“Defending Islam” by attacking hadeeth

Every so often Muslims run into people who believe Islam exists without the hadeeth literature – the record of what the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) said or did. There are a couple of sects, the Khalifites and Perveizites, who insist that the hadeeth is not a source of Islam and that it’s just a load of hear-say. People who read the Usenet newsgroup soc.religion.islam during the mid-1990s will remember that it was infested with anti-hadeeth activists on at least one occasion (and they still raise their heads every so often to this day). I’ve met people myself who insist that they “follow the hadeeth of Allah”, meaning the Qur’an. In response to an article by Robert Spencer attacking one Musdah Mulia, an Indonesian Muslim feminist, Front Page Magazine has displayed a response by Khaleel Mohammed which relies on an anti-hadeeth position.

Mulia’s position that the hijab is not mandatory is indeed the position of a large majority of women in Indonesia.

But the position of ordinary people does not count. It’s recorded that in the Maldives, until recently, it was common for women to go bare-breasted, never mind without hijab; the Moroccan travelling qadi Ibn Battuta recorded that he was appointed a judge in that country, and was unable to persuade local women to dress properly other than in his court. Despite this, it has been a Muslim country for centuries.

The Islamic position is the consensus of the scholars, not what common people do.

But Spencer is upset that this woman who IS a scholar of Islam (whether she is a scholar of religion is another matter) should have made such a Qur’anic statement.

I’m not sure what he means by a person making “a Qur’anic statement”. But if someone insists that hijab is not compulsory, he or she is either not a scholar of Islam, or is a liar. Any aspiring student of Islam will learn that hijab is compulsory very early in their studies.

Instead he chooses to attack her by talking about the Islamic tradition in which Muhammad supposedly commands that when a woman reaches the age of menstruation, it does not suit her to display anything except her face and hands. This tradition, as indicated by his own phraseology, is just a tradition from the body of literature known as the hadith.

As I have said before on Frontpagemag and elsewhere, this is a source of belief that is very problematic. It does not have the authority of the Qur’an and was made up long after Muhammad died.

If the entire hadeeth literature is “made up”, then what record is there of what the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) said or did? We are told in the Qur’an to pray, fast and pay our zakaat; we are not told exactly how – this is something we were taught by the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam). There are numerous injunctions in the Qur’an itself to obey Allah and His Messenger (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam); the latter part of this injunction is impossible without a record of what the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) instructed us to do or not to do, and how.

The status of the Hadeeth is different from the Qur’an in that the specific ritual purity rules surrounding copies of the Qur’an do not apply to books of hadeeth. We do not have to be in wudhu to touch a hadeeth book, even Bukhari, but the status of authentic Hadeeth is that of revelation, and its commands are binding upon us.

Khaleel then tries to address some issues on which Spencer had attacked Mulia. First, the Hijab:

The Jewish and Christian women of Muhammad’s time wore head coverings, and these also were an indication of demarcation between a slave woman and a free woman. The Qur’an (24:31, 33:59), as any good scholar will tell you, is NOT incipiently ordaining the hijab–but simply telling the women HOW the head covering is to be worn–that it is to be drawn over the breasts. The Qur’an is addressing a society where the head covering is obviously a norm. If time and place have changed, or “if the reason is no longer there, the ruling is obsolete” (in the words of the jurists), then such as Mulia’s ilk have the right to view the hijab as no longer needed.

So the fact that headcoverings are no longer fashionable in the west means they are no longer compulsory in the Muslim world? This is classic post-conquest thinking: we must do what our conquerors do (even if they don’t actually tell us to). When Ibn Battuta entered the Maldives, he attempted to enforce the Islamic rules on dress even though they were unfashionable there. When Muslims entered the UK, their children demanded the right to wear the correct Islamic dress, and have usually succeeded.

The fact that Mulia does not see most Muslim women in Indonesia wearing hijab does not mean it has ceased to be compulsory; if the ruling really does mean “if you wear a headcovering, draw it over your breasts”, why have Muslims never interpreted it this way? More to the point, if Allah Almighty had meant this, He could have told us, “Tell the believing women who wear head coverings to draw them over their breasts”. (The word used is khimaar, not hijaab.)

A proper Islamic scholar explains the ruling thus:

There is no other lexical sense in which the word khimar may be construed. The wording of the command, however, “and let them drape their headcoverings over their bosoms,” sometimes confuses nonspecialists in the sciences of the Qur’an, and in truth, interpreting the Qur’an does sometimes require in-depth knowledge of the historical circumstances in which the various verses were revealed. In this instance, the elliptical form of the divine command is because women at the time of the revelation wore their headcovers tied back behind their necks, as some village women still do in Muslim countries, leaving the front of the neck bare, as well as the opening (Ar. singular jayb, plural juyub, translated as “bosoms” in the above verse) at the top of the dress. The Islamic revelation confirmed the practice of covering the head, understood from the use of the word khimar in the verse, but also explained that the custom of the time was not sufficient and that women were henceforth to tie the headcover in front and let it drape down to conceal the throat and the dress’s opening at the top.

This is why Muslim women cover their heads: because the Qur’an unambiguously orders them to, and there is no qualifying text or hadith or even other lexical possibility to show that the Qur’anic order might mean anything besides obligation. Rather, the hadiths all bear this meaning out, Muslim scholars are in unanimous agreement about it and have been from the time of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) down to our own day, and it is even known by all non-Muslim peoples about them.

As for the Burka and Chador:

There are not mentioned in the Qur’an nor in the hadith. Yes, Muslim women do wear them in certain cultures, but that is the interpretation of their culture–the words are not even Arabic.

The word “chador” is indeed not Arabic (it’s Persian). The word burqaa’ is, however, in common usage in the Gulf region (bear in mind, despite the proximity to Persia, this is historical Arab territory), to mean a face covering (albeit of a different type to that found in Afghanistan).

On inheritance:

Yes, these are in the Qur’an. But once again: at least the Qur’an speaks of women having some right to inheritance. That the other scriptures of the Abrahamic religions do not have such laws speak volumes about the status of women at that time. They were not even allowed to inherit and by the process of gradualism, the Qur’an sought to give women a share of inheritance. No one will argue that those laws, by today’s enlightened values, are equal. But they are certainly far better than anything that any Abrahamic religion had until then.

Ah, a “process of gradualism”. No doubt once the Muslim lands are conquered by people who have suddenly noticed that women are human beings after centuries of denying them their rights, we can get to giving women the equality they supposedly have where our conquerors come from.

In fact, Islamic inheritance laws remained static after they were revealed. A woman has vastly less financial responsibility than a man, given that it’s a man’s job to feed his family. A woman’s half may end up being disposable income. A man’s whole may well end up being spent on necessities.

On the “male escort for women”:

This is not mentioned in the Qur’an, but in the hadith, the status of which has already been discussed.

In fact, there is an enormous difference of opinion on this in our times, partly because the hadeeths on it vary and because the nature of travel in our times has changed – but not because it’s based only on hadeeths; in fact, there are hadeeths which give the impression to some authorities of approving of a woman travelling alone if there is safety. (Bear in mind that in modern western societies, the countryside is vastly safer than the city, and banditry is virtually nonexistent.)

Khaleel Mohammed then goes on with a familiar claim that “the Arab/Persian cultures shaped the traditions of early Islam, often in dissonance with the Qur’an”, as if to claim that people’s interpretations of Islam merely reflect their cultures. Actually, you can’t say that about anyone more than contemporary “reformers” of Islam, but the hadeeth literature demonstrates that the Prophet (sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) opposed traditional practices on some occasions. For example, he broke taboos such as the objection to marrying the daughter of a particularly close friend or of nobler lineage. (Some Muslims aren’t aware of this; a few days ago, I had to prove to some Muslims on a blog that the Sahaba did not allow Sayyidina Bilaal, radhi Allahu ‘anhu, to go through his life without the company of a wife on account of his race and his slave background.)

This article is one more example of a “defence of Islam” being published on this particular website which “defends Islam” from a deviant viewpoint. Khaleel Mohammed’s defence will not convince anybody who was convinced by Spencer’s earlier article, and it’s likely that Spencer will issue another article refuting his false principles [update 6.42 BST: Spencer has indeed written a refutation, which you can find both at his Jihad Watch site and at FPM, under the title “Response to Khaleel Mohammed”]. He claims at the end of his article that Spencer “takes things out of context, and shamelessly lies”, an accusation I agree with, but he does appear to have some knowledge of classical Islamic methodology, which Khaleel doesn’t.

It should go without saying that the appearance of hijaab in places where it was previously absent is scant compensation for the spread of heretical sects like Wahhabism, the revilement of classical scholars, the abandonment of classical ways of learning, the closure of the doors of lawful acts of worship (tawassul, group dhikr, mawlid), sectarianism and approval of heinous acts such as the murder of schoolchildren. But this does not mean that hijaab is not compulsory, and that Muslims should not defend it and the people who wear it.