary and dystopian, I want to point out that it does not have to be. You can be as kind and gentle as the kindest and gentlest person you can imagine and still enjoy the benefits of these mechanisms on your children, raising them to be kind and gentle and religious like yourself.

The results of secular efforts to replace religion with alternative moralities are as pathetic as you would expect. There is no secularized society whose majority is not made of juvenile-minded, unprincipled, selfish and short-sighed men and women. They complain about unethical and anti-consumer corporations while investing their retirement savings in these very same corporations’ stocks. They complain about the banks while constantly borrowing from them. They complain about corrupt politicians while continually voting the same enemies of the people and puppets of the banks and the state back into office because they promise them shiny new things.

There are many decent irreligious people. But the longer the society continues without religion, the rarer they will become.

The reality seems to be that it is simply impossible to bring up morally upright, responsible and long-term minded citizens in a secularized society. Secular morality is always a defective wannabe religion that is incapable of convincing the majority of people to act by it. The nice, kind and moral secular people you see in the West are perhaps all second or third-generation offspring of upright Christians who continue to enjoy Christianity’s teachings in an unsystematic and vague manner, for now. With each generation those teachings are going to fade more, out-competed by the influences of secular society (films, songs, books). It has taken just one human lifetime for the United States to go from a world where Wall Street and Congress had many highly principled humans (thanks to Christianity’s influence) to a world where they have become almost impossible to spot. I am not saying there was some golden age 80 years ago when Christian morality was still taken seriously. It is, rather, the difference between 10% of the elite being principled 80 years ago compared to 1% being principled today. And that makes all the difference in the world. A few good men and women in a power structure can prevent a great deal of evil.

Those who think that humanistic ideals can replace religion should remember that the greatest historical humanists were all highly religious people and many were priests. Secularism is just a recent social experiment, and the results are not encouraging.

Programming for Complete Beginners Code Examples 

var text = 
    'And this is Dorlcote Mill. I must '
  + 'stand a minute or two here on the bridge '
  + 'and look at it, though the clouds are '
  + 'threatening, and it is far on in the afternoon. '
  + 'Even in this leafless time of departing February '
  + 'it is pleasant to look at,–perhaps the chill, '
  + 'damp season adds a charm to the trimly kept, '
  + 'comfortable dwelling-house, as old as the elms '
  + 'and chestnuts that shelter it from the '
  + 'northern blast. ';
  
var text_analyzer = {
    current_text : text,
    get_words_array : function() {
        var text = this.current_text;
        var split_text = text.split(' ');
        return split_text;
    },
    count_words : function() {
        var words_array = this.get_words_array();
        var length = words_array.length;
        return length;
    },
    get_average_word_length : function() {
      var all_word_lengths = 0;
      var words_array = this.get_words_array();
      for(var i in words_array) {
          var current_word = words_array[i];
          all_word_lengths = all_word_lengths +
              current_word.length;
      }
      return all_word_lengths / words_array.length;
    },
    get_longest_word : function() {
        var longest_length_seen_so_far = 0;
        var longest_word = '';
        var words_array = this.get_words_array();
        for(var i in words_array) {
            var current_word = words_array[i];
            if(current_word.length > 
                longest_length_seen_so_far) {
                longest_word = current_word;
                longest_length_seen_so_far =
                    current_word.length;
            }
        }
        return longest_word;
    },
    get_word_frequencies : function() {
        var words_array = this.get_words_array();
        var word_frequencies = {};
        for(var i in words_array) {
            var current_word = words_array[i];
            if(! (current_word in word_frequencies)) {
                word_frequencies[current_word] = 1;
            }
            else {
                var previous_frequency = 
                    word_frequencies[current_word];
                var new_frequency = previous_frequency
                    + 1;
                word_frequencies[current_word] =
                    new_frequency;
            }
        }
        return word_frequencies;
    },
};

function print_object(the_object) {
    document.write('{
');
    for(var i in the_object) {
        var key = i;
        var value = the_object[i];
        document.write('"' + key + '"');
        document.write(' : ');
        if(Array.isArray(value)) {
            print_array(value);   
        }
        else if(typeof value === 'object') {
            print_object(value);
        }
        else {
            document.write(value);
        }
        document.write('
');
    }
    document.write('}
');
}
function print_array(the_array) {
    document.write('[
');
    for(var i in the_array) {
        var value = the_array[i];
        if(Array.isArray(value)) {
            print_array(value);
        }
        else if(typeof value === 'object') {
            print_object(value);
        }
        else {
            document.write(value + ',');
        }
    }
    document.write(']
');
}

document.write(text_analyzer.get_word_frequencies()['on']);

Chapter 12 “Program” starting code:

 

 

Page 44 of 73
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73