All Things Halal

Are Pictures Worth Fighting Over?

2012-02-05T03:15:00.005Z

Some years ago, I remember proudly showing a course pack I had put together on the history of Muslim-Christian interaction to a Muslim friend of mine. The booklet displayed on each page pictures I had culled from the Internet, from friends, and from my own collection of photos. Not being especially religious, my friend nevertheless surprised me with his reaction. "You're not seriously thinking about presenting this to any Muslim students, are you?" he asked.

His concern was primarily with the image on the cover, an Islamic depiction of Muhammad on a camel and Jesus on a donkey. I knew, of course, that caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in the Danish press had set off a firestorm of protest in 2006, but as this picture did not portray him in an unflattering way, I wasn't particularly concerned. My friend made me wonder if I wasn't being cautious enough.

Currently, I'm reading a collection of essays by Sidney Griffith, a scholar at the Catholic University in Washington, D.C., about Christian writings in the early 'Abbasid period (roughly the years 750-900). The essays cover a variety of topics, and a few of them take up the controversy that images have caused in Muslim-Christian relations. Christian Melkite monks (those Christians who subscribed to the Council of Chalcedon in 451) found themselves having to defend their veneration of icons from Muslim claims that they were committing idolatry. Griffith quotes one particularly trenchant criticism from a Muslim writing in the ninth century:

"You extol the cross and the image. You kiss them, and you prostrate yourselves to them, even though they are what people have made with their own hands. They [the icons] neither hear, nor see, nor do harm, nor bring any advantage. The most estimable of them among you are made of gold and silver. Such is what Abraham's people did with their images and idols."

That last sentence refers to passages in the Qur'an (such as 21: 51-73) that tell the story of Abraham rejecting the idolatry of his father and breaking his idols to worship the one God. It's not a story you will find in Genesis, which says little more than that God called Abraham out of his country to go to the land where he would bless Abraham's descendants (12:1-3).

Christians in Muslim lands by and large defended their practice of venerating icons. Veneration, argued the theologian Theodore Abu Qurrah (d. 820), was not idolatry, but adoration of God. Both the Bible and the Qur'an at times referred to God with bodily metaphors, and as images were the illiterate man's words, what was wrong with icons using images of the body to bring praise to God?

Muslims, of course, have not been the only people to criticize icons. The Byzantine empire itself went through a period of 'iconoclasm' when the emperors banned the churches from displaying icons. And in the West, Protestants have demonstrated their own iconoclasm; think, for example, of the Scottish Reformers who stripped the Kirk (church) in Edinburgh of its stained glass windows. Even today, many Presbyterian churches have a spartan look about them. Indeed, I suspect many of us Protestants have a lingering suspicion of images and not much sympathy for the Eastern icon.

Yet I wonder, though, what we lose when we reject the opportunities that come with worshiping through image. Though I want to be sensitive to my Muslim friends, I am not so ready as many Protestants to reject what the icon represents. The Eastern church may have something to teach us yet. And perhaps this is a discussion worth having with our Muslim friends as well.

A New Project

2012-01-07T02:35:00.002Z

With this post, I'm initiating a new phase to this blog. I am this month beginning doctoral research through the University of Exeter on the monastery of Mar Saba (located near Bethlehem) and its relationship with its Abbasid and Fatimid overlords from roughly the years 800-1100 CE.

Last June, I traveled to Mar Saba and had the privilege of meeting some of the ancient monastery's monks as well as praying in what is allegedly the cave of the great 8th c. theologian John of Damascus. Mar Saba is one of the most important centers of Christian learning in the Middle East; some scholars think the Bible was first translated into Arabic there. For the next several years, Mar Saba will be the focus of my research, and I am hopeful this blog can act as a forum for exhibiting some of what I am finding.

Taking a 'Break'

2010-03-11T19:37:00.005Z

As my master's program at Oxford University draws to a close this June, so also is the program intensifying. Oxford University has the rather quaint but very stressful tradition of slotting all of their exams for a student's degree into a two-to-three week time frame. EVERY grade (or mark as the British say) I make and that's reported on my transcript I'll earn during that examination period!

So I have decided to take a rather extended break (i.e. several months) from this blog as I focus on 'revising' (or studying) for my exams, as well as writing my master's thesis. If I feel particularly inspired, I'll post an update. But, first things first.

(Note: April 17, 2011: This has turned into a 'very' long break as language studies in Amman, Jordan, have taken priority. However I intend to revive this blog upon re-entering a graduate program, God willing.)

It's the End of the World (as Muslims Knew It)

2010-02-05T15:39:00.009Z

Few natural wonders have impressed me as much as the Rock of Gibraltar, a small mountain range jutting out of the southern Spanish coast into the Mediterranean and pointed towards Morocco. My family and I visited this place a few weeks ago, and I was amazed by how compact the English colony of Gibraltar is—it has to be as the Rock takes up most of the peninsula! It's not even possible to drive all of the way around its perimeter, as the eastern side of the mountain drops precipitously hundreds of feet into the sea. (At its highest point, the Rock stands at 1,396 feet.)

From the southern point of the peninsula, it's possible to see the mountains of Morocco. Any ship trying to cross between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean must pass by Gibraltar, and the peninsula is consequently strategic to any power trying to control the region (which is why England grabbed it away from Spain in 1713). And it's no wonder then that Muslims chose Gibraltar as their point of invasion of Spain in 711. The Umayyad officer in command of the strike, Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād, gave his name to the peninsula—Jabal al-Ṭāriq (the mountain of Ṭāriq), or Gibraltar.

But that's not the reason why I'm writing about Gibraltar. For once, I'm actually more interested in its legend than its history! Roman legend has it that Hercules on a mission to the Far West (at that time the Atlantic) smashed through the Atlas mountains, thereby creating the Strait of Gibraltar. Thus the Rock of Gibraltar is one of the 'pillars of Hercules', the other being Jabal Mūsa on the Moroccan coast. Much later, Muslim storytellers reworked the legend to make Alexander the Great the one responsible for digging the strait on his way to do battle with a dragon on one of the islands off the coast of North Africa.

Until recently, I had no idea of the power legend had over medieval Muslims. I've often wondered why Columbus, rather than a Muslim navigator, was the one to discover America, given that Morocco is perched right on the edge of the Atlantic, and that Muslim geographers were remarkably advanced for their time. They had access to geographical information from China to Morocco (see my entry on the great Muslim traveler Ibn Baṭṭūṭa), and their maps were amazingly accurate. Moreover, at least some Muslim geographers agreed that the earth was round, an idea which they took from the ancient Greeks, and that the Indian and Atlantic oceans were connected. So why didn't they set sail on the Atlantic?

It seems that many of the fears European sailors had of dangerous sea-serpents and the like were shared by Muslims. The Muslim historian-geographer al-Mas'ūdi (d. 956), for example, described in detail the dragon with which Alexander did battle. The dragon is taken from the sea by angels, and with its tail, it destroys houses, trees, and mountains. Some scholars have connected this dragon with the Leviathan in the book of Job (3:8, 41:1–34), though the connection seems rather tenuous to me. No wonder, then, that monsters like this discouraged exploration.

Did Muslim geographers take stories like this seriously? Whether they did or not, it certainly colored Muslims' perceptions of the Atlantic. The ocean itself was threatening in Muslim lore. Al-Mas'ūdi writes that on the territory separating the Mediterranean from the Ocean (Gibraltar?) there is a tower (minaret) of brass and stones built by Hercules which has this inscription: 'There is no way behind me, nor a trodden path for any one who will enter this sea from the Mediterranean ... for this is the sea of darkness, the Green sea, the surrounding one.'

There's more. The Persian geographer Ibn al-Faqih (writing around 902), relates a story told by Mūsā b. Nuṣair, the Umayyad general in charge of the general invasion of Spain in 711. Mūsā describes how during the invasion he reached a city in Spain that boasted shining cupolas and pinnacles, but had no gates in its wall for the men to enter. A Muslim soldier with the aid of a ladder climbed up the wall, but upon reaching the top, burst out laughing, descended into the town and was never seen again. This happened twice more until Mūsā discovered an inscription on the wall saying that man will never reach immortality. The Muslims then retreated from the city, assuming it cursed by the jinn. This city at the end of the world (for that is what Muslims thought Spain to be) turns out to be a place of death, perched on the edge of the forbidding ocean.

Thankfully, we encountered no such city when we were in Spain, nor did the Atlantic from Gibraltar’s viewpoint look all that forbidding to me. But then it was a relatively pleasant, clear day on Europe’s southern tip. Maybe I would have felt differently if storm clouds were gathering, lightening flashing, thunder booming, waves surging....

The Jizyah: Abolished but not Forgotten

2009-12-27T23:05:00.005Z

Unless you are a specialist in Islamic or medieval history, the word jizyah probably doesn’t mean anything to you. But that would not have been true for the hundreds of thousands of non-Muslims who lived under Muslim rule prior to 1856, when the Ottoman sultan finally abolished it. The jizyah, in fact, was probably the first thing Christians and Jews and other subject peoples knew about their Muslim conquerors as early as the seventh century, as Muslims were quick to exact it from them.

And what was the jizyah? The jizyah was a poll tax (or a tax levied on individuals) that was specific to 'People of the Book' (primarily Jews and Christians) living under Muslim rule, and that was consequently not paid by Muslims. It was not a set tax but varied in severity over time and place. The tax finds its inspiration in Islamic law from Qur’ān 9:29, which reads: 'Fight those who do not believe in God and in the Last Day and do not declare forbidden what God and his messenger forbid, and do not believe in the religion [even if they are] amongst those who have been given the Book, until they pay the jizyah out of hand, being in the state of submission.' The tax (as Muslim jurists typically understand this verse) was the condition of the surrender treaty, and only People of the Book (namely Jews and Christians) would be allowed such terms.

Many Islamic legal scholars have written on the jizyah, and this past fall, my tutor and I have been translating the section of Shāfi‘ī’s Umm that deals with the jizyah. Shāfi‘ī (d. 820) is credited as the father of one of Sunni Islam’s largest schools of law, and thus his influence is considerable. The Shāfi‘ī school is particularly dominant in some countries in the Middle East (notably Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Egypt) as well as East Africa and Southeast Asia.

What does Shāfi‘ī say about the jizyah? One of his concerns is that polytheists not try to pass themselves off as Christians or Jews in front of Muslim tax collectors. And why should they want to do that? Because—and Shāfi‘ī is brutally clear on this point—polytheists must submit to Islam or they will be killed, while the People of the Book may remain in their faith as long as they pay the jizyah. Shāfi‘ī says that those claiming to be Jews or Christians must show proof that they were practicing their faith before the Qur’ān came down to Muḥammad. Any Jewish or Christian children who came of age after the time of Muḥammad could continue in the religion of their fathers. But any polytheist who converted to Christianity or Judaism after the advent of Islam would, in Shāfi‘ī’s view, still be a polytheist and must either convert to Islam or face death!

Shāfi‘ī, though, specifies that only Jewish and Christian men who had reached sexual maturity and who were of sound mind should be expected to pay the jizyah. He exempts women, children, the mentally instable, and the enslaved from paying the tax. Shāfi‘ī, of course, realizes that the men may be paying on behalf of their wives and children. But he is clear that any wealth owned by the women independently of the men may not be touched by Muslims—with the caveat that she ‘remain in her land’. If she wishes to travel on business, she may be taxed, though she cannot enter the Hijāz (where Makka and Madīna are), as that is forbidden to non-Muslims.

Legal theory does not necessarily equal actual practice. Many historians have pointed out that Muslim caliphs extended the ‘privilege’ of the jizyah to the Magian/Zoroastrian peoples of Persia and later to the Hindus of India. After all, the jizyah helped fill the caliph’s treasury, and some historians have argued that the early Muslims didn’t want non-Muslims to convert to Islam in its early years for this very reason. Nevertheless, the jizyah marked out Christians and Jews as being in a state of submission to Islam, and if they refused to pay it, they were breaking the terms of their original treaty that protected them and were thus open to Muslim attack. It was a demeaning reminder of their status under Islam. It's no wonder that Christians and Jews under Ottoman rule in the 19^th century pressed hard for its abolition when the rising European colonial powers of Britain and France began pressuring the Ottomans to reform their government (a reform movement known as tanzimat).

To my knowledge, no Muslim governments have brought back the jizyah, though some Islamist groups have demanded it in recent years from Christians in places like Iraq and Pakistan. But any discussion of Muslim tolerance for other religions must take the jizyah into account. The evidence is clear that tolerance came at a cost, and a great one at that.

A New Take on a Budweiser Story

2009-11-18T23:35:00.007Z

There's a story going round on the Internet that on September 11, 2001, a Budweiser employee in California entered a shop to find its Arab owners whooping and hollering in appreciation for what the terrorists had done. Shocked and disgusted, the Budweiser employee stepped out of the door and called his boss to tell him what he had discovered. His boss told him to remove all Budweiser merchandise from the store, which the employee promptly did.

News spread quickly to other suppliers as to what had happened, and soon managers from other companies began withdrawing their goods. Without products to sell, the Arabs managers of the store were forced to close their shop and leave town. Moral of the story: here's an effective way to respond to supporters of terrorism.

The story, it turns out, probably isn't true. Management at Budweiser denies it ever happened. But it raises an important question. Imagine with me that this encounter really did take place. It's true that what the employee did was better than responding with violence. But the message the Arabs received by companies boycotting them was simply that they weren't wanted there. It did nothing to change their attitude towards Americans; on the contrary, it likely hardened their hatred of America.

I'm reminded of the story of Jonah in the Bible, where Jonah was keen on seeing the city of Ninevah destroyed because of its sinfulness. Ninevah was the capital of the Jews' primary enemy at the time, Assyria. We know from sources external and internal to the Bible that Assyria annihilated the northern kingdom of Israel, and that the Assyrian army attacked the southern kingdom as well. Jonah really didn't want to see the people of Ninevah repent of their sin and be saved. He wanted to see them obliterated. But God did want Ninevah to repent and he didn't want to kill these people. When the people of Ninevah turned from their sin and God spared them his judgment, Jonah got angry.

Arabs love stories, and they're remarkably open to biblical stories, since the Qur'an hints at them but rarely gives any details. What if the Budweiser employee had been a Christian, and what if he had approached these Muslims and said he wanted to tell them a story? Jonah, or Yunus, is considered a prophet in Islam, so hopefully these men would have agreed to listen. And what does the story teach? That God wants people to turn from their sin, and he doesn't want to destroy them.

Many of the people in the Trade Centers likely didn't believe in God. Some of them probably had hostility toward Christ. Yet God would rather shower mercy on repentant people than destroy them.

I don't know how these Arabs might have responded to this. They might have simply shrugged off the story. But it may have got them thinking more deeply about the nature of God. And it may have created an opening to talking about the love of Christ.

When Sex Brings Death

2009-10-24T23:07:00.012+01:00

It’s made news headlines. Human rights organizations have denounced it. It’s caused riots and all manners of protest. It might be the one thing you’ve heard about Islamic law. It’s the penalty for zīna, or sexual sin that applies to Muslims convicted of having sex outside of marriage.

Several months ago, I watched a film called The Kite Runner set in Afghanistan before and during the Ṭalibān regime. In a particularly wrenching moment in the movie, the protagonist is present for the stoning of a couple caught in adultery. The two are tied up and covered in the back of a truck, are brought to a sports stadium full of hundreds of people, then forced to their knees where the authorities begin to stone them. The producer of the film doesn’t leave the film’s viewers to their imagination but coldly depicts the brutality of the execution—the screaming, the impact of the stones, the blood. It is perhaps the most shocking moment of the entire film, though it is only a passing story in the film’s overarching plot.

For anyone who has seen the movie, the scene is sure to provoke lots of questions. First some facts about how zīna is prosecuted. According to sharī‘a, four male Muslim witnesses must be present at the scene of the sex act in order for zīna to be confirmed and the death sentence pronounced—a pretty strange scenario, to be sure. But three of the four schools of Sunni law allow the court to admit circumstantial evidence, and Malikis (which are dominant in North Africa) hold that if an unmarried woman becomes pregnant with child, that this is evidence of zīna. A woman who claims she has been raped must show evidence that she tried to get help if she is to be believed. And how likely is a woman to succeed in that? In their book, Partners or Prisoners, Ida Glaser and Napoleon John noted a study showing that in 1995, 140 women in Pakistan (where sharī‘a is part of the law) complained to police they had been raped, and of these only six proceeded to a full investigation (see pg 271). Clearly women are facing an uphill battle on this one.

And where does this practice of punishing zīna come from? Punishment of zīna by stoning does not actually originate in the Qur’ān (though some Muslim jurists think that it was in the canon following 4:15 but was later lost when a goat ate the papyrus containing it). Chapter 24:2 instructs that the woman and man guilty of adultery or fornication must be flogged ‘each of them with a hundred stripes.’ Nevertheless Islamic scholars have come to accept stoning as the expected punishment for zīna. Some scholars have suggested it may have come from Jewish law in the Old Testament (see Leviticus chapter 20), but that is just speculation.

I am reminded of the story of Jesus in John 8:1–11, in which the religious leaders of the Jews brought a woman caught in adultery before Jesus. (I’ve always wondered where the guilty man was. Perhaps the woman was showing with child, which is why she got singled out?) The leaders prepared to stone her, but asked Jesus what he thought they should do with her. Jesus responds, ‘Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.’ A stunning response for these leaders, for who among them was without sin? John reports that everyone but Jesus left the court, whereupon Jesus refused to condemn her as well but told her to go ‘sin no more.’

In the West, we tend to read this story with a sense of historical distance. What government in the West kills people for sexual sin nowadays? But given the punishment for zīna in sharī‘a, Jesus’ question is a piercing one. Who among Muslim clerics are without sin? Indeed who among any of us?

*For a good academic treatment of before (though someday I would like to), but I can imagine it’s a far cry from the one place I have been to in North Africa—Cairo, Egypt. I’m not thinking of the fact that the city of Cairo alone has a massive population (roughly 9 million), compared with the 10 million that call the entire land of Tunisia home. Or that Cairo is polluted from heavy industry and hazy with smog, while Carthage sits daintily on the Mediterranean coast, beckoning to tourists with its picture-perfect blue skies and sea shimmering in the background.

No, I’m thinking about the different paths that Christianity took in these places following the Islamic conquests of the seventh century. The biblical scholar F.F. Bruce once famously argued that the church in North Africa (who birthed such luminaries as Tertullian, Cyprian, and especially Augustine) did not survive the coming of Islam because it was “the religion of the dominant Roman caste, rather than of the native [Berber] races, and the Bible was read only in Latin.” Bruce contended that for a church to survive, the Bible must be read in the vernacular by indigenous populations. Go to Cairo today, and you’ll find ample evidence that the Coptic church, while not flourishing, nevertheless retains a significant foothold in Egypt. No comparable church exists in Tunisia today.

This past week, I picked up Hugh Kennedy’s The Great Arab Conquests again, after putting it down for more pressing matters earlier this spring (see my prior blog for first impressions of his book). Aware of Bruce’s argument, I came with real interest to Kennedy’s chapter on the Islamic invasion of the Maghrib (the western part of North Africa). While the chapter isn’t about the disappearance of Christianity, per se, he does fill in some historical and cultural details that are not widely known.

For example, he writes that North Africa was in the first few centuries of Roman rule the empire’s wealthiest province and remained so until the early fifth century. The province cultivated a lucrative trade in olives, which it grew and then sold via its capital Carthage to Rome. But in the early fifth century, the province was lost to German tribes known as the Vandals (Augustine of Hippo dreaded their coming), and that trade pattern was disrupted and not restored, even when the Byzantines won the area back from the Vandals in 533. Carthage (and surrounding cities) went into irrevocable decline, and was a mere shell of its former self when Muslims finally captured the city in 698.

In his essay, Bruce had assumed that the church’s reliance on Latin alienated the ‘native’ peoples [ie the Berbers] from Christianity. But Kennedy observes that when the Byzantines returned to take North Africa back from the Vandals, they imposed Greek on the peoples of Carthage. He writes that this ‘foreign tongue’ must have “made the imperial authorities seem more like alien invaders than restorers of past glories.” Now you could argue that doesn’t change the core argument of Bruce—that the Berbers didn’t accept Christianity because it wasn’t in their vernacular. But that foreign tongue wasn’t necessarily Latin by the time Muslim armies arrived—it was Greek.

Kennedy’s chapter also makes at least a few references to Christian Berber tribes. He mentions that Uqba bin Nafi al-Fihri, whom Muslims credit as leading the Islamic conquests in the Maghrib, discovered and attacked a Christian Berber tribe in the town of Aghmat, deep in the remote Atlas Mountains. He also notes that Kusayla, the most powerful Berber leader in the Maghrib and who presented the Muslims with their greatest military challenge, had ‘many’ followers who were Christians and who had good relations with the Byzantines. It's true that Berbers didn't reliably ally with the Byzantines against the Muslims, but they didn't welcome the Arabs either.

While it may be true that the Berbers never accepted Christianity wholesale, the Church certainly made significant inroads into the Berber tribes. Why Christianity did not survive among these groups is a more difficult question that Bruce’s argument doesn’t really address. That remains for another generation of scholars to answer.

Memoirs of a Traveler Extraordinaire

2009-06-20T12:51:00.030+01:00

I remember clearly my feeling of exhilaration the first time I stepped onto an airplane and flew across the Atlantic. I was caught up in the spirit of adventure, going to places I had only read about but never experienced. In the space of a couple months, I had visited and studied in five different countries on three continents, traveling on a biblical studies tour organized by my college. It was a truly amazing experience to step out of one country and culture into another just a few hours later.

But while my experience was amazing, it was hardly extraordinary, especially in this day and age when globetrotting boils down to whether you have the time and money, and some spare Immodium in your luggage. Not so during the Middle Ages. Travelling was dangerous—one often had to go in armed caravans to protect oneself against hostile locals and wild beasts. Travel could be arduous, taking weeks to cross deserts or tundra, all the while trying to avoid or in some cases enduring sandstorms or blizzards. Reception by local authorities could be uncertain, especially if you didn’t know the local customs or language and might easily offend. Local diseases could be fatal, as doctors were hard to come by especially in rural areas.

The last couple weeks I’ve been reading intensively the rihla (journey) of Ibn Battuta in preparation for my upcoming exam (I’ll be translating an excerpt of his writings from Arabic to English). Ibn Battuta was born in what is today Morocco in 1304, and at the age of 21, left by caravan to travel to Mecca to go on hajj. Nothing extraordinary there, as every Muslim is expected to go on hajj at least once in his life, provided he is able. But Ibn Battuta didn’t come right home. Rather he kept on traveling … for the next 30 years of his life.

The man would go on to visit nearly every corner of the Muslim world—North Africa, Egypt, Syria, the Saudi peninsula, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, the East African coast, the Persian Gulf, Turkey, the Crimea, parts of Central Asia, Afghanistan, India, Malaysia, parts of China, and near the end of his life, Spain, the western Sahara, and Mali. That’s extraordinary—even by today’s standards. And at the end of his life, he recounted his travels to a man named Ibn Juzayy, who wrote it all down. (The map to the left shows both Ibn Battuta's travels and those of a rough contemporary of his, Marco Polo. Click on the map to blow it up. Note that not even Marco Polo traveled as far south as Ibn Battuta did during his travels in Africa.)

Ibn Battuta’s writings provide insights into people and places all over the Muslim world. In the Middle East and North Africa, he was able to communicate easily in Arabic, but in places like Turkey, India, and Mali, only a few could speak Arabic, and Ibn Battuta sometimes had real difficulty communicating. Yet he rarely had difficulty finding lodging, for as a man of some standing, he could impose upon the governor or qadi (judge) of the town and request his hospitality. In Turkey especially, the zawiyas (Sufi hospices) would vie with each other in providing him with a place to stay, feeding him, and entertaining him. In India, Ibn Battuta enjoyed such largesse from the ruler that he stayed in the capital of Delhi for several years and rose to become the qadi of the city and quite a wealthy man.

To read Ibn Battuta’s writings, though, is to also grasp what kind of man he was. As a Sunni Muslim, he spoke derisively of the Rafidis (refusers), or Shi’ite Muslims that ‘refused’ the first three caliphs of Islam (Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthmaan). He went so far as to even avoid entering cities in Iraq where Shi’ites were in the majority. In Turkey, Ibn Battuta expressed outrage that a Jewish physician would presume to sit across from the sultan he was caring for and above some Muslims reciting the Qur’an. He expressed disgust at the way Muslim women in Mali walked around publicly showing their breasts, and was incredulous that men and women there mixed freely—in the Middle East, men and women could only socialize together if they were close relatives. He called Christians in Europe, Hindus in India, and Africans outside Islam ‘infidels’ and even acquired slaves in his travels, some of whom were non-Muslim women he used as concubines.

In some ways, I understand Ibn Battuta. Like him, I started my travels with a kind of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Rome and Greece. And like him, I've gone on to visit many other places. But I much prefer the life of a family man and the stability of a home. And I don't share his prejudices, for many reasons!

Arabic 102 (A Bit More than Your Basic Grammar)

2009-06-05T12:24:00.005+01:00

Back in December, I wrote a short blog on some basics about the Arabic language, and promised to not write many blogs on this topic as most of you have only a passing interest (if any) in it. But I know a few of you readers may want to know a bit more about Arabic than just the basics. As I’ve now nearly completed my first year of Arabic at Oxford, and have worked through a 400+page grammar of Arabic, I think I can at least profess to say I’m past the elementary stage.

Let me start with some points I made last time, and expand on them a little. I noted that in Arabic, script reads from right to left. But Arabic numbers don’t. The number ‘19’ then, looks just like it does in Arabic as it does in English. There’s another interesting thing to know about Arabic numbers. Many people will know that the West adopted the current numbering system from the Muslim world, replacing the Roman one. But we actually share those shapes only with Arabs in the Maghrib, or North Africa. In the Middle East, the numbers appear differently, with the exception of “1” and “9”.

I also noted that Arabic words have three root letters that define the word, and from which many other words are derived. But not all Arabic words have three roots. Some have four and some even have five. What’s interesting about this is that if you find a word that has more than three roots, you can pretty much assume that it’s a foreign import, probably Persian but possibly Turkish or something from the West. While it may not be clear in English what words come from the outside, it is in Arabic.

Another thing to know about the Arabic root system is that roots that are vowels are considered ‘weak’, meaning that they may disappear when you shift tenses, ie from the past to the present. This can make it frustrating when you’re trying to search for a word in the dictionary, in that not all the roots may be there for you to look up; you have to realise that one or two of them are missing. Take, for example, the verb ‘rai’ or ‘to see’. Since ‘a’ and ‘i’ are vowels, you lose them in the present tense, and all you have to work with is the root ‘r’.

Every Arabic verb has what are called different ‘forms’. Arabs use commonly up to ten forms, though actually 15 of them exist. The word ‘qabila’ means ‘to accept’ but form two, or ‘qabbila’ means ‘to kiss’ a kind of ‘intensification’ of the word. Form three or ‘qaabila’ means ‘to encounter’, having a relational aspect to the word. Form four or ‘aqbala’ has a causative meaning, ‘to turn forward or draw near to’, and so on.

On a less technical note, I mentioned last time that Arabic vocabulary is so very different from Western vocabulary that you really have to start from scratch when you’re learning the language. I’ve still found that to be true, but there are some words that have made it into our vocabulary that we know, or ‘think’ we know. Everyone has heard of the Sahara desert, that great expanse of sand that makes so much of North Africa inhospitable. But ‘Sahara’ is actually just an Arabic word for ‘desert’, so when we say the Sahara desert, what we’re actually saying is ‘desert desert.’

Regarding how much Arabic has changed over time, I have yet to take Qur’anic Arabic, so I may not be the best person to ask just yet. But I do know that Arabic at its earliest stage did not have the dots that are so crucial to differentiating certain letters—letters like ‘gim’ ‘ha’ or ‘kha’, or ‘ta’ and ‘nun’, for example. How readers knew what was what is beyond me, though I suppose they must have been familiar enough with the text that they read them with the dots mentally imposed.

My education in Arabic grammar here at Oxford is officially at an end, but I know that I’ll continue learning more here over the next year, and will on rare occasions pass on to you something of what I learn. Now I am mostly readings texts, and in preparation for my upcoming exam, am getting to know in Arabic Ibn Battuta, the 14th-century Arab traveler who rivals Marco Polo in his journeys (Ibn Battuta traveled from Spain to China, and from Central Asia to Mali!).

A Particularly Gross Case of Plagiarism?

2009-05-20T19:47:00.008+01:00

In the university, there are few things that can get you in deeper trouble than plagiarism. Every course booklet at the University of Edinburgh included a few pages on the topic—by the time I took my third course there, I think I had that section memorized. Since graduate education is not just learning about a subject but bringing new ideas or perspectives to the table, you can’t commit a greater sin than passing someone else’s ideas off as your own. Of course, being honest about your work, no matter what kind of work you may be engaged in, is a good policy to live by!

Which brings me to my topic. Today I attended a series of lectures at Oxford on late antique and medieval translation movements in the Middle East. One of the presenters there was Sebastian Brock, a giant in Syriac studies and whose work I depended heavily on once while writing a short piece several years ago for Christian History’s website on Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (and yes, I did cite Brock in my article!).

But the paper that grabbed my attention most was that delivered by Benjamin Jokisch, who teaches at the University of Freiburg in southwestern Germany. With an expertise in Islamic law, Jokisch first presented the idea, which many Muslims and Westerners have subscribed to, that Islamic law developed on its own, independent of any non-Islamic systems. The reasoning goes that Muslims jurists could not have drawn on any outside systems (such as the Roman one) because they did not have access to relevant texts.

But Jokisch questions that premise. What we now know as shari’a, or Islamic law, developed during the time of the Abbasid caliphate established in 750. This was the age of the great translation movements (the image above pictures this), when Muslim rulers commissioned primarily Christians within the empire (but others as well) to translate Greek philosophy and scientific texts into Arabic via Syriac. So it should come as no surprise when Jokisch discovered close parallels between the legal work of al-Shaybani (749-805) and a 7^th century Byzantine law document called the Digestsumma—parallels not only in their structure but even in their wording.

Yet al-Shaybani never gives credit to the Digestsumma. Why is that? Jokisch argues that at the time of the Abbasids, two different forces were at work. Some Muslim scholars were openly interested in other cultures (especially the Greek one), and were willing to accept that truth could come from non-Islamic sources. But another group—what we might call the hadith movement—wanted to justify law solely on the basis of Islam, and giving credit to something like Digestsumma didn’t fit that worldview. In other words, Jokisch is accusing these Muslims of a particularly gross case of plagiarism, one in which a whole legal system borrowed from another then claimed they owed no debt.

Earlier in the day Sebastian Brock spoke about how we have fewer Syriac documents written after the Islamic conquest than those written before. The Islamic conquests elevated Arabic over all other languages. Syriac became only a medium to Arabic, not something worth reading in its own right. Given this kind of attitude, maybe it’s no surprise at all that Muslims would wish to appropriate Roman law as their own, and give no credit to the people they took it from.

This is only another small essay into the massive topic of Islamic law. I shall return to it again in this blog. But it reminds me that university students aren’t the only people tempted to plagiarize. And perhaps more importantly, it opens the question as to how much Islam took from other cultures, and isn’t willing to admit it.

A Few Questions for Diarmaid MacCulloch

2009-05-05T21:39:00.012+01:00

This evening I attended a lecture by Prof. Diarmaid MacCulloch, a church historian at Oxford known best for his history of the Reformation. As is so often the case with me, I couldn’t think of any questions to ask by the conclusion of the lecture, but then came up with several on my walk home.

So let me cut to the chase. Prof. MacCulloch had some good though not terribly original points. He mentioned how when he was an undergraduate and graduate student, that Christianity (indeed, religion) was hardly taken seriously by historians; the future as far as academics were concerned favored secularization and the increasing irrelevance of religion. But the explosive growth of Christianity in places like Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia (Korea, China, and India, for example), and indeed the continuing strength of Christianity in North America, is demanding that historians reconsider their assumptions. I’m glad in a place like Oxford that that message is getting out there, thanks in large part to the work of scholars like Andrew Walls and Philip Jenkins, who have written rather extensively about world Christianity.

I also appreciated Prof. MacCulloch’s dismissal of popular works like The DaVinci Code as something to be taken seriously, though I wish I had asked him to clarify his position on the ‘lost Christianities’ [i.e. read Gnostics] that scholars like Elaine Pagels at Princeton like to put on a level with orthodox Christianity. But then MacCulloch went on to talk about ‘different Christianities’, exploring, for example, the ruptures in the church in the fifth century, when Monophysites, Diophysites, and Chalcedonians split over how they could explain the relationship of Christ’s divinity to his humanity. (See my prior blog entry for a discussion of how this controversy likely played to the advantage of the Muslim invaders in the seventh century.) As I walked home, I wondered: what exactly do we mean by ‘different Christianities’? Yes, it’s blatantly obvious that within Christianity there is an enormous amount of diversity in practice and even in the fine points of doctrine. But is that really the same thing as ‘different Christianities?’

To my great disappointment, MacCulloch essentially admitted that he had lost his faith over the course of his career. He harped on ‘dogmatism’, believing that this is what is most unattractive about religion. But (again as I was walking home) I wanted to ask, what does he define as dogma? Would he call the Apostles Creed ‘dogmatism’ and therefore reject it as narrow-minded? Yet few believing Christians of any branch would fundamentally disagree with the contents of that creed. What about the Gospels themselves? Are they ‘dogmatic’, in MacCulloch’s estimation?

On that note, MacCulloch attacked evangelicals unwilling to accept the homosexual lifestyle on biblical grounds as being hypocritical in their ‘dogmatism’. He contended that American evangelicals in the nineteenth century had to argue against Scripture in their fight against slavery (presumably having to counter passages like 1 Timothy 6:1-5, Ephesians 6:5-6, Titus 2:9-10), but that evangelicals conveniently take passages like Leviticus 20:13 and Romans 1:26-27 at face value. This is quite a claim (and a parallel I would argue is very much forced), but my initial reaction is that Paul’s encouragement to slaves to keep the peace and obey their masters agreed with Christ’s ‘way’ of dealing with injustice—winning people through good example rather than rebelling against the authorities. There is a way to read those passages that does not do violence to the text, but questions the assumption drawn that Paul had no problem with the institution of slavery. But I would argue it’s much more difficult to do this with the passages on homosexuality, especially as there are no passages that I am aware of that would appear to affirm the other position (as there is with abolitionists: see for example Galatians 3:28).

MacCulloch in his talk pushed a video series he did with the BBC that is set to air this fall on the diversity of Christianity. He related some interesting stories of travelling to distant parts of the globe to talk about the spread of Christianity—he told of one nasty encounter he had with some Chinese Buddhists who didn’t appreciate his interest in an archaeological reminder of Nestorian Christianity (which reached China in the seventh century). MacCulloch made the compelling point (again already made by scholars like Jenkins) that before the advent of Islam, more Christians lived in the Middle East than in western Europe, and that Christianity in Europe was a distant ‘country cousin’ to the flourishing Christian civilisations of the Fertile Crescent. Christianity is most emphatically not a ‘Western’ religion, despite the stereotype.

As a scholar with a keen interest in World Christianity (though it's not my speciality), I very much look forward to seeing that diversity that MacCulloch has experienced thanks to the largesse of the BBC and Oxford. But even more, I’m hoping for a second chance to pose him my questions.

Taking on the (Islamic) Conquests

2009-03-28T21:21:00.003Z

A few years ago, Sir Ridley Scott’s movie about the Crusades, Kingdom of Heaven, reignited interest in a medieval conflict that has periodically captured public interest. Before and after the film came out, many were quick to decry Crusader violence, including many Christians who saw, and continue to see, the Crusades as an abuse of the Christian way of peace laid out by Jesus in the Gospels. Consider, for example, the Reconciliation Walk that culminated in a formal apology to Jews and Muslims for the bloody conquest of Jerusalem by Crusaders in 1099. I think it’s safe to say the Crusaders have few, if any, modern admirers.

I’m currently reading Hugh Kennedy’s The Great Arab Conquests (2007), and I’m struck by a great irony. If Westerners are eager to apologise for the Crusades, I’m not aware of any Muslim apology for the 7th-century Islamic conquests. In the 630s and 640s, Muslim armies swept out of the Hijaz (located in the Arabian peninsula) to conquer Syria, Palestine, and Iraq, with Iran, Egypt, and North Africa soon to follow. Syria, Palestine, and Egypt had been part of the Roman/Byzantine empire for hundreds of years, while Iraq and Iran belonged to the Persian Sasanians. The Islamic conquests were nothing short of revolutionary, much more profound in their breadth and permanency than the Crusades were later to be. And the Muslim accounts of these conquests made no apologies for them; on the contrary, as Kennedy writes, Muslims could “remember their victories as clear evidence that God was on their side. (15)”

I raise this, not to write a blog about that topic, per se, but to introduce what a remarkable book I’m reading. Kennedy’s book is a groundbreaker, not because he has done extraordinary new research, but because he has pulled together a great variety of scholarship to produce a comprehensive treatment of the first Islamic conquests. But because he is standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before, he enjoys a bird’s eye view that many other scholars lack.

Take for example, his analysis of the fall of Syria and Palestine to the Muslims. How could an empire which had controlled that part of the world for hundreds of years lose important provinces in just a few years? As is fairly well known to students of Islamic history, Syria and Palestine had just undergone occupation by the Persians previous to the Islamic invasion, and were consequently struggling to recover from the ravages of war. Kennedy explores this as a primary reason for the Roman/Byzantine weakness.

But then he provides other reasons that are not as well known. Previous to 540, Syria had enjoyed a period of prosperity, but in the sixth and seventh centuries, the province suffered a series of plagues that decimated the population. Kennedy writes that “When the Muslim conquerors entered the cities of Syria and Palestine in the 630s and 640s they may have walked the streets where the grass and thorns grew high between the ancient columns and where the remaining inhabitants clustered in little groups, squatting in the ruins of the great palatial houses their ancestors had enjoyed. (68)” Kennedy may be using a bit of hyperbole here, but the image is rather effective.

Yet another reason for the Muslims’ success was Christian disunity. Since the Council of Chalcedon (451), Eastern Christian communities had split over how exactly Jesus was both God and man. Did his divinity swallow up his humanity, as the Monophysite Copts seemed to claim, or could one actually divide the humanity of Christ from his divinity, as the Nestorians in northern Mesopotamia argued? While these debates may not exercise the church today, they left deep divisions that festered sometimes into outright violence in the fifth and sixth centuries. The Byzantine authorities, who favored a middling position of Jesus being both fully God and fully man, did not make any friends among Monophysites in Egypt when they sought to impose their formulae on them. While it’s difficult to assess the historicity of the claim, Kennedy argues that it may well have been these divisions that ruptured the Byzantine army in its fatal battle with the Muslim army at the River of Yarmuk in 636. “The sources,” Kennedy writes, “are awash with rumors of disaffection … of the Christian Arabs going over to the Muslim side in the course of the battle (82).”

Kennedy explores some other facets of the conquests that aren’t well known. Most of what we know about the conquests was written down after the fact and not during the events they describe. We must be careful not to take everything at face value, but at the same time, the Islamic sources do tell us something about what concerned Muslims of later generations. What seemed to have been a major preoccupation for them was money.

Alongside my reading of Kennedy, I have been translating from Arabic one of these texts describing the battles between the Muslims and the Byzantines, and I know from that that the first thing that the Muslims did after they conquered a Byzantine town was to levy a tax, whether it be a poll tax on each individual (the jizya) or a land tax on the community (the kharaj). If a city resisted the Muslim invasion, and this is the key point, they could expect much higher taxes than the city that peacefully surrendered (see page 19 of Kennedy). Muslims in the eighth century who desired lower taxes for their city would want to make a case that their city surrendered peacefully. Indeed, records actually differ as to whether Damascus, for example, was taken by violence or peacefully. In an attempt to resolve the problem, some have suggested while Damascus was under attack by one Muslim contingent at one end of the city, at the other side the Christians negotiated a surrender with another Muslim force! But it may just reflect the politics of later generations who had a vested interest in seeing Damascus paying either more or less in taxes.

There’s really so much more in this book than I can possibly comment on. In sum, Kennedy has done all of us a huge favour in taking on a subject of immense importance that is often skirted for various reasons. I highly recommend it to those who know nothing about the Islamic conquests. Kennedy is an Arabist with good academic credentials (he taught Islamic studies at the University of St. Andrews for many years), and in this book at least, he is also highly readable. In addition to peppering his book with lots of interesting anecodotes, he includes a colour centerfold with lots of photos and pictures. This book is a must-have for your collection.

Surprised by Jack

2009-03-06T00:25:00.009Z

I’ve long been a lover of C.S. Lewis’s children’s series The Chronicles of Narnia—one of the first books I read to my kids was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It’s hard to miss the Christian element in these books—Lewis's friend J.R.R. Tolkien was famously critical of the Narnia books as verging too close to Christian allegory. But it’s books like Surprised by Joy, which detail his journey from atheism to Christianity, and Mere Christianity, which sets out his defense of the faith, that provide windows into one of Lewis’s great missions in life—to persuade skeptics of the truth of Christianity.

For a man so eager and able to respond to those challenging Christianity, I’ve frankly been surprised by ‘Jack’ (as his friends called him). Lewis seems to have written very little about a faith that has been highly critical of Christianity—Islam. Lewis did understand that Islam denied the Incarnation. He believed that Islam was a ‘simplification’ of Christianity, that it reduced the mysterious complexity of ‘Three’ into ‘One’. In a book he co-authored with Charles Williams, Arthurian Torso (1948), he wrote that in Islam, we have “the loss of living, paradoxical, vibrant, mysterious truths, for mere Monotheism [read: Islam] blinds and stifles the mind like noonday sun in the Arabian deserts (125).” Clearly Lewis mourned Islam's rejection of the Trinity, and believed its brand of monotheism to be a step backward.

But from the research I’ve done thus far, I’ve found nothing that suggests he gave much more substantial reflection to Islam than this. In his essay 'Christian Apologetics' (1945), he wrote that “the only two things really worth considering are Christianity and Hinduism. Islam is only the greatest of the Christian heresies, Buddhism only the greatest of the Hindu heresies” (Lewis, Compelling Reason, 79).

Yet Islam does seem to have made some impression on Lewis, if The Chronicles of Narnia is anything to go by. The Horse and His Boy depicts a culture that some have compared to Islamic culture. There are problems with this, notably that the Calormenes are polytheistic, not monotheistic, and that there are images of the god Tash in his temple, whereas Muslims are careful not to depict Muhammad in art. But there are phrases that Lewis uses, like when he’s referring to ‘Tash, the inexorable, the irresistible’ that are reminiscent of the Islamic refrain ‘in the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate.’ Tashbaan, the capital of the Calormenes, is perched on the edge of a Sahara-like desert that also brings to mind an image of the Middle East. Even the high culture of the Calormenes, such as the private quarters of the noble women, brings to mind Orientalist perceptions of the harem. When Walden Media finally brings the book to the theatre, the company will have to do some considerable recasting of the Calormenes if they want viewers to avoid making the connection between Tashbaan and the Muslim world.

His last book in the series, The Last Battle, could suggest a nuanced view of Islam, for Emmet, a Calormene that stumbles into the new Narnia, is told by Aslan that he was worshipping the Lion even when he thought he was worshiping the Calormene god Tash. I’ll be honest that I’m not prepared yet to discuss whether Lewis’s theology was ‘exclusive’ or ‘inclusive’—meaning whether he believed that God could save people outside Christ or not. But the character of Emmet is an intriguing one, and leaves me wondering whether he thought there might indeed be Muslims in heaven, who in trying to follow the Issa of the Qur’an were really following the Jesus of the Bible.

It’s safe to say Lewis didn’t have much sympathy for those converting to Islam. When Martin Lings, one of his students at Magdalen College, started down the road to Sufism, Lewis wrote in a letter to a friend that “My wretched man (Lings) is embarking on this without having given the least attention to Christianity or even to secular European philosophy; consequently to write to him is a double battle against the man and against my own impatience.” Clearly, he believed Christianity to be preferred above all other religions. He went on to write that “The more one sees the confusion in which young men’s minds grow up now-a-days, the more cause we [meaning the older generation] have to be thankful on our own part.”

I intend to keep researching this as I’m able—I’m hoping that I’m wrong, and that Jack gave Islam more thought that he appears to have done. It certainly deserves more than the cursory mentions I’ve found thus far.

Kosher vs. Halal: Comparing Jewish with Islamic Law

2009-02-14T19:28:00.013Z

It's been several years since friends introduced me to the Islamic concept of halal (permissible) food. But it's only recently that I've begun to compare it with what I'm learning about the Jewish concept of kosher. Like Jews, Muslims must avoid pork, to the extent that pigs cannot even be slaughtered in the same vicinity as other animals. Like Jews, Muslims must not eat animals with blood—in both cases, the blood must be drained from the animals before the meat can be eaten. Like Jews, Muslims have certain laws as to how the animal may be slaughtered, emphasizing in each a quick, ‘humane’ stroke of the knife that brings instant death. In truth, halal and kosher look a lot alike.

But look a little closer, and you start noticing the differences. Jews are careful to separate out milk from meat, something Muslims don’t observe. The first five books of the Old Testament have a lot more to say about clean and unclean animals than the Qur’an does (see Qur’an 5:3 vs. Leviticus 11 and Deut. 14). Devout Jews and Muslims both avoid wine, but Jews appear to shun it because wine was regularly used by pagan neighbours for ceremonial purposes, while the Qur’an appears inconsistent, warning Muslims against intoxication, but then promising wine in Paradise (see Qur’an 2:219 and 5:90–91 vs. 47:15 or 76:21).

I draw this comparison in part because I am working through a book right now with one of my tutors comparing Jewish with Islamic law more generally. Jacob Neusner & Tamara Sonn's Comparing Religions Through Law is an interesting exercise in examining the many parallels between the two religions in order to draw out of both what is highly distinctive. The authors limit themselves to looking only at the classical/sacred texts so as not to fall vulnerable to the charge of unfairly comparing textual commands with practices that have varied over time and place.

I won’t go into all the details, but let me summarize for you some of the most significant findings of the book (I’ve not finished it yet, so I may revise my opinion!). The first thing to point out is the obvious but important one—that both religions have a law, and they expect their followers to abide by it! Contrast this with the New Testament, where both Jesus and the apostles question the virtue of strictly observing the law and where we are encouraged to give to God what is God’s and to Caesar what is Caesar’s (Mark 12:13–17, Matt. 22:15– 22, Luke 20:20– 26). Clearly Judaism and Islam both differ from Christianity on their insistence of regulating daily life among their faithful.

Both Jewish and Islamic law place a high value on the role of reasoning in the law, though for Jews and Muslims alike, logic should always remain subject to the Torah and the Qur’an, respectively. Where this plays out is in the actual enforcement of law—Judaism and Islam both give judges a great deal of authority to make decisions about individual cases, and Muslims especially have engineered ways to mitigate court sentences. For example, shari‘a holds that a crime committed by an insane man is not as serious as one that was committed by a man of sound mind, and it remains to the judge to determine whether the man is sane or not.

But let’s explore the differences. First, Islam has no history of temple sacrifice or temple law—indeed the Qur’an stipulates that guidance (rather than animal sacrifice) is all that is needed for Muslims to live as they should, though Shi‘ites do sacrifice animals every year on Id al-Adha. This is important from a Christian perspective because it is of course in the Jewish sacrificial system that the New Testament roots the Christian concept of God redeeming us through the death of his Son. But even if we restrict ourselves to Jewish thought, Jewish concepts of atoning for sin through the death of an animal is definitely alien to Islam.

Next, rabbinic law as practiced today in various synagogues comes from a code of laws called the Mishnah that rabbis put together in the first couple of centuries after Christ, when the Romans, not the Jews, were in charge of Palestine. Consequently, the Mishnah is often theoretical, written for a Jewish state that did not exist at the time. By contrast, Muslims formulated Islamic law during an era of Islamic power (the Abbasid caliphate of the 8th through 10th centuries). Shari‘a, then, was constructed as much from the experience of those governing Muslims and non-Muslims alike, as it was from the Qu’ran and various reports about Muhammad then floating around (what became known as Hadith).

Judaism and Islam differ most though perhaps in their attitudes toward land. In the Old Testament, God set aside the Promised Land for his people, the Jews, and it is these biblical promises (such as Genesis 15:18) that Jews even today interpret literally as justification for the nation of Israel. Muslims too lay claim to land, but not to any one piece of real estate in particular. Rather, Muslim jurists in medieval times divided the world into the dar al-Islam (house of Islam) where Muslims ruled and Islamic law was enforced, and the dar al-harb (house of war) where non-Muslims ruled and were open to attack from Muslims. (One can also find reference to the dar al-sulh, or house of treaty, lands in which non-Muslim leaders could assure some security for themselves if they agreed to pay a certain tax to Muslim neighbours and promised to protect Muslims living in their land.) In other words, Jews limited their ambitions for land to a certain region while Muslims did not.

And this difference frankly is arguably the most significant one, for even in modern-day Israel, Jewish law does not govern as shari‘a does in most Muslim countries today. How much of Jewish law remains theoretical, or at most practiced not as the law of the land but as the mediation of synagogues in peoples’ personal lives? Shari‘a on the other hand has impacted and continues to impact millions of people across significant parts of the globe, from Morocco to Indonesia.

In the months ahead, I intend to do much more serious study of shari‘a, as I believe it is an important aspect of Islam that we in the West increasingly need to understand. And looking at it through the somewhat familiar lens of Judaism is certainly an interesting way to begin.

How Should the Nigerian Church Respond to Muslim Violence?

2009-01-26T21:17:00.009Z

Several months ago, I started working on an article about Muslim-Christian violence in Nigeria, which I hoped would be eligible for publication. But then came the notice that Oxford had accepted me into graduate school, and this project has fallen by the wayside. I hope to resurrect and rework it in the future, but given the renewed violence between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria over November, I felt it important to make my research accessible to the broader public. I have either changed or removed names to protect the privacy and/or security of people I have interviewed, and have starred them as such. I welcome your feedback.

When *Danladi Gobir was growing up in Jos, Nigeria in the 1980s, Muslims were only beginning to listen to and spread radical ideas coming from other parts of the Muslim world. Muslim-Christian relations until then had been peaceful. But in 1985, Gobir recalls, Muslims in the northern city of Kaduna murdered hundreds of Christians, and then the killings continued year after year. Villages destroyed, churches on fire, riots in the street—the violence in northern Nigeria did not abate but rather grew more intense.

At first the churches responded with prayer. Gobir remembers attending all-night prayer vigils, fasting and praying against the spirit behind the violence and for the protection of Christians. Churches continued to send missionaries into Muslim areas and plant large numbers of congregations. But around 1990, attitudes toward Muslim violence began to change. “A leading church in Kaduna was the first to mobilize its youth to protect their church building from being burned down by Muslim fanatics,” Gobir recalls. “This was after their church, like other churches in the city, had been burned down at least two times previously. Their success emboldened other Christians to take similar steps of self-defense.”

Christians across northern Nigeria began to question whether pacifism was really an appropriate response to Muslim aggression. “Some Christians began questioning the traditional interpretation of the classical pacifist passage in the Bible, Matthew 5:39, where Jesus commanded that when someone strikes you on one cheek, you should turn the other one,” notes Gobir. "[They] argued a distinction should be made between 'personal' ethics and 'community' ethics in the Bible. These aren't necessarily contradictory, but rather complimentary."

"In the Old Testament," he explains, "we find that Nehemiah defended Jerusalem against hostile neighbors by rebuilding the city walls with spade and spear in hand. In Genesis, Abraham rescued Lot from people who wanted to molest him, thereby preserving the community. Yet, we still find the love principle operative in the Old Testament as well. For example, when God blinded the invading Aramean army on Elisha’s behalf, the prophet brought them to the court of the king of Israel where they were fed and released without harm (2 Kings 6:8–23).”

Historical precedents
Gobir might be surprised to find that Christians in the Middle Ages likewise turned to the Old Testament for guidance on how to respond to Islamic violence. Oxford professor Christopher Tyerman recently pointed out in his massive account of the Crusades, God’s War, that the medieval church regularly preached from the Old Testament, and valued it for “its historicity, its moral stories, its prophecies and its prefiguring of the New Covenant.” Tyerman writes, “The Old Testament bequeathed stories of legitimate war pleasing to God, from the Israelites, Joshua and King David to Judas Maccabeus.”

These stories impressed commoners and rulers alike. In the centerfold of Tyerman’s book, an illuminated Bible commissioned by the 13th century king Louis IX of France portrays the biblical Joshua dressed as a French knight liberating Gibeon from the Five Kings. In fact, the biblical character of Joshua was particularly important to crusaders. In 1099, they marched around Muslim-controlled Jerusalem in imitation of Joshua at Jericho in the days leading up to the first attack on the city, “ignoring the taunts of the locals.”

Other Old Testament passages like Psalm 79 also resonated with them: “O God, the heathen are come into your inheritance. Your holy temple has been defiled. They have laid Jerusalem on heaps.” This verse became particularly relevant after Jerusalem returned to Muslim rule after Saladin’s capture of it in 1187 (an event dramatized in the 2005 movie Kingdom of Heaven, directed by Sir Ridley Scott). Church officials repeatedly appealed for the liberation of Christians in Jerusalem as late as the sixteenth century.

Such imagery served to reinforce crusader conviction that God was on their side, and that he approved of the violence they committed in his name. Many Christians in medieval times reserved this perspective not only for the battles being waged in the Holy Land, but for struggles against Muslims in Spain and, later, against aggressive Turkish armies in Eastern Europe. In their minds, they were fighting not only to liberate Christians in Jerusalem, but to defend and expand all of Christendom.

The Next Christendom
Attacking Jerusalem is by no means part of this new Christian resistance to Islamic violence in Nigeria. But according to Penn State University professor Philip Jenkins, a medieval emphasis on the Old Testament might well be making a comeback in the “next Christendom,” a term he uses to describe the church in Africa and Asia. His book, The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South makes just this claim, and he backs it up with extensive data and interviews across sub-Saharan Africa. While, according to Jenkins, in modern times “the Old Testament has enjoyed decreasing prestige within Christianity” particularly in the West, it is finding an enthusiastic response in Africans who believe it speaks “directly and familiarly to local conditions.” Poverty, famine, tribal rivalry and war, exorcism, challenging idolatry—Africans identify closely with all of these, and the Old Testament depicts a world very much like the one they know.

Jenkins does not portray in his book a developed African theology of war based on the Old Testament, though he provides hints that a theology of this kind might be in the making. He points out that Christians living under shari'a law in northern Nigeria are asking seriously whether the injunction of Romans 13 to obey those in authority over us “should apply to them, and at what point Christian submission should give place to the martial spirit of the Old Testament.” Yet “some modern African Christians find in the New Testament accounts of Samaritans practical advice for how they might learn to live with and communicate with their Muslim neighbors.” The lessons from such a comparison are clear. Among them are that Jesus told Jews to not return Samaritan hostility with violence (Luke 9:51-56). He showered Samaritans with compassion, and he praised their responsiveness to his message (Luke 17:11-19). And he commanded his disciples to go beyond Judea to evangelize Samaria (Acts 1:8).

A lack of reflection?
It’s certainly worth asking how many Christians in Nigeria are still evangelizing Muslims, given the current hostilities. As one missionary *Harrison Gove put it, “Evangelism used to be the church's raison d’etre, but it has slipped down the priority list recently. It is rather hard to evangelize the same people you are fighting against! Moreover, some leaders feel dialogue means compromise. Many feel that it is useless as Muslims say one thing and do another.”

Gove acknowledges that those who have theological training rarely seem to address the Muslim-Christian conflict. “They are usually too busy with administrative matters. The conflict tends to be addressed in terms of citizenship rights, or the need to uphold a secular state, in which secular is understood by Christians as meaning a religiously neutral state, while Muslims see it as a religiously hostile state.”

Many Nigerians do have a sense that God has a special plan for their country in world affairs. “The newer Pentecostals,” muses Gove, “seem to speak of Nigeria as being God’s chosen land and the need to repent. But I am not sure how different their ideas are from typical American concepts of the United States being a light on a hill called by God to serve him in the world today.” One denomination's monthly magazine has quoted various Old Testament passages in reference to the Muslim-Christian conflict. “But most of the articles failed to develop a theological approach from them,” Gove says. “The verses were mainly added on as biblical proof texts for statements or arguments already made.”

Others who have worked in Nigeria agree with this perspective. “It isn't that they start with the Old Testament and come up with an approach to Christian-Muslim relations,” says missionary *Clive Harris. “Rather, they start with preferred ways of handling the issues, and then appeal to the Old Testament to justify them because the New Testament seems rather spineless and uncooperative.” Harris argues that such preachers do not perceive how the different parts of Scripture “relate to the center of God’s revelation in Christ,” and consequently end up applying commands given to Israel in the Old Testament directly to the nation of Nigeria.

The challenge ahead
The cases before northern Nigerian shari'a courts accelerate the urgency with which the Nigerian church must develop just this theology of response to violence. Christians are finding that justice is often not done in these courts, when his or her case is pitted against a Muslim’s. “I know of Christian girls in northern Nigeria,” says Gobir, “who have been kidnapped going to school, and their captors are giving them in marriage to Muslims. Shari'a courts say these girls are Muslims, and parents are unable to reclaim their daughters. Christians have responded by focusing on advocacy through groups like the Christian Association of Nigeria, and appealing to the federal government officials to put pressure on the state officials upholding shari'a.”

Indeed, it is just this experience of shari'a that has impacted Christian thinking about how to respond to Islam. Nigerian scholar *Sunday Abasi conducted extensive research among northern Nigerian Christians over a period of 16 months, and found a consistent sentiment among people that they were victims in need of justice. “They see their plight as that of Israel during the period of the Judges. They are oppressed and subjugated, therefore, they need a savior who can save them like Samson and Gideon.” Abasi acknowledges that Christians in northern Nigeria do have a strong awareness of spiritual warfare, but that they very much see this battle as a physical one against an oppressive Muslim government.

Christians, of course, have faced persecution at many points in the church’s history. But in a place like Nigeria, where half of the country is predominately Christian, the plight of northern Christians pushes their brethren in the south to do something on their behalf. Gobir reflects, “We must work towards the building of institutions that guarantee true democracy. Short of this, any attempts in inter-faith dialogue under a lopsided oppressive system will be tantamount to placing a Band-Aid over a septic wound.”

(Pseudo) Medicine in Medieval Cambridge—and Cairo Too

2009-01-15T21:38:00.015Z

Over the break this Christmas (when I wasn’t lying in bed ill from a chest infection!), Lisa and I together read through a couple mysteries penned by Elizabeth Cruwys a.k.a Susanna Gregory, (PhD, Cambridge). Gregory sets her stories in 14th c. Cambridge, and while I’ve enjoyed the plots, I’ve been even more intrigued by what she describes as the medical ‘knowledge’ taught in the university.

For one thing, medicine in Europe at this time consisted largely of astrology. In the story, wealthy and poor alike expect physicians to read their stars in the hope that they will improve. The university, for its part, expects its medical students to study astrology and to be able to discuss various kinds of astrological tabulation in their examinations.

Gregory also features in her book the ideas of the ancient Greek philosopher Galen—that the body needed a balance of black and yellow bile, blood and phlegm to function well. It was in fact Galen’s ideas that led medieval doctors to practice blood-letting, which they believed would keep the body’s humors’ in balance. Of course, what the practice really did was facilitate the deaths of patients.

At various points in the book, the story’s protagonist, Matthew Bartholomew (a doctor and professor of medicine), finds himself in conflict with these ideas. His conviction that illnesses might actually have something to do with sanitation rather than stars doesn’t sit well with his academic colleagues, but the university finds it hard to argue with his success in treating the poor. What sets Bartholomew apart, though, is the person from whom he receives his training—an Arab physician at the University of Paris. It is he who leads Bartholomew to question the current assumptions of medicine. Implication: Muslims knew what they were doing when it came to medicine while Christian Europe did not.

Now I’m no expert on Islamic medicine, but from what little I’ve read, medicine as practiced by Christians and Muslims by that time came largely from the same source. Robert Irwin points out that the ideas Gregory depicts as mainstream in 14th century Cambridge came from Muslims! Galen’s ideas about humors, for example, were translated from Arabic into Latin in 12th c. Toledo, Spain, after its reconquest by Christians from Muslims in 1085.

In the same way, translators transmitted to Europe the ideas of another Greek philosopher, Ptolemy, who mixed astrology with astronomy. Indeed, astrology played a significant role in the medieval Islamic world. When the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur founded his capital city of Baghdad in 762, for example, he depended on astrologers to help him decide where and when to locate the city.

While it’s largely true that the Islamic world ‘saved’ Greek knowledge for the West, it also processed and passed on lots of misinformation. And there are other issues too—Irwin observes that Islamic law does not allow physicians to dissect bodies, a law which doesn’t exactly encourage scientific inquiry. I wonder how much of this Gregory knew when she wrote about her Arab physician. Maybe I need to hunt down her e-mail address.

Postscript:

After writing this blog, I decided to e-mail Gregory's publisher, and present my criticism. Here is what the publisher had to say in response:

Dear Mr Gertz

Thank you for your e-mail about Susanna Gregory's series of mediaeval mysteries. Ms Gregory's historical research has been widely acclaimed and she uses her knowledge to inform what is a fictional concept of her own imagination, she is not writing an academic treatise.

The character of Bartholomew is something of a maverick, some of which is explained by his studies in Paris, some by his own clinical experience, some by his contrary nature, all making him mistrust the reliance of other physicians on astrological charts and bleeding, which allows Ms Gregory's whodunnit plots (a 20th century conceit) to develop.

And, as you will have noted in her novels, Bartholomew is not averse to post-mortem dissection despite its contemporaneous illegality – the Islamic world not being alone in finding its practice abhorent in previous centuries – something he learned during his time of learning under an Islamic tutor.

The 'accepted' mores and assumed knowledge of society in past eras have often inspired present day novelists to create characters who might well have questioned such accepted 'truths', even if future learning proves either side of such theories incorrect, such is the art of novelists - using their imaginations to entertain.

With best wishes
Hilary Hale
Editorial Director, Sphere

Are you convinced? I can tell that Gregory has done an enormous amount of research about medieval Cambridge. I guess I am simply asking how much does she know about Islamic medicine?

I am aware that novels are meant to entertain, but in some ways it is even more important to be accurate in a novel since the public is much more likely to read it than they will an academic treatise! And they are even less equipped to sift fact from fiction than a scholar is.

Let Muslims Wish You a Merry Christmas

2008-12-23T11:44:00.001Z

I remember how surprised I was when a Muslim first wished me a merry Christmas. We had come to the end of our first semester at the Univ. of Edinburgh, and one of my classmates greeted me with this as we finished up our studies and prepared for the break. By that point I knew that Christians and Muslims didn’t celebrate the same holidays. Was she just trying to be extra culturally and religiously sensitive?

But then I would be forgetting Sura 19. The first 40 verses of chapter 19 in the Qur’an tell the account of the angel’s annunciation of John’s coming birth to Zechariah, his annunciation of Jesus’ coming birth to Mary, and the nativity of Jesus. It’s the longest sustained narrative about Jesus in the Qur’an—all other verses are rather cryptic about Jesus.

Since most of you have probably never read these verses, I am pasting below the relevant section. Alongside these verses, read again the Nativity account from Luke 1:26–2:7.

Qur’an 19:16–40 (Meccan sura)

19:16 Relate in the Book the story of Mary, when she withdrew from her family to a place in the East. 17 She placed a screen to hide herself from them. Then We [Allah] sent to her our angel, and he appeared before her as a man in all respects.

19:18 She said, “I seek refuge from you in Allah most Gracious. Come not near me if you do fear Allah.”

19:19 He said, “No, I am only a messenger from your Lord, to announce to you the gift of a holy son.”

19:20 She said, “How shall I have a son, seeing that no man has touched me, and I am chaste?”

19:21 He said, “So it will be. Your Lord says, ‘That is easy for Me, and We wish to appoint him as a Sign unto men and a mercy from Us. It is a matter so decreed.’”

19:22 So she conceived him, and she retired with him to a remote place. 23 And the pains of childbirth drove her to the trunk of a palm tree. She cried out in her anguish: “Ah, would that I had died before this. Would that I had been a thing forgotten and out of sight!”

19:24 But a voice cried to her from beneath the palm tree: “Grieve not! For your Lord has provided a rivulet beneath you. 25 And shake towards yourself the trunk of the palm tree. It will let fall fresh ripe dates upon you. 26 So eat and drink and cool your eye. And if you see any man, say, ‘I vowed a fast to Allah most Gracious, and this day will I enter into no talk with any human being.’”

19:27 At length she brought the babe to her people, carrying him in her arms. They said, “O Mary! Truly have you brought us an amazing thing! 28 O sister of Aaron! Your father was not a man of evil, nor your mother a woman unchaste!”

19:29 But she pointed to the babe. They said, “How can we talk to one who is a child in the cradle?”

19:30 He [Jesus] said, “I am indeed a servant of Allah. He has given me revelation and made me a prophet. 31 And He has made me blessed wherever I be, and has enjoined on me Prayer and Charity as long as I live. 32 He has made me kind to my mother, and not overbearing or miserable. 33 So Peace is on me the day that I die, and the day that I shall be raised up to life again!”

19:34 Such was Jesus the son of Mary. It is a statement of truth, about which they vainly dispute.

19:35 It is not befitting to the majesty of Allah that He should beget a son. Glory be to Him! When He determines a matter, He only says to it, “Be,” and it is.

19:36 Truly Allah is my Lord and your Lord. Serve Him, therefore. This is a Way that is straight. 37 But the sects differ among themselves.

Woe to the Unbelievers because of the coming Judgment of a momentous Day! 38 How plainly will they see and hear, the Day that will appear before Us. How the unjust are clearly in error! 39 But warn them of the Day of Distress, when the matter will be determined. For behold, they are negligent and they do not believe!

19:40 It is We who will inherit the earth, and all of its beings. To Us will they all be returned.

In a reading exercise like this, we usually want to jump to what we see is different between the accounts. But let me just quickly review what the accounts in Qur’an 19 and Luke 1 and 2 have in common. First, Gabriel appears to Mary to announce the coming birth of Jesus. Mary then asks how this can be, seeing that she is a virgin. Gabriel responds that God is able to do this. Finally, Mary gives birth to Jesus. All of these similarities are significant, particularly that both Christians and Muslims believe that Mary was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus.

Now for the differences. In the Bible, Gabriel appears to Mary in Nazareth, but in the Qur’an, Mary appears to be sequestered in the Temple during the Annunication (in Qur’an 3:37, she was assigned to Zecharias in the Temple). In the Gospel of Luke, Gabriel says that the Most High will come upon Mary and that Jesus is to be the Son of God, whereas in the Qur’an, Gabriel only says it is easy for God to create Jesus without a father. (Indeed, Qur’an 3:59 states that “The similitude of Jesus before Allah is as that of Adam. He created him from dust, then said to him, “Be,” and he was.” In other words, Jesus is compared with Adam in terms of how he was created.) Finally, in the Bible, Mary gives birth to Jesus in a manger in Bethlehem with Joseph present, while in the Qur’an, Mary gives birth to Jesus under a palm tree with no one to help her, save God who provides her with dates from the tree.

The Qur’an gives special attention to how the birth of Jesus was received by Mary’s relatives, a question which goes unanswered in the Bible. (From Matthew 2:23 & Luke 2:39, we only know that they returned to Nazareth.) What seems clear here is that Mary’s reputation is on the line, and it takes Jesus speaking from the cradle to vindicate her as pure before God. Why is this important? Some Muslim jurists believed Muslim women could be prophetesses, and a prophet in Islam is above rebuke. The idea was first raised by the Andalusi jurist al-Qabri (d. 1015), who specifically named Mary as a prophetess. Ibn Hazm, who subscribed to this idea, later distinguished between messengers and prophets, though, saying that God never chose a woman to be a Messenger like Muhammad.

In Qur’an 19:19, we read that Gabriel promised Mary a ‘holy son’. One of the most respected collectors of Muslim tradition, Bukhari, records the tradition based on this verse that “Satan has pierced the side of every newborn son of Adam with his finger except Isa (Jesus) son of Mary.” It’s a remarkable tradition, given that Muslims don’t believe in original sin and thereby see no need for a Saviour. But this Muslim affirmation of Jesus’ sinlessness really does set him apart from any other person, including Muhammad!

As we draw this study to a close, we see both the promise and the limits of the ‘Christmas’ Christians and Muslims share. Clearly we do not understand Christmas in the same way. But it’s a place to begin, and for that I’m grateful. I certainly prefer this kind of dialogue to the perennial cultural wars in the West as to whether it’s okay to say ‘Merry Christmas’ in public or whether we can set up a nativity on public land. If you know any Muslims at work or in your neighbourhood, let them wish you a Merry Christmas this year. Then suggest you compare Luke 1 & 2 with Qur’an 19.

What You Perhaps Didn’t Know About Arabic

2008-12-16T13:44:00.002Z

A very important part of my course here at Oxford is learning Arabic. While in many ways I am still a beginner, I nevertheless am far enough along that I have learned enough that might be interesting to some of you who have no or very little exposure to the language. My apologies ahead of time to any of you who finds this blog a bit technical.

One of the first things to know about Arabic is that like other Semitic languages, Arabic reads from right to left, and a book begins at the back (as we might think of it) and moves to the front. It takes a bit of time to get used to it, but you’d be amazed how quickly the brain can adjust. In late medieval times, when Western scholars had almost no knowledge of Arabic, they tried to read the texts from left to right—you can imagine how far they got with that!

Also, Arabic has only one case; you don’t have to worry about uppercase or lowercase letters, which is quite nice! But letters unfortunately can change shape, depending on where they are located in a word. This is especially true for letters that connect to one another, as many Arabic letters do.

Unlike European languages, you just don’t have much on which you can hang your hat when it comes to learning vocabulary. It’s a pretty natural progression from the Spanish ‘restaurante’ to the English ‘restaurant’, or the German ‘ein’ to the English ‘one’. But it’s a rare occurrence when the English word sounds like the Arabic one. That means you have to start from scratch, like a little child would!

One nice feature of Arabic is that almost every word has three ‘roots’ or letters that define the word. So the letters Kaaf, taa, and baa, in that order, have something to do with writing. Kataba means ‘he wrote’, while kitaab means ‘book’, maktaba means ‘library’, and so on. Another interesting example might be jalasa, which means ‘he sat’ and majlis which means council, or a bunch of people sitting together! The key letters there are giim, laam and siin.

The usual word order in the Arabic sentence is verb-subject-object, though it varies somewhat, if the sentence follows a conjunction ('and' or 'but'). That means you get the action right up front, though it means you sometimes at first wonder exactly who is doing the action.

Like any language, Arabic has some interesting ways of expressing things. If someone is drunk, Arabs say they are ‘riding Lucifer’s horse’—an apt expression for the danger of drinking too much alcohol! Or when someone finds something truly gratifying, they would not say their ‘hearts have been warmed’ as we might say in English; but instead they might say something like their 'hearts grow cold', since the Arabian deserts are so hot that water is the most desirable thing.

Finally, Arabic is a classical language in the sense that it has remained relatively stable, not changing significantly over time. This is because the Qur’an is not only the sacred text of Islam, but it is the normative text for Arabic. Muslims are so concerned that people read the Qur’an with good Arabic that they insert the markings for short vowels into the Qur'an that are usually absent from Arabic texts. Those short vowels are called the fatha, damma, and kasra, and correspond to the vowels ‘a’, ‘u’ and ‘e’. Long vowels in Arabic—the alif, waw, and yaa—are always written in the text.

Don’t worry—I won’t be posting many blogs like this in the future. But hopefully this will help to demystify Arabic a little for you.

Edward Said and the Problem of the Harem

2008-12-15T12:35:00.002Z

In 1978, a professor of English literature at Columbia University in New York published a book that has had an enormous impact on the field of Islamic studies. Edward Said’s Orientalism has become the new orthodoxy among academics, though scholars like Princeton’s Bernard Lewis have challenged his premises. Said’s central argument was that Western scholars of Islam were guilty of ‘essentializing’ the Orient (in clearer language, negatively stereotyping the Middle East) in order to control it. These scholars, according to Said, approached their subject with reprehensible arrogance, and were active agents in the European colonialist enterprise headed up by Britain and France in the Levant during the first half of the 20th century.

I don’t wish to dwell overmuch on Said’s general thesis—Robert Irwin and Ibn Warraq have written quite powerful refutations of it. One of their most convincing arguments is that many of the best Western scholars of Islam were Germans, and Germany never owned an empire in the Middle East. But in this blog, I want to limit my reflections to one of Said’s more provocative claims—that one way Westerners stereotyped the Middle East was through their writings on and paintings of women there.

Said charged scholars and travelers alike with the sin of presenting Oriental women as little more than sensual, sexual objects for them to fantasize about. He examines, for example, the writings of the 19th c. French author Gustave Flaubert, who encountered and wrote about Kuchuk Hanem, a famous Egyptian dancer. Said concludes that for Flaubert, Kuchuk became a “disturbing symbol of fecundity, peculiarly Oriental in her luxuriant and seemingly unbounded sexuality.” (187) He goes on to write: “Woven through all of Flaubert’s Oriental experiences, exciting or disappointing, is an almost uniform association between the Orient and sex. … Why the Orient seems still to suggest not only fecundity but sexual promise (and threat), untiring sensuality, unlimited desire, deep generative energies, is something on which one could speculate… (188)”—which, of course, Said proceeds to do.

Said has a point, for even today Westerners portray the Orient in sensual ways, particularly through the medium of film. Hollywood's classic Casablanca might be a good example of perpetuating this sort of stereotype. But a much more recent illustration of this though might be found in the character Sibylla in Sir Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005), in which a Crusader queen has ‘indigenized’ and is presented as exotic and erotic. Surely, presentations of these kinds do little in leading to real understanding of women in the Middle East.

But there is a problem with Said’s focus on the distorted ideas Westerners may have had about women in the ‘Orient’. The temptation is to disregard any criticisms Westerners in the 19th and early 20th centuries may have had of the Middle East as arrogant and ignorant. But many Westerners who traveled there were rightly concerned about various conventions that were problematic for women, especially the harem, or the houses of polygamous Muslim men. (Harem comes from the Arabic word haram, or forbidden.) I’ve recently been reading Marshall Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam, and in his second volume, he has a very interesting section where he discusses the harem in some detail (if you’re interested, check out pages 140–146). Hodgson writes that “wealthy men not only had three or four wives by marriage, whom they kept secluded from masculine company; they had a whole household of female dependants, servants and also, among them, slave concubines…” In the Qur’an, Sura 4:3 gives Muslim men permission to marry up to four wives, but it also allows them a captive “that your right hand possesses.” Thus Islamic law not only endorsed polygamy, but also allowed men concubines as well—and frankly, many Muslim men who could afford it indulged.

Hodgson points out that secluding women in the home, as Muslim men did, was not something exclusive to Islam—Christian Byzantium approved of 'protecting' wives from public view, though it did not, of course, allow polygamy. But the Muslim women of the harem lived in “a world of their own in which women ruled over women, with the lone adult male as an often rather remote arbiter.” In other words, harems were hives of political activity where wives/concubines vied for their husband’s/master’s attentions and lobbied for their childrens’ futures over those of other wives’ children. It goes without saying that Muslim men who had harems must have had a hard time heeding Sura 4:3’s admonition to “deal justly” with multiple wives.

The Old Testament likewise describes in vivid detail the problems that come with polygamy and concubinage. Consider Abraham’s failure to treat his wife (Sarah) and his concubine (Hagar) equally, leading eventually to Hagar’s exile into the desert. Or think of the intense rivalry between Leah and Rachel for Jacob’s affections, and the hostility Leah’s sons felt toward Joseph, son of Jacob’s favorite, Rachel. Ida Glaser, a former tutor of mine at the University of Edinburgh, has written in her book Partners or Prisoners? that “the culture of Genesis is much closer to most Muslim cultures than it is to the West” (200), though she is quick to point out that Westerners can fall into patterns of domination, dependency and blame as well. (By the way, I highly recommend her book for those of you wanting to think as Christians about women and Islam.)

I began this blog with some reflections on Edward Said, and while I think he has some good things to say about the dangers of stereotyping, he does all of us a disfavor by taking the focus away from problematic conventions like the harem. The conflicts that raged inside the harem are one of those things we need to know about and take seriously. And given that Muslim men continue to be polygamous, the harem is still a relevant subject, even if we don’t have Western travelers writing copiously about it anymore. Maybe it’s time for the academic community to stop replaying Said’s tired themes and take the spotlight off the ‘Orientalists’ and place it back on the flesh-and-blood people of the ‘Orient’.

Unclean Meat

2008-11-19T11:29:00.000Z

Lisa and I once had some Muslim friends over for a meal and made the mistake of offering them meat that wasn’t halal. (For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, halal means ‘permissible’ in Arabic, and is the only kind of meat observant Muslims will eat.) We apologized profusely to them when we realized our error, and quickly put together a vegetarian meal. Needless to say, we felt pretty embarrassed and swore we wouldn’t do that again.

Our guests were gracious enough, but the blunder prompted a discussion I haven’t forgotten. One of our guests was Sunni and the other Shi’ite, and they reacted somewhat differently. Our Sunni friend seemed inclined to overlook the mistake, and quoted a Quranic passage that gave Muslims permission to eat with Christians, while our Shi’ite friend reacted more cautiously. I was a bit surprised, and wondered at the difference, as we actually had spent more time with our Shi’ite friend and had gotten to know her better.

The other night I was reading for one of my classes, and came across a section on Shi’ism that appeared to shed some light on our experience. The Quranic passage that gives Muslims permission to eat with Christians can be found in Sura (chapter) 5:5, and reads: “This day are all things good and pure made lawful unto you. The food of the People of the Book (Jews and Christians) is lawful unto you and yours is lawful unto them…” But according to the scholar Goldhizer, Shi’ites interpret this verse differently from Sunnis. He writes, “Despite the explicit permission given in the Qur’an (5:5), Shi’i law regards food prepared by Christians and Jews as forbidden meat, and the meat of animals slaughtered by them as forbidden meat (216).” For more on this, see Ignaz Goldhizer’s Introduction to Islamic Law and Theology.

Christians, it must be remembered, have also encountered the question of whether to eat unclean meat. The first Christians were Jews, who like Muslims, had dietary laws by which they abided. But in Acts 10:9–23, we find that the apostle Peter received a vision from heaven in which he was encouraged to kill and eat unclean animals. Peter responded as a devout Jew might: “Surely not, Lord! I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.”

God’s response to Peter was clear: “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” Yes, God was talking about animals that the Torah had until then declared unclean. But he was also talking about Jewish friendship with Gentiles. Peter’s vision was immediately followed by God’s instruction to go with three men who had arrived at his door to the Roman centurion Cornelius, a ‘God-fearing’ Gentile. The last thing that God wanted was Peter’s worry over ritual uncleanness to deter him from visiting a Gentile that was ready to receive the gospel.

I for one am glad that I am not bound to dietary laws, but my experience with our Muslim friends remind me that it is still a live issue for many. But if we learn anything from Peter’s story, it is that God is not as interested in issues of cleanliness as he is in building relationships with those who desire to know him.

I’m hoping that we’ll get another chance to have our friend over for a meal. I hear she’s coming by Oxford soon.