Food Needs:

• 3 Empty Barrels: $135
• Non-Perishable Foods to fill: $1000

Total Food Cost: $1135

Books:

• 100 A Gift for the Intellects in Explanation of the Three Fundamental Principles of Islaam of Imaam Muhammad Ibn ‘Abdul-Wahhaab with the exp. of Shaykh ‘Ubayd al-Jaabiree $1200
• 100 The Prophet’s Prayer Described by Imaam Muhammad Naasirud-Deen al-Albaanee $700
• 100 Fortress of the Muslim $210
• 100 The Collection of an-Nawawee’s 40 Hadeeth (Pocket Size) $210

Total Book Cost: $2320

Da’wah Pamphlets:

• 200 Common Misconceptions About God
• 200 7 Fundamental Questions About Islaam
• 200 Women in Islaam
• 200 Muhammad: A Witness, Bearer of Glad Tidings and a Warner
• 200 Uprooting the Forces of Evil: Islam’s War on Terror

Total Pamphlet Cost: $0 (to be donated by TROID)

Shipping Charges: $285

Dominica Total: $3740

Has anyone noticed that they ask for more money to distribute two particular “salafi” texts than they do for food? While I do not see anything wrong with sending a few Islamic books or dhikr manuals like Hisn al-Muslim, surely people in the Carribean need money to buy other necessities than food, such as clothing or tools or cooking equipment, than “salafi” propaganda tracts.

The programme interviews Mufti Barkatullah and Cassandra Balchin, both of whom are associated with the document. The programme seems to seek out stereotypical male and female Muslim opinion, such as the guy with a heavy foreign accent who said that he would not give up his right to polygamy in case his wife got ill (I can think of such eventualities myself, but the first wife “getting ill” is not one of them). The presenter, Roger Bolton, repeated a claim that four years’ work had gone into the document, and Mufti Barkatullah alleged that the MCB were backtracking on their earlier support because of pressure from “some minority big-mouth”. I must say that I don’t think the document represents four years’ work; it is five pages long and could have been done in that number of hours.

They also interviewed Shaikh Ibrahim Mogra (whom they presented as “the MCB’s Ibrahim Mogra” rather than as a shaikh or scholar), who made the point that the aspects of Islamic law challenged by this contract were the law, whether it matches with British custom or not; Cassandra Balchin of the so-called Muslim Women’s Network UK (although her role in Women Living Under Muslim Laws is better known) alleged that the sky hadn’t fallen when the role of the wali had been abandoned elsewhere.

It was Ed Husain, in this article on the Guardian’s website, which drew my attention to this lecture. He dismisses it as “a rant” from “an Arab male cleric with extreme Wahhabi leanings, denouncing the contract as kufr, or non-belief”. Well, most “clerics”, or scholars as Muslims actually call them, are male. This has always been the case, although the fact that there are not enough female scholars (as there used to be plenty) is acknowledged in some quarters at least. Ed is also male; why should anyone take any notice of him if this trait is a black mark against Haitham al-Haddad? The lecture’s biggest offending seems to be that it rubbishes a point of view Husain agrees with, and does so pretty comprehensively, and I cannot call its delivery a “rant” although I think he over-eggs the pudding a bit regarding the decline of the West.

“Ed” starts off with a sob story about a female former colleague of his, who caved into parental pressure to marry a cousin who then treated her badly. Given how much of what Ed has told us over the past couple of years has been debunked, I wonder how much of what Ed says about this woman is true, or if she even exists. Ed reckons that, if this contract had been used, his friend might have been able to divorce this abusive husband, or indeed, to have married her “first love” whom she had sacrificed to marry this man. The fact is that it would have had no such effect.

You can download the Muslim Marriage Contract (PDF) here. You will notice that the first page contains a substantial array of logos, including that of the Islamic Shari’ah Council and Muslim Council of Britain, both of which have withdrawn their support for the contract. The MCB have explained their position thus:

In furtherance of its policy to work with others for the unity of Muslims and for the common good, the MCB had collaborated on a worthwhile initiative on enabling parties to a Muslim marriage to understand and respect their rights and obligations and to enable Courts to enforce the rights of parties in accordance with what is agreed at the time of the Nikah. That initiative has regrettably led to misinterpretation of Shari’ah by those who the MCB had trusted to take the lead on this matter. Those representing the Muslim Institute were reported as saying that the documentation produced was a “re-invention of Shari’ah” or that it was a “modern” or ” reformist” view of the Shari’ah. These types of glib generalisations on sharia councils are unhelpful and not in keeping with MCB’s evidence-based approach to community issues. Moreover the MCB looks to the traditional Islamic institutions of ijma (the consensus of scholars) as the way forward in resolving the issues of our times.

The MCB rejects the misguided and incorrect assertions made by and ascribed to the Muslim Institute.

Given that the Muslim Institute is run by Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, one would have expected that the MCB would have checked up on his record, which includes rubbing shoulders (if not literally) with Cassandra Balchin of the secularist pressure group, Women Living Under Muslim Laws. I saw him present a lecture at SOAS on a bill which included Balchin and Chetan Butt, a Harry’s Place type based at Goldsmith’s College. Ed accuses the Council of having a position “as retrogressive and insular as its previous decision to boycott attending Holocaust Memorial Day”, a decision they had every right to take, particularly given that the memorial was all about an event which had nothing to do with Muslims, particulary those from the Indian subcontinent. Ed thinks that the City Circle were ahead of the MCB on that issue as they are on this one. The City Circle is run by Asim Siddiqui, who is the son of Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, who has run the so-called Muslim Parliament and Muslim Institute for years, whose name is on this contract, a fact that Ed does not bother to mention in his article. Whatever the inadequacies of the MCB, it is not a family affair.

The tolerance the Muslim Institute gets from the secular establishment is amazing; the Muslim Institute and Parliament have been part of the same establishment since the 1980s, and were then noisily pro-Iranian, and both have degenerated into vehicles for Ghayasuddin Siddiqui; both are run out of the same address (109 Fulham Palace Road, London W6). In 1989, they were among the foremost cheerleaders for the Iranian fatwa on Salman Rushdie, while UKACIA (UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs, run by the same people who later set up the MCB) stuck to demonstrations and lobbying. Perhaps the Iranian money has dried up, or perhaps Siddiqui has realised that the Muslim community no longer regard Iran as a great hope for the revival of Islam, or have decided that they do not want to be dominated by Shi’ites after all; or perhaps the secularist lecture circuit provides more money nowadays. The Muslim “Parliament” still exists, or at least its website does, but its website lists just two people as Personnel - Siddiqui himself and one Jaffer Clarke - and it seems to contain no references to past or forthcoming elections. Is a man really to be taken seriously when he runs a “parliament” to which nobody is ever elected? Running front organisations for oneself is normally the hallmark of a kook, not a respectable community leader.

The main problem with this contract is that parts of it are simply not religiously valid. The right of a man to take other wives, for example, is one which the Islamic community has agreed upon for its entire history. This contract, meanwhile, lists among the “special conditions” that the husband “is not to enter into formal or informal nikah (Muslim marriage) contract in the UK or abroad with another woman, as it is unlawful under the laws of England and Wales as well as the Scottish legal system”. If this really were illegal in this country, there would be no need for it to be included in this contract (more on that issue later, insha Allah), but as it is, informal marriages are not unlawful; what is unlawful in the UK is registering them. Even in the USA, where polygamy was outlawed as a response to the Mormon practice, informal polygamy is tolerated, whether among the Christian sects which practise it or among Muslims. However, in Islamic law, polygamy is a right men have, and no contract can take that away. A woman can stipulate a right to divorce for herself if she is particularly averse, but cannot stop it happening altogether. So, this part of the contract is null and void. Similarly, since the fact that a man’s divorce of his wife is binding is a matter of consensus among the scholars, and is well-known, no contract can make it non-binding, or bind a man to seek counselling or judicial approval.

While not part of the terms and conditions, the certificate also specifies that the marriage be witnessed by “two adult witnesses of good character”, which it alleges is “gender/faith neutral”. This has never been accepted by any Muslim authority; rather, some authorities accept one male and two female witnesses, while others insist on two men. Furthermore, they must be upstanding Muslims, and some suggest that, if there is a shortage of upstanding men, that the marriage be witnessed by a large number of people. Needless to say, classical Islamic jurisprudence does not insist that the witnesses be resident in the country where the marriage takes place, or that the marriage certificate records the postcode of their place of residence.

I suspect that this contract is, for British legal purposes, highly dubious. It mixes boilerplate rhetoric better suited to a preamble into the terms of the contract, and makes stipulations which are completely redundant. Among the terms and conditions is too much vague material. For example, it requires the couple to “undertake to stay loyal to each other and never to engage in extra-marital affairs”, the second of which is already a condition on which a marriage can be ended, and the first is too unspecific to be enforceable, since one person’s idea of what is acceptable as loyalty will differ from another’s, and in the case of marriage, may well go beyond merely not having affairs. The entirety of the “mutual rights and obligations” section is boilerplate and does not belong in the section on terms and conditions; some stipulations, such as the obligation not to spread sexually-transmitted diseases or sexually abuse the children, are already more than adequately covered by civil and criminal law; it also carries the offensive presumption that Muslims will sexually abuse their own children unless you really spell it out to them that you can’t do that sort of thing. It is rather like making people sign an agreement not to throw someone under a train every time they buy a train ticket or enter a station.

So, this contract is legally shoddy, and Islamically invalid. I doubt very much whether it would have helped Ed’s supposed friend, because the right not to marry someone you don’t want to marry is already established, at least in the Hanafi school followed in Pakistan, as is the ability to stipulate a right to divorce at the instigation of the wife. Would this woman have been offered the chance to enter a marriage based on this particular contract when caving in to family pressure to marry a clearly undesirable man? I really do not think so. It is my contention that Muslim women who want to escape from difficult family situations, or to study against the wishes of their family or whatever, do not need outside meddling in Muslim family structures or institutions; they need actual material help, which means money. If these people, and their secularist liberal supporters, wanted to help people other than themselves, they might put their hands in their pockets to help these women pay for food, accommodation and other needs, rather than drawing up a silly little document which is so badly researched and drafted that it will end up helping nobody.

What sticks out about his article in today’s paper is the same as what I noticed in a previous media appearance: his total rejection of, and total refusal to acknowledge, all criticism. Nobody is deconstructing his writing and finding parts of it wanting in accuracy: the only opposition he acknowledges is that of enemies, calling him names, accusing him of being an agent or of being in it for the money, and making threats to him. There are a few “spiritual Muslims and scholars” cheering him on in private, he tells us, but for some reason they won’t speak up - despite the fact that such people have stood up to oppose extremism for years without being afraid to give their names.

Among the issues he fails to address is that some of the details in his book are remembered differently by others who were there. For example, Yahya Birt, on Deenport today, notes that the murder he describes of a Nigerian student in Newham may not have been “Britain’s first Islamist murder” at all, but rather a drug-related incident. He alleges that HT is “a sophisticated organisation: it rarely ever pulls the trigger. It raises the temperature and allows others to do the deed”. Since he talks in the present tense, can he tell us of all the murders in which HT have been similarly indirectly involved since the split with Omar Bakri? I should not think so, because there have been none. He completely ignores the significance of this split, which is all too evident in the belligerent attitude of al-Muhajiroun’s remnants even today and the quiet intellectual activism of HT. We may disagree with them - I certainly do - but it does not give us the right to slander them.

In his article today, he claims to have unmasked “those who, until very recently, were walking in and out of Downing Street masquerading as moderate Muslims”, who “taught from the works of Syed Qutb and Abul Ala Mawdudi, the godfathers of al-Qaeda ideology” by night and stood at the Cenotaph with politicians and diplomats by day. Clearly this is an appeal to the non-Muslim readers, since it could not fool any Muslim. They may well be influenced by Mawdudi, but do we see them encouraging acts of terrorism in the west, or indeed anywhere? If they had been, one would expect that we would have seen far more violence than we have. Of course, it has never been any secret that many of the MCB’s leaders have a Jama’at background, and this fact was “exposed” in the media before he came on the scene last month. Media and blog campaigns against politicians befriending Muslim Brotherhood affiliated scholars like Shaikh Qaradawi have been going on since at least 2005 - certainly well before the London bombings.

He has not addressed the issue of why he does not behave as he suggested to others last year, while he was writing his book. When people criticised a leader of whom he approved - Hisham Kabbani, the leader of the self-styled Islamic Supreme Council of America - he said, “must we wash our dirty linen in public?”. Does he not see any contradiction, when encouraging people not to discuss the ISCA’s faults on a forum as public as DeenPort, in discussing the affairs of the whole Muslim community in a published book and in the national media?

I’m not in a position to analyse “Ed” Husain’s motives, but he is not the only person out there throwing mud at Muslims, in the name of “moderate” Islam, in such a way as to get noticed and praised by hostile non-Muslims. Recently Dr Irfan al-Alawi was interviewed by the Christian Broadcasting Network, a right-wing American TV station best known for broadcasting Pat Robertson’s 700 Club programme, as part of a news feature posted on YouTube under the heading “Make way for the Monster-Mosque in Londonistan” (also see a written version here or here). Irfan al-Alawi is the “Western Europe director” of Stephen Schwartz’s so-called Center for Islamic Pluralism, and is shown in the feature talking of the Tablighi Jama’at’s “satanic ideology” to CBN’s fundamentalist Christian viewers. Quite apart from the fact that taking men for a few days out of their normal routine for a bit of religious learning isn’t perceived as “satanic” by the vast majority of Muslims, the article contains the usual exaggeration of the mosque’s capacity and other scary “facts”.

People defending al-Alawi point to his role in bringing to the public’s attention the Saudis’ destruction of the architectural heritage of the Hijaz, and Mecca and Madinah in particular, but his attacks on fellow Muslims, and his association with Stephen Schwartz who is distinguished for denouncing Shaikh Hamza Yusuf over and over again like a stuck record, detract from this to a huge degree. It is a known fact that his opinion of the TJ is not shared by the shuyookh of the Bani Alawi with whom Irfan al-Alawi is associated. I have personally heard Habib Ali Jifri speak highly of the TJ. However, while I’m sure we all agree that protecting our heritage from the Saudi régime’s depredations is important, Shaikh Hamza’s and his colleagues’ work has been to protect Muslims rather than bricks and mortar. The fact is that, through their work, it has been made easier in the west to be a mainstream Muslim and that an English-speaking Muslim culture has been established which follows the four madhhabs and accepts the authority of the traditional scholars rather than sectarians. I do not see what good motive anyone would have for speaking ill of such a person in the courts of those who hate Islam and the Muslims.