Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (7 page)

With Islam, all that would change. First, the Qur’an ordered that the bride-price should be paid to the bride herself, and that she should keep it as long as she wished, as a financial safety net. Second, the Qur’an also decreed that females should receive a share of inheritance. It was only half of what their male siblings would get, but in a society in which men were considered to be responsible for care of the whole household, this was a generous amount. The Qur’an also granted women the right to accept or reject a marriage offer, and it established the marital bond on the basis of “love” and “mercy.”
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What the Qur’an brought was not full equality between the sexes, but, when considered in context, it was a great improvement. “In such a primitive world, what Muhammad achieved for women was extraordinary,” says British historian Karen Armstrong. “The very idea that a woman could be a witness or could inherit anything at all in her own right was astonishing.”
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That’s why the rights of women in Islamic law—the Shariah—would remain ahead of the West well into modern times. In the Middle Ages, some Christian scholars even criticized Islam for giving too much power to menials such as slaves and women.
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Even when Great Britain applied its legal system to Muslims in place of the Shariah, as it did in some of its colonies, married women were stripped of the property that Islamic law had always granted them.
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The tragedy is that while women’s rights peaked in the West in the twentieth century, in Islamdom it stagnated for centuries and even declined to its current reprehensible state. In the upcoming chapters, we will see the reasons for this.

Improvement and evolution, and not total revolution, was often the method of the Qur’an. Slavery was not abolished, for example, but manumission was encouraged, and the position of the slave was improved enormously. The “Arabian slave . . . was now no longer merely a chattel but was also a human being with a certain religious and hence a social status and with certain quasi-legal rights.”
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Even rights for animals were introduced. Pagan Arabs used to treat them quite cruelly, even to the extent of cutting off lumps of flesh to eat while the poor creatures were still alive. Muhammad banned all such practices as well as animal fights organized for entertainment. Reportedly, he once told a man that he could go to paradise simply for giving water to a thirsty dog.
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Yet still, the concept of “rights” would not become a major theme in Islamic law. Mohammad Kamali, professor of Islamic law, points to this problem and notes that while the Qur’an introduced many individual rights—such as rights to life, property, privacy, movement, justice, personal dignity, and equality before the law—classical Islamic literature focused on duties.
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In other words, an Islamic theory of rights could have been developed, for it had a basis in the Qur’an, but just as with Christianity, Muslims had to wait until modern times to look at their scripture with a more individualistic perspective. That’s why some new books of Islamic jurisprudence have chapters on “the rights and freedoms of the individual,” something the classical works lacked.
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T
HE
P
OLITICS OF THE
P
ROPHET

So far, we have focused on the message of the Qur’an. But what about the events that it precipitated? What about, for example, the political order that the Prophet Muhammad founded? Didn’t he establish a theocratic state that waged wars and pursued conquests? These are good questions, and the answer is not as simple as it might seem.

In fact, Muhammad did not start his mission as a political leader. The Qur’an told him that he was “only a warner and a bringer of good news.”
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When he was worrying that most pagans did not listen to his preaching, God was telling him to let go. “We did not appoint you over them as their keeper,” a verse reminded, “and you are not set over them as their guardian.”
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The Qur’an also recognized the Meccans’ right to disbelieve. It threatened unbelievers with hellfire, but it also emphasized that, in this world, they should be free to choose their own path. “It is the truth from your Lord,” one verse read, “so let whoever wishes have belief and whoever wishes be an unbeliever.”
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The first thirteen of the Prophet’s twenty-three-year career went on like this—totally apolitical and nonviolent. This attitude partly changed only after he had to flee from Mecca—where he was on the verge of being killed by prominent pagans who were offended by his uncompromising monotheism—to Yathrib, a town that would later be known as Medina (the City). This
hijra
, or migration, would be a turning point in the prophet’s mission and would mark the very beginning of the Muslim calendar.

The Muslims in Medina, a recently formed community, welcomed the Prophet with hymns and warmly accepted his Meccan followers. Here they were all brothers in faith, in a community free from oppression. And the Prophet of God was not only a spiritual leader now but also a political one. Yet, interestingly, the Prophet did not establish a theocracy in Medina. Instead of a polity defined solely by Islam, he founded a territorial polity based on religious pluralism.

This is evident in a document called the Charter of Medina, which the Prophet signed with the leaders of the other community in the city: the Jews. Three Jewish tribes had lived in Yathrib for some time. After some negotiations, they signed a pact with Muhammad that recognized him as the head of Medina, but it granted both faith communities the right to live in their autonomous ways. “To the Jews their religion,” read one of the clauses, “and to the Muslims their religion.” The idea was that the city belonged to both of these groups, and each had to contribute to its defense in the event of an outside threat. “All tribes are one community,” the charter declared, “distinct from other people.”
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The word for community used here, interestingly, was
umma
, which later acquired an exclusively Islamic meaning. Today, Muslims use the term only to mean fellow Muslims. But, in the Charter of Medina, the
umma
consisted of people from different faiths who had formed a political community with joint interests. What this meant, according to a Western scholar, is that “Muhammad’s original Medina ‘community’ was a purely secular one.”
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The religious pluralism in the charter was probably a result of custom rather than an innovation by the Prophet. However, if the Prophet’s political mission will be seen as normative for Muslims, the pluralist and even the “secular” nature of the charter cannot be overlooked.

Unfortunately, the system established by the charter did not last long, mainly due to growing tension between the Muslims and their archenemies, the Meccan pagans, who had killed, tortured, and finally expelled the Muslims from their homeland. “Permission to fight is given to those who are fought against,” the Qur’an soon declared. “They are expelled from their homes without any right, merely for saying, ‘Our Lord is God.’ ”
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What linked this Meccan threat to Medinan Muslims and the fate of the Jews in the city, according to Muslim sources, was the Jews’ decision to collaborate with the enemy. Consequently, two of the three Jewish tribes, which violated the charter by helping the Meccans, were expelled from Medina. The third Jewish tribe, the Banu Qurayza—which negotiated with the Meccan army when the latter besieged Medina to annihilate the whole Muslim community during the critical Battle of the Trench—was less lucky. This treason, as Muslims saw it, would be punished by the most controversial decision that Muhammad ever made: the mass execution of all the tribe’s males and the enslavement of the women and children.

The validity of this story has been doubted by some modern Muslim scholars.
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One of them, Walid N. Arafat, thinks that the story is a later invention. “To kill such a large number is diametrically opposed to the Islamic sense of justice and to the basic principles laid down in the Qur’an,” he argues, pointing to the verse: “No soul shall bear another’s burden.”
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Yet even if the mass execution had really happened, as the mainstream view holds, one should note that it took place not as a commandment of the Qur’an but as the result of the customs of the time.
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“We cannot judge the treatment of the Qurayza by present-day moral standards,” notes Norman A. Stillman, professor of Judaic history. “Their fate was a bitter one, but not unusual according to the harsh rules of war during that period.” Stillman also reminds us that, in the Old Testament (Deut. 20:13–14), the Israelites were enjoined to do the same thing to their enemies: the slaughter of adult males and the enslavement of women and children, which was, after all, “common practice throughout the ancient world.”
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And this takes us to a crucial question: Are all things that Muhammad did normative for Muslims? Or do some of them reflect not the everlasting rules and principles of Islam but rather those of the Prophet’s time and milieu?

M
UHAMMAD THE
H
UMAN

Some modern Muslim theologians, and even some classical ones, who address the question above have come to the conclusion that the “historical” and the “religious” aspects of Muhammad must be separated.
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The Prophet brought a message relevant for all ages, in other words, but he lived a life of his own age.

Recognition of this is the key to saving ourselves from falling into one of the two very common and related mistakes. The first, which is made by non-Muslims, is to criticize, and sometimes even condemn, Muhammad according to our modern standards. The second mistake, which is made by Muslims, is to take the standards of his time as eternally valid and to try to bring them into the modern era.

Take, for example, another of his controversial deeds: his marriage to Aisha, who was, according to our definitions, quite underage.
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Of course, this is absolutely unacceptable by modern standards, but it was quite normal then, when puberty was commonly regarded as the natural age for marriage. (Arabs in the seventh century also tended to reach adulthood at an earlier age than Westerners do today.)
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Other controversial aspects of Muhammad—that he had several wives, owned slaves (whom he treated very benevolently), or ordered acts of violence such as the fate of the Banu Qurayza—became controversial only in the modern era and in the eyes of modern critics. “It is clear that those of Muhammad’s actions which are disapproved by the modern West,” notes William Montgomery Watt, “were not the object of the moral criticism of his contemporaries.”
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For the Muslim mind, this “historicity” of the Prophet should not be scandalous. In fact, expecting from Muhammad a perfect universal wisdom, totally unbound from his time and culture, would not be consistent with Qur’anic theology. Unlike the image of Jesus in Christianity—who, as the Word of God, had existed since eternity and entered into history by becoming flesh—Muhammad was just a human. He was not the Word of God; he was a humble man touched by the Word of God. “I am only a human being like yourselves,” the Qur’an ordered him to state. “It is only revealed to me that your god is One God.”
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Interestingly, though, Muslim tradition would later exalt him to a suprahuman figure who, like Jesus, existed before time and universe and performed many miracles on earth. In the next chapter, we will see how this “Prophetology” contributed to the rise of an all-encompassing
Sunna
(prophetic tradition) as a stagnant force in Islam more than a century after the Prophet’s death.

T
HE
G
REAT
M
YSTERYIN IN
I
SLAM

The final years of the Prophet’s life would be ones of victory. After five years of war, he signed a peace treaty with the pagans of Mecca in March 628. The next two years gave the Muslims a good opportunity to evangelize the new faith and gain converts from all over the Arabian Peninsula. Then, after a skirmish between two tribes that were allied with Medina and Mecca, respectively, the peace treaty dissolved. With an overwhelming army of ten thousand men, Muhammad marched toward Mecca. For the elders of the city, the only recourse was to surrender to the man whom they had chased out just six years earlier. They all feared that he would take revenge on his enemies, but instead he issued a general amnesty and forced no one to accept Islam.