Turabi pushes tired liberalism

Inayat Bunglawala (one of the leaders of the Muslim Council of Britain) writes at Comment is Free that Sudanese politician Hasan al-Turabi has made a speech supporting some rather old “Islamic” liberal positions:

Turabi seems to have challenged the traditional view that says Muslim men are allowed to marry Christians or Jews, but Muslim women are not. It should to be noted here that Sudan’s population includes a very sizeable 30% non-Muslim minority.

He also appears to have stated that the Hijab (headscarf) worn by many Muslim women was originally only intended to ensure that women covered up their chests in public.

Not content to rest there, it looks as if Turabi also - among many other matters - questioned the conventional Muslim idea of equating the testimony of two women to that of one man, saying that a woman’s testimony should be regarded as just as valid as that of a man’s, if not more reliable in some instances. He gave the example of the unfairness of equating the testimony of two female post-graduates with that of one illiterate man.

Bunglawala also noted that when he visited Sudan in the mid-1990s, there were no shortage of local Muslim women willing to shake his hand - clearly another idea they had been fed by the local “Islamic movement” which Turabi had apparently liberalised in order to make it easy to sell to people who might otherwise have become communists.

By advancing ideas like these which are against the well-known scholarly consensus, which forbids handshaking between unrelated people of the opposite sex and mandates the headscarf, he only makes life more difficult for people who wish to live by Islam as it is, not as some reformers wish it was. The fact that Turabi is a supposedly “Islamist” politician gives his false claims a spurious authority, but in fact Turabi is just a politician, not an Islamic scholar. He comes from a family of scholars, as a Sudanese shaikh told me personally, but went against his scholarly background. When I asked who his shaikh was now, an onlooker said “Shaitaan”, and the shaikh did not object.

Inayat Bunglawala should know better than to give this man and his deviant ideas undeserved publicity. His job is to represent the Muslims of this country, not to represent foreign “Islamic thinkers” to us or to the wider public on blogs. And he should know that the issue of hijab is still a sensitive one here, and that handshaking is indeed haraam in the circumstances he mentioned, and that we don’t need anyone telling us, when we expect to live by our deen in these matters, “such-and-such Muslim leader/intellectual says it’s OK / not necessary”. Either do your job properly or leave it to someone who will, Bunglawala.

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