A word to the veiled and bearded

Eat what you want and dress up as you desire, as long as extravagance and pride do not mislead you.

- Hadith The Prophet Muhammad (SAW), as reported by AbdAllah ibn Abbas



This seems to state very clearly that rules of diet and dress are means to an end, not an end in themselves. It also implies that if you follow any religious dietary and dress codes out of extravagance and pride, you are hurting yourself spiritually. I have known Muslim women who refuse to wear hijab in the west, because it calls attention to one's self unnecessarily. It seems to me that this hadith backs up that judgment.

Muhammad and Aisha

A beliefnet interview with Deepak Chopra quotes him as saying "some of the {facts of Muhammad's life} are not very palatable. There's the beheading of the Jews, there's the marriage to Aisha, a girl of 6 -- we are told all this from history, confirmed by scholars."

I've already written about the beheading of the Jews, but I suppose this is as good a time as any to discuss his relationship with Aisha. For many people,this story is a deal breaker that completely devalues everything else Muhammad ever did. For that reason, it is important to paraphrase the two most common responses to this issue by modern Muslims.

1) Some Muslims say it was a different time and that this sort of thing was acceptable back then. Some have pointed out that in the 19th century USA, the age of consent was 10 in almost every state. According to the only Hadith that deals with this issue, Aisha was 6 when she married Muhammad, and consummated the marriage at 9. Are we really going to label Muhammad a monster over a one year difference? Ignoring Muhammad's alleged behavior on this issue does not require us to approve of it. Muhammad was often ahead of his time, but perhaps on this particular issue he wasn't. Like George Washington and Abraham, he also kept slaves. No one claims that Washington's numerous other accomplishments and virtues should be completely ignored because he was a slave holder. Why not give Muhammad similar allowances for the customs of his time?

2) There are also many Muslim scholars who are highly critical of the single hadith that supports this claim. It was from a highly questionable source-a male friend of Muhammad's who obviously wasn't there at the time- and is not confirmed by any other source. This source claims that he heard the details from Aisha, but Aisha herself was one of the greatest contributors of hadiths, and makes no mention of it. There are also other historical sources which seem to contradict it. For example, Aisha was reported to have been present at a battle which was only a few years after her wedding, and she would have been too young to be permitted on the battlefield if she had gotten married at six. Scholars who use these alternative sources usually date Aisha's wedding age as around fourteen or fifteen.

So how about focusing on Muhammad's teachings, and ignoring thousand year old gossip? Chopra's claim that this incident is "confirmed by scholars" is an overstatement at best, and the incident is not that important even if it occurred.

Muhammad and Genital Mutilation

I followed up a link to what was called an "excellent balanced article regarding Islam" by a poster on beliefnet. I'm not going to include the link on this papge, because only a person who hates and fears Islam would consider this article balanced. It is full of highly insulting and inflammatory comments about Islam and Muslims, treating both as a scourge that threatens to engulf all of Western Civilization. Most importantly, none of these comments are backed up by footnotes, and I am certain that at least one of them is completely fabricated:an alleged Hadith in which Muhammad praises genital mutilation. The Arabs of Muhammad's time and place did not practice genital mutilation, so Muhammad would have had no reason to praise that practice, if he had heard of it at all. This is an African practice, and is done only by Sub-Saharan Africans and some Arabs who live in Africa. i.e. Egypt. The fact that this article contains such an obvious falsehood gives good reason for dismissing the rest of its alleged facts.

This religion is easy

This religion is easy. Do not make it a rigor, or you shall be overcome. Be steadfast, seek the closeness of Allah, grow in virtue, and implore His appeasement day and night.

- Hadith The Prophet Muhammad (SAW), as reported by Abu Hurairah

Nothing in here about not playing music, or keeping your beard long, or stopping women from driving cars. As a political leader, sometimes Muhammad had to make a lot of ad hoc decisions about what his particular Ummah had to do at that particular time. I see no reason to believe he wanted a troop of scholars to comb through everything everyone remembered about what he said and construct a set of prohibitions that are not mentioned anywhere in the Koran

I just found this Hadith on the Beliefnet site:


The Holy Prophet (saw) said "There will come a time upon the people when nothing will remain of Islam except its name and nothing will remain of the Quran except its inscription. Their mosques will be splendidly furnished but destitute of guidance. Their divines will be the worst people under the sky; strife will issue from them and avert to them."

No Citation for it, so I'm not sure it's legit. But if it is, it is a direct contradiction to my friend Abdullah's frequent claim that "Allah does not unite the believers in an error."

ijtihad and qiyas

My previous post was an attempt at what the Islamic tradition called ijtihad. This word translates roughly as "rational argument", and it has long been an essential aspect of Koranic interpretation. This underscores the fact that Muslims have long recognized that applying the principles of the Koran to daily life requires skill and thought. Those who think the meaning of the Koran is obvious rarely agree with each other as to what this "obvious" meaning is. Wahabbi Clerics in Saudi Arabia think it is obvious that the Koran forbids women from driving, even though cars didn't exist when the Koran was revealed. Shiite Clerics in Iran think it is obvious that women are permitted to drive, as long they keep their faces covered when they do it. The fact that they disagree seems to me to indicate that there is nothing obvious about applying a single text to thousands of years of diverse human experience.

This fact has nothing to do with the question of whether the Koran is the revealed word of God. Even if God did speak directly to Muhammad, there is still a serious intellectual challenge involved in figuring out how to apply what he said to individual life situations. Words get their meanings from the context in which they are said, and for the Koran that context no longer exists. To simply superimpose our own context on words said a thousand years earlier runs the risk of giving the words a completely new, and wrong, interpretation. That is what people do when they read the Koran without any knowledge of Islamic history, or without consulting scholars who are familiar with the nuances of the original Arabic.

The Hadith were preserved partly because Islamic scholars were aware of this problem. Some modern Islamic reformers want to throw out the Hadith, because only the Koran is the word of God. I agree with part of their intention, because many of the more extreme prohibitions advocated by fundamentalists are derived only from the Hadith. I think however that tremendous insight and benefits can come from reading the Hadith, and other aspects of Islamic history, as long as we remember this passage from the Koran.

Do you see that which God has provided for you? You make some of it Unlawful (Haram) and some of it Lawful (Halal). Did God allow you to do this? Or do you tell lies about God? 
QURAN, 10:59

What this implies to many of us is that only the Koran should be used as a source for taboos and prohibitions, because only the Koran is the word of God. Most of the prohibitions imposed by fundamentalists (including my least favorite, the prohibition against music) have no basis in the Koran and are derived solely from the Hadith. We can however, reject these Hadith-inspired taboos, and still value the Hadith as a way of enabling us to more fully understand exactly what the Koran was saying.

However, once we have understood the Koran in its historical context, there is still the problem of how to apply its teachings to the present time. That requires careful reasoning (ijtihad) and careful use of analogies (qiyas). There are no exact parallels between what was happening in 6th century Arabia and what is happening now, so we have to using our wisdom to decide which parallels are legitimate analogies and which are false analogies. Do all rules about camels apply to cars? Do rules about swords apply to guns and atomic bombs? Obviously some rules do, and some don't, but the Koran cannot tell us which is which. We must puzzle it out using the wisdom that Allah gave us, come to the best answer we can, and be humble and open-minded when discussing our interpretations with those who disagree with us.