Aaron Goldstein notes
that, according to one Islamic authority, the London-based Islamic
Sharia Council, women are to be treated, in effect, as second-class
citizens in accordance with sharia law.
It’s certainly true that the status of women in many Islamic
countries leaves much to be desired. But before we indict all of
Islam as being irredeemably backward, we should point out, as
does Reid Smith, that Sharia can and does mean divergent things to
different Muslims.
Moreover, unlike Roman Catholicism, which has a clear
institutional hierarchy to settle matters of doctrinal dispute,
Islam is a mishmash of competing sects, none of which has clear or
obvious jurisdiction over the other.
Which is why, as Reid observes,
“the Pashtunwal Taliban state doesn’t look anything like an
ethnically, culturally and religiously diverse Malaysia — despite
the fact that both states find inspiration (of sorts) in sharia
law.”
The truth is that what Islam means, and how Islam is practiced,
is subject to serious dispute within the Islamic world. As Reuel
Marc Gerecht
explains, “What Islam is, as with Christianity and Judaism, is
an evolving question, but it’s not just Muslim holy warriors who
don’t care for the Prophet Mohammad being depicted as a pre-modern
peacenik.”
Judaism, for instance, can and does mean many different things,
even today. And the status of women within the various branches of
Judaism, although superior to the status of women within Islam, can
and does vary significantly. Why, here in the United States (in
Brooklyn, New York), Hasidic women are
required, literally, to sit in the back of the bus.
Hasidic “men and women thus have considerably different
experiences of spirituality and daily tasks,” reports PBS. “Most
observers would not dispute that the Hasidim live in a
traditionally patriarchal system.”
Ultimately, only Muslims can decide what Islam is and what Islam
means. But a democratic ethos is crucial. And so, the
United States has a clear and manifest interest in promoting
democratic change within the Islamic world.
“What we want to see happen in Arab lands and in Iran,”
writes Gerecht, “is real intellectual competition — the
starting point for healthy evolution. In particular, we want to see
devout Sunni Muslims in Egypt try to figure out what exactly are
‘Islamic values.’”
We should like to see Islam’s classical schools of law
revitalized, not thrown in the dustbin as they so often have been
by the Middle East’s secularizing dictatorships. We want to see
Malikis versus Hanafis versus Shafiis versus Hanbalis (especially
the Hanbalis who are close to the Saudi interpretation of the
faith) versus the Shiite Jafaris.
We want to see them argue, as they did long ago in Sunni Islam’s
formative legal period, that no one can represent or embody the
divine will — that, as the liberal Egyptian Islamic jurist Khaled
Abou El Fadl puts it, “human knowledge is separate and apart from
Divine knowledge.”
Man’s foremost moral and legal duty is thus to guard himself
against error and ignorance, to resist the hubris that through
fiqh, the study of the Holy Law, any man can exclusively
know God’s order. Modern autocracies in the Middle East have
suppressed such philosophical debates, as they have suppressed so
much else.
Parliaments, once they get going, have a way of looking upon
themselves as supreme. Legislatures, not clerical schools, are
likely to be the decisive forum for great ethical debates —
especially among Sunni Muslims, who have no clerical hierarchy and
are already subject to a wild proliferation of “fatwas,”
juridical decisions, by clerics and would-be clerics who pointedly
say that “your fatwa is no better than my
fatwa.”
It is likely in any Muslim society that goes democratic that
what in the past was the domain of judges and scholars in religious
schools — interpreting the Koran and assessing the relevance and
value of the Traditions of the Prophet — will become the domain of
legislatures, particularly in Sunni Arab lands where the
organization, prestige, and soft power of the clergy is vastly less
than among Shiites.
