The Corona Fatwas (2): Theological & Juridical Considerations

As discussed in an earlier post on Corona Fatwas, Muslim religious scholars were quick to respond with legal opinions (fatwas), once the global dimensions of the Corona-Virus/Covid-19 pandemic became clear. Central to these pronouncements were the effects of social distancing, lockdown or quarantine measures on the communal aspects of Islamic religious practices. Most acute at the time of the eruption of the pandemic were the consequences for the weekly congregational noon prayers on Friday. But as the crisis continues, the questions also extend to the communal aspects during Ramadan, the annual month of fasting which commenced on 24 April, as well as the pilgrimage to Mecca, which is scheduled this year to take place in late July and early August.

The proclamation of these fatwas evinces the dialectical dynamics between politics and religion in the Muslim world: Governments seek religious sanction for the measures they impose on society in the face of this health crisis, while the (often state-sponsored) religious establishment of Islamic scholars and office holders derive authority and underscore their continuing relevance by making pronouncements on current affairs.

Square of Mecca's Grand Mosque lies deserted amids Corona-Virus pandemic fears

By way of update, here are some excerpts from a survey on the Qantara website, which gives an impression of the ongoing debates about the theological and juridical considerations in regards to the constraints on congregational prayers and other communal activities.

Given the swift and far-reaching reactions from Muslim scholars with regard to Friday prayers, it cannot be assumed that leading Saudi scholars would contradict the potential desire of the royal family to cancel this year’s hajj. In fact, in the almost global suspension of Friday prayers and other communal worship, we might see a kind of modern iǧmāʿ, a broad consensus from the legal scholars. 

The Islamic tradition has a few fitting precedents for taking drastic steps in the interest of infection control, including with regard to practicing the religion, which may go some way towards explaining the broad consensus. According to one story about the Prophet (ḥadīṯ), which is well-evidenced in the sources, Muhammad also called on believers not to travel to a country where the plague was known to have broken out, and not to leave their own country when there was an epidemic of this kind there. This early form of restriction on travel can serve as a present-day starting point for comprehensive preventative health measures.

Islamic Legal Maxims

Aside from the Higher Objectives of Islamic Law  (maqasid al-shari'a) mentioned in the previous post, also featuring prominently in the religious discussions that are taking place now are the so-called Legal Maxims (qawa'id fiqhiyya).

Islamic law also contains a few central legal maxims on which sweeping restrictions on individual and communal religious practices could be based. The starting point for these maxims is the legal proposition that counts as one of the five basic maxims that span all the legal schools: “Harm should be eliminated” (aḍ-ḍarar yuzāl)).

 

These maxims could serve to justify a potential short-notice cancellation of the upcoming hajj. In the first version, the harm would be the further spread of coronavirus and the resultant rapid increase of people falling ill with Covid-19 both during the pilgrimage and afterwards.

In opposition to this is the benefit to the individual pilgrims, who are fulfilling their religious duty through the hajj – and in this, according to many religious scholars, there is also a general benefit, since the annual hajj also serves a collective interest in the preservation of the religion.

In terms of the Higher Objectives (maqasid), this part of the debates points at an evaluation of the relative importance of protecting and preserving life and religion respectively.

Aside from theological-juridical considerations, the survey notes that  historical precedents too can be used to vindicate the possible drastic measure of cancelling this year's Hajj. As was also pointed out in the previous post, a hint in that direction was already given in a statement of the King Abdulaziz Foundation for Research and Archives (KAFRA), identifying no less than forty earlier instances of cancellations of the Hajj throughout history.

For the full article, click here

Has Sunni Islam as a 'Community of the Middle' died?

Herunder are some excerpts from an article that appeared in The Islamic Monthly. It is from the hand of Mohammad Fadel. An established scholar, currently associated with the University of Toronto, Fadel is also a prolific author and critical debater on things Islamic.

Mohammad Fadel

In the intriguingly entitled 'ISIS, Islamophobia, and the End of Sunnism', he criticizes both media-savvy Islam (or religion in general) bashers such as Bill Maher and Sam Harris, but also presents an introspection into the shortcomings of the Muslim intelligentsia

Saying that their description of Islamic doctrines is reductionist is not responsive to the legitimate concern that certainly some Muslims hold to the doctrines that Harris and Maher criticize, nor does it provide an answer to the question that many people genuinely wish to know, namely, what is the content of authoritative Islamic teaching regarding a familiar range of contentious issues that are held to be important by mainstream liberals?

In a lucid and boldly argued piece, Fadel not only takes 'new atheists' to task for the misconceived views of Islam, but puts the blame also on Muslim intellectuals. He criticizes the latter for failing to come up with convincing counter arguments as a result of their own uncritical rehashing of outdated texts and over-reliance on authority figures from the past.

The profound weakness, or even the non-existence, of a credible institutional expression of Islamic teachings in the modern world means there is no source from which an outsider (or even Muslims) can know what authoritative Islamic teaching is. In the absence of such an expression, one can hardly blame non-Muslims — who wish to “know” what Muslims believe — for turning to the same sources that Muslims themselves do, such as pre-modern treatises of Islamic law that continue to be taught in seminaries in the Muslim world and are also  used by Muslims in the West.

While appreciative of the argument that there is no such thing as 'Islam', and that it makes more sense to talk of 'Muslims', it is methodologically impossible to give exhaustive representative accounts that accurately reflect the full diversity of opinion among the believers:

Such an empirical investigation, at its extreme, would require surveying of millions of Muslim individuals all over the world before conclusions about Islam could be reached. Not only would such a study be practically impossible, we generally don’t demand such precision in empirical studies before we accept the results of social scientific studies

Pointing at the cheap shots taken by new atheists such as Sam Harris, Fadel observes:

It is a trivial exercise to pick up standard works of Islamic law and find ideas that are repugnant to the modern world. But, it is also a trivial exercise to pick up classics of Western philosophy and law and find the same thing. Even Thomas Jefferson the most egalitarian of America’s founders, expressed views on gender equality that would disqualify him today from entering public office, or might even get him dismissed from a public office were he to express them openly. 

It is not just a matter of 'tit-for-tat' in debating the likes of Harris and Maher, the  lack of critical engagement with the Islamic heritage on the part of Muslims themselves is preventing any real tangible change in the generally deplorable political condition of the Muslim world. For example, in relation to the contentious issue of the application of Islamic law, Fadel observes:

..if Sunni Muslims are too indifferent to their law that they fail to articulate a meaningful expression of its content in the modern world, then the best that Sunnis can plead in their own defense is that historical Islamic law is irrelevant to their beliefs and actions. But it is this very nihilism that produces the ethical and political vacuum that authoritarian political regimes, corrupt oligarchies and religious millenarians have filled and created the political circumstances justifying Islamophobia.

Why, after more than a century of theological and legal reform that has generally moved toward greater recognition of rights of women and non-Muslims, for example, has a brutally atavistic movement like ISIS found a home (even if one hopes it is only temporary) in the Nile-to-Oxus region, which was once called the heartland of the Islamic world by the great American historian of Islam, Marshall Hodgson? In my opinion, this is not because a reified Islam is teaching Muslims to reject liberal values as such, but is a simple and predictable reflection of the fact that political orders prevailing in the Islamic heartland have no interest in promoting liberalizing political values. 

Cutting to the heart of the matter, according to Fadel's diagnosis, Sunni Islam has failed to live up to its claim as representing the umma-alwasat -- the 'community of the middle':

Sunnism was historically a centrist tradition that rejected the messianism of Shiʿism and the unforgiving puritanism of the Khawārij. Its centrism, however, was not born of a kind of ad hoc reasoning that called on Muslims simply to take middle positions between extremes. It was a centrism based on firm adherence to certain moral principles, including rejection of armed rebellion with a refusal to recognize as valid the illegal conduct of rulers; a readiness to overlook moral shortcomings of individuals constituting the community, whether rulers or ruled, combined with an insistence on holding each person accountable before the law for their conduct

The consequences are dire, because in his conclusion Mohammad Fadel minces no words:

In short, the political theology of Sunnism was centered on the sovereignty of law and respect for authority (not power as such). The historical tradition of Sunnism, however, assumed a certain kind of relationship between political leaders, religious leaders and the public that no longer exists and will not return. Until a new political theology is established that adapts the historical principles of Sunnism to the realities of a democratic age, we can continue to expect the persistence of groups like ISIS and the Islamophobic New Atheists. 

For the full article, click here

A critical Muslim view from Indonesia on democracy, state and religion

Herdi Sahrasad

The Jakarta Post carried an interesting article  on the delicate relation between state and religion in Indonesia. It was co-authored by American political scientist Blake Respini and the Indonesian journalist and academic Herdi Sahrasad, a lecturer at Paramadina University and associate director of the Center for Islam and State Studies.

 

Blake Respini

It challenges received views on the compatibility between support for a democratic political system and holding on to religiously-inspired -- often conservative -- social values. Many Muslim organizations in Indonesia advocate a combination of the two: 

It is easy to mistake support for a conservative moral law as support for Islamism when it is more simply a reflection of basic conservative values.[..] these civic organizations may be as important to the future of Indonesia’s democracy as is the curtailment of extremists.[...] 

From an outsider (Western) perspective this often leads to confusion, but, as the authors point out, in the Indonesian context: 

a critical component of Indonesia’s democratic future involves recognition of the special role of Islam in the state. [...] most Indonesian Muslims want their government to respect Islamic customs even if they do not support the creation of an Islamic state, the line between support for and opposition to sharia is often blurred.

 The debate over the passage of sharia-based legislation reflects that Indonesia continues to map out the most central questions concerning the basic shape of its democracy.

Consequently, the overeasy binaries projected in most of the media coverage on the Muslim world as well as due to the 'securitization' of the academic study of Islam, create a simplistic and misleading image -- certainly where it comes to Indonesia: 

political debate is often framed by pitting Islamists against non-Islamists, the lines are really much more subtle than this and democratic negotiation will require all parties to recognize this so that they can find common ground

 This reality imposes a delicate balancing act on both states and their citizens:

 All of us have multiple identities. We may define ourselves as students, scholars, husbands, wives, athletes, musicians from an array of images that form our composite selves. However, for a nation state to succeed it is essential that one of the imbedded images that a country’s inhabitants hold of themselves is that of their national identity. 

In the Indonesian case it meant finding a meaningful combination between the Muslim identity of its majority population, connecting it with co-religionists elsewhere, and their belonging to Indonesia, forcing them to forge bonds with non-Muslim fellow countrymen (and women).

To read the article in full, click here. For a slightly different version, highlighting some other aspects, click here.