Freemasons state “peace, fraternity and love among human beings” to be the tenets of their mission. However under these concepts, albeit seemingly positive at first sight, lies the Masonic philosophy’s enmity to religion.
Masonry has been one of the major topics about which people have been curious and bewildered. That is because the organisation’s activities are kept confidential and thus its real philosophy and objections are subject to much controversy. In their public disclosures, freemasons extensively refer to “human love, tolerance, universal fraternity, the way to science and wisdom...”, concepts with an instant appeal to heart. However, freemasonry is a dark organisation with its atheist and even anti-religious features.
The most interesting aspect is that the concepts referred by freemasons in their public disclosures and the accusations against them regarding being “irreligious” do not have much difference in essence. At this stage, one might raise the question “Why?” After all, none of these concepts seem adverse; love, tolerance and other similar “Humanist” concepts do not seem to be anti-religious at first sight. Even, many people think these concepts are among the moral teachings religions introduce.
However what truly matters is the content attributed to these concepts.
What “Love For Human” means for Freemasonry
Freemasons often speak about fraternity, tolerance and universal peace. They resort to the rhetoric that men are responsible for others. These are actually words rendering consolidation among people and thus there is nothing wrong with them. But what about a person’s responsibilities towards Allah?
This question discloses the actual face of the Masonic philosophy. That is because, the “love for human”, as referred by Masonic philosophy, is not the love sourced from the fact that human beings are the creations of Allah, as also approved by Yunus Emre in his words “to love the created because of the Creator.” On the contrary, freemasons hold that all human beings came into existence as an end of an evolutionary process. This is, however, an ultimate expression of denial of Allah.
In brief, the philosophy defined as “humanism”, which is the backbone of freemasonry, solely foresees the love shown to people and not to Allah. This distorted philosophy is expressed in the official reports of Turkish Freemasonry lodges which was published in 1923:
“We no longer accept Allah as the purpose of our lives. We have created our own purpose. That purpose will serve humanity and no longer Allah.”
“Underdeveloped societies are impotent. To cover their incapability, they mostly deify the forces and happenings which surround them. Masonry deifies humans.” (Selamet Mahfili- Third conference, page 51)
The definition of humanism, which lays the basis of freemasonry, indicates that this philosophy is of an anti-religious nature. Julian Huxley, the leader of the humanist movement in the 20th century founded a new religion, “Evolutionary Humanism” in the guidance of Darwin’s evolution theory. He stated the meaning rendered by this new religion as follows:
“When I use the word “humanist”, I mean that a human being is a natural creature such as a plant or an animal. In other words, the human body, mind and soul have not been created by a supernatural power but created as a result of the evolution. Therefore, the human being should not believe in the control nor the guide of a supernatural power but his sole existence and sole power.” (American Humanist Association Brochure)
John Dewey published a “Humanist Manifesto” in 1933. The manifesto underscored the idea that it was high time to eliminate divine religions and replace them with a new age of scientific improvement and social cooperation.
The second Manifesto published in 1973 explained all the threats against human kind. In this Manifesto, an outline is given regarding how this philosophy denies the existence of Allah;
“There is no Deity who will save us. We should save ourselves.”
Masonic ideology is also based on the same Humanistic principles. All the warming words used in the ideology are of a deceptive nature when one truly looks into their meanings. Once detached from the existence of Allah, words such as love, fraternity and peace will be meaningless. The sole existence of mankind is to worship Allah, as Allah states in the following verse:
“I created the jinn and mankind only that they might worship Me.” (Surat adh-Dhariyat: 56).
If mankind will deny this duty and rebel against Allah, He might never attain salvation.
One could never truly love another unless he has faith in Allah. This is why the term “human love”, which is frequently used in the Masonic ideology is entirely divorced from reality; all ideologies based on denial will strengthen the wicked side in people and will therefore give rise to bloodshed and torture. During the 20th century, due to the existence of irreligious ideologies such as communism and fascism, hundreds of millions of people suffered from genocide while billions were subjected to torture and pressure. It is also important to remember that The French Revolution, a Freemason-supported movement, derived its strength from the motto “Freedom, Equality and Fraternity” but ended up with tens of thousands of dead executed under guillotine.
The Meaning of “The Scientific Path and Reason”
As with the case of the concepts of “human love” interpreted within the framework of Humanism, “science” and “rationalism” are also taken up in anti-religious contexts by Freemasons.
For a Muslim, science is the tool to observe the universe Allah created and to understand the secrets underlying the way it functions. Rational thinking, on the other hand, is a way of worship Allah commands in the Qur'an and a sign of faith. However, in the Masonic terminology, these concepts are used with totally different connotations. In the According to Masonic thinking, science is not a tool to analyse the beings created by Allah. On the contrary, having faith in science is being associated with being an atheist. Under the guise of science, hoaxes such as Darwinism are indoctrinated to societies. Masonic teaching wages a war against religion by means of the hoax of Darwinism, which is actually refuted by the science itself. In a journal published by Turkish Freemasons, the responsibility of Freemasons to make the propagation of non-religiousness under the mask of “science” is stated as follows:
Believing that this is the best and single way in terms of evolution, our main Masonic duty is not to deviate from positive sciences and wisdom, to propagate this belief among people and to raise the public in the guidance of sciences. The following words of Ernest Renan is significant:
“The vain goals of religion will collapse by itself, only when the public is trained and enlightened by science and reason.”
The following statements of Lessing also support the same argument: “Through the enlightenment of man by science and wisdom, man will no longer feel the need of religion one day.”
This is the Masonic approach to religion.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Why Muslims are backward?
Why Izzat or Honor is not there for the believers (Momineen?)
3: 110, Ali Imran
Allah says that Muslims are the best people or nation? Are we now?
Muslims are backward educationally, socially, and economically and in world power politically. Need to make a self-critical study: Nobel Prize winners, Olympic Gold Medal winners. Number of Books published, number of Articles published. Number of scientists per 100,000 population.
The Qur'an and Hadith exhort the Muslims to read and excel in education- both men and women. In this Masjid people leave free literature. How many of the worshippers pick them and read them and take action?
Look at the literacy rate in the Muslim Ummah. Muslim countries like, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, etc. Now Afghanistan is in a hopeless situation with civil wars. Sisters who constitute 50% of the population are not allowed to go pursue education.
Rabbi Zidni Ilma, 20: 114 (Ta Ha) Oh Lord enrich me with knowledge.
Pakistan's average literacy rate is 26% for all the population-male and female. Contrast this with India's which has an average literacy rate of 52 %. Pakistan is the most advanced country in Science and Technology. It is the only Muslim Nuclear Power country. What is the GDP for Education and for Defense? How much is wasted through corruption.
The average literary rate of the whole Muslim Ummah is around 35 %. For our sisters it is about one half. In rural areas only it is only about 2 to 5 %. In United States a woman gets 12.4 years of school education. In Bangladesh she gets only 0.9 year of school education and in Yemen she gets only 0.2 years of school education.
Knowledge is power. The U.S. is the only Super Power. Why? Because it has knowledge in every field of human endeavor. Most of the Immigrant Muslims came here for higher education. Go to any developing country and ask a student where do you want to go for higher education. The answer invariably will be United States. US is a super power and power corrupts and absolutely corrupts absolutely. No doubt the US Foreign Policy is not even handed and commits wrong to some Muslim countries because of the lobbyists. Then how do Muslims correct the situation? Most of us are Immigrants and many are US Citizens. Our children and grand children are growing here. With violence we cannot correct the situation which is not Islamic when it is targeted towards the innocent civilians. I have seen many brothers call the Westerners as "Kuffar", but what I know is they are called the Ahl-e-Kitab- people of the Book. We can change the situation thro' Ilm and Aml plus Sabr. We need to be organized. First we need to be united. We can learn many lessons from other communities how they correct their situations and shortcomings.
Thousand years ago, our ancestors were masters in Astronomy, like Al-Biruni, Battani, etc. Today our knowledge of Astronomy is weak. The built astronomical observatories created calendars, astrolabes, etc. Day before yesterday (Wednesday) was the new moon. The solar eclipse occurs when the moon comes between the sun and the earth and when they are all in conjunction or in a straight line. It happens on the new moon day. On a new moon day the Hilal is not visible anywhere in the world. It is visible the next day. The Hilal was seen yesterday (Thursday) and hence today is the first day of Jumada ul Awwal. Some Muslim countries declared yesterday was the first day of Jumada ul Awwal. No wonder why Muslims celebrate Ids on three different days in the same town. It happened here in the United States. It is just ignorance. We do not have sound Deeni Talim nor of the Duniya.
30 years ago man landed on the moon. Many Muslims consider moon as a sacred celestial clock. The devout Muslims refused to believe that man had landed on the moon.
1,000 years ago Muslims were in the forefront in every field of knowledge. The students from the West came to Muslim Spain, Sicily, Cairo, and Baghdad to study the sciences.
Take the example of Abu Rayhan al-Biruni. He was 26 years old, 1,000 years ago today. Sultan Mahmood of Ghazna in Afghanistan conquered his native place Khev and brought him to his capitol. Sultan Mahmood was not only a conqueror but also a scholar who gathered eminent scholars like Firdousi who is famous for Shah Nama and Abu Rayhan Al-Biruni. Sultan Mahood took Al-Biruni with him to India. In India al-Biruni stayed for 20 years studying from Pandits their sciences, mathematics, philosophy, etc. He learnt Sanskrit and translated Snakhya and Patanjali into Arabic. He measured the radius and diameter of the earth to within + or _ 20 km and 200 km respectively. He showed the earth rotates on its axis. He explained how the solar and lunar eclipses occur. He saved the life of a traveler who told the Sultan that in a land the Sun never sets. The land of the midnight sun. The Sultan decreed a death sentence to the traveler for blasphemy. However al-Biruni explained that the tilt of the earth towards the sun in the summer causes the phenomenon of the midnight sun.
Like our ancestors Muslims should take the lead in scientific study, exploration and knowledge. INTELLECTUAL REVIVAL OF MUSLIMS is the need of the hour.
The greatest pleasure for a father or mother is when their son or daughter achieves or rather excels in education, profession, power, wealth, etc. The most important is education. If I am a middle school graduate, then it is my responsibility to make my children high-school graduates or college graduates. If I am a high school graduate, then I should make my children college graduates or postgraduates. If I am a college graduate, then I should make my children obtain doctoral degrees. May Allah (SWT) give us the Tawfeek to understand His Deen and follow His Guidance.
3: 110, Ali Imran
Allah says that Muslims are the best people or nation? Are we now?
Muslims are backward educationally, socially, and economically and in world power politically. Need to make a self-critical study: Nobel Prize winners, Olympic Gold Medal winners. Number of Books published, number of Articles published. Number of scientists per 100,000 population.
The Qur'an and Hadith exhort the Muslims to read and excel in education- both men and women. In this Masjid people leave free literature. How many of the worshippers pick them and read them and take action?
Look at the literacy rate in the Muslim Ummah. Muslim countries like, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, etc. Now Afghanistan is in a hopeless situation with civil wars. Sisters who constitute 50% of the population are not allowed to go pursue education.
Rabbi Zidni Ilma, 20: 114 (Ta Ha) Oh Lord enrich me with knowledge.
Pakistan's average literacy rate is 26% for all the population-male and female. Contrast this with India's which has an average literacy rate of 52 %. Pakistan is the most advanced country in Science and Technology. It is the only Muslim Nuclear Power country. What is the GDP for Education and for Defense? How much is wasted through corruption.
The average literary rate of the whole Muslim Ummah is around 35 %. For our sisters it is about one half. In rural areas only it is only about 2 to 5 %. In United States a woman gets 12.4 years of school education. In Bangladesh she gets only 0.9 year of school education and in Yemen she gets only 0.2 years of school education.
Knowledge is power. The U.S. is the only Super Power. Why? Because it has knowledge in every field of human endeavor. Most of the Immigrant Muslims came here for higher education. Go to any developing country and ask a student where do you want to go for higher education. The answer invariably will be United States. US is a super power and power corrupts and absolutely corrupts absolutely. No doubt the US Foreign Policy is not even handed and commits wrong to some Muslim countries because of the lobbyists. Then how do Muslims correct the situation? Most of us are Immigrants and many are US Citizens. Our children and grand children are growing here. With violence we cannot correct the situation which is not Islamic when it is targeted towards the innocent civilians. I have seen many brothers call the Westerners as "Kuffar", but what I know is they are called the Ahl-e-Kitab- people of the Book. We can change the situation thro' Ilm and Aml plus Sabr. We need to be organized. First we need to be united. We can learn many lessons from other communities how they correct their situations and shortcomings.
Thousand years ago, our ancestors were masters in Astronomy, like Al-Biruni, Battani, etc. Today our knowledge of Astronomy is weak. The built astronomical observatories created calendars, astrolabes, etc. Day before yesterday (Wednesday) was the new moon. The solar eclipse occurs when the moon comes between the sun and the earth and when they are all in conjunction or in a straight line. It happens on the new moon day. On a new moon day the Hilal is not visible anywhere in the world. It is visible the next day. The Hilal was seen yesterday (Thursday) and hence today is the first day of Jumada ul Awwal. Some Muslim countries declared yesterday was the first day of Jumada ul Awwal. No wonder why Muslims celebrate Ids on three different days in the same town. It happened here in the United States. It is just ignorance. We do not have sound Deeni Talim nor of the Duniya.
30 years ago man landed on the moon. Many Muslims consider moon as a sacred celestial clock. The devout Muslims refused to believe that man had landed on the moon.
1,000 years ago Muslims were in the forefront in every field of knowledge. The students from the West came to Muslim Spain, Sicily, Cairo, and Baghdad to study the sciences.
Take the example of Abu Rayhan al-Biruni. He was 26 years old, 1,000 years ago today. Sultan Mahmood of Ghazna in Afghanistan conquered his native place Khev and brought him to his capitol. Sultan Mahmood was not only a conqueror but also a scholar who gathered eminent scholars like Firdousi who is famous for Shah Nama and Abu Rayhan Al-Biruni. Sultan Mahood took Al-Biruni with him to India. In India al-Biruni stayed for 20 years studying from Pandits their sciences, mathematics, philosophy, etc. He learnt Sanskrit and translated Snakhya and Patanjali into Arabic. He measured the radius and diameter of the earth to within + or _ 20 km and 200 km respectively. He showed the earth rotates on its axis. He explained how the solar and lunar eclipses occur. He saved the life of a traveler who told the Sultan that in a land the Sun never sets. The land of the midnight sun. The Sultan decreed a death sentence to the traveler for blasphemy. However al-Biruni explained that the tilt of the earth towards the sun in the summer causes the phenomenon of the midnight sun.
Like our ancestors Muslims should take the lead in scientific study, exploration and knowledge. INTELLECTUAL REVIVAL OF MUSLIMS is the need of the hour.
The greatest pleasure for a father or mother is when their son or daughter achieves or rather excels in education, profession, power, wealth, etc. The most important is education. If I am a middle school graduate, then it is my responsibility to make my children high-school graduates or college graduates. If I am a high school graduate, then I should make my children college graduates or postgraduates. If I am a college graduate, then I should make my children obtain doctoral degrees. May Allah (SWT) give us the Tawfeek to understand His Deen and follow His Guidance.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Rise and Fall of Muslim Scientists
INTRODUCTION
The rise of the Muslims to the zenith of civilization in a period of four decades was based on Al-Islam's emphasis on learning. This is obvious when one takes a look at the Qur'an and the traditions of Prophet Muhammad(SAS) which are filled with references to learning, education, observation, and the use of Reason. The very first verse of the Qur'an revealed to the Prophet Of Al-Islam (SAS) on the night of power (Laylathul Qadr) in the month of Ramadan in 611 AD reads:
"Read: In the name of thy Lord who created man from a clot.
Read: And they Lord is the Most Generous Who taught by the pen,
Taught man that which he knew not." Surah Al-Alaq, 96:1-5
"And they shall say had we but listened or used reason, we
Would not among the inmates of the burning fire." Al Mulk, 67:10
"Are those who have knowledge and those who have no knowledge
Alike? Only the men of understanding are mindful." Al Zumar, 39:9.
The Qur'an exhorts the Muslims to do scientific research:
" And whoso bringeth the truth and believeth therein such are
the dutiful." Surah Al Zumar, 39:33
Every Muslim man's and every Muslim woman's prayer should be:
"My Lord! Enrich me with knowledge." Surah TA HA, 20:114.
The pursuit of knowledge and the use of reason, based on sense
of observation is made obligatory on every Muslim man and woman.
The following traditions of the Prophet(SAS) supplement the
foregoing teachings of the Qur'an in the following way:
(1) Seek knowledge "even though it be in China."
(2) "The acquisition of knowledge is compulsory for every
Muslim, whether male or female."
(3) "The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of
the martyr."
(4) "Seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave."
(5) "God has revealed to me, 'Whoever walks in the pursuit of
knowledge I facilitate for him the way to heaven.'
(6) "The best form of worship is the pursuit of knowledge."
(7) "Scholars should endeavor to spread knowledge and provide
education to people who have been deprived of it. For,
where knowledge is hidden it disappears."
(8) Some one asked the Prophet(SAS): "Who is the biggest
scholar?" He replied: "He who is constantly trying to
learn from others, for a scholar is every hungry for more
knowledge."
(9) "Seek for knowledge and wisdom, for whatever the vessel
from which it flows, you will never be the loser."
(10) "Thinking deep for one hour(with sincerity) is better
than 70 years of (mechanical) worship."
(11) "Worship without knowledge, has no goodness in it and
knowledge without understanding has no goodness in it.
And the recitation of the Qur'an, which is not thoughtful
has no goodness in it."
(12) "To listen to the words of the learned and to instill
unto others the lessons of science is better than
religious exercises."
(13) "Acquire knowledge: it enables its possessor to
distinguish right from the wrong, it lights the way to
heaven; it is our friend in the desert, our society in
solitude, our companion when friendless; it guides us
to happiness; it sustains us in misery; it is an ornament
among friends and an armor against enemies."
MUSLIM HERITAGE IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Prophet Muhammad(SAS) was able to unite the Arab tribes who had been torn by revenge, rivalry, and internal fights, and produced a strong nation, that acquired and ruled simultaneously the two known empires at that time, namely the Persian and Byzantine Empires. The Islamic Empire extended from the Atlantic Ocean on the West to the borders of China on the East. Only 80 years after the death of their Prophet the Muslims crossed to
Europe to rule Spain for more than 700 years. The Muslims preserved the cultures of the conquered lands.
The Islamic Empire for more than 1,000 years remained the most advanced and civilized nation in the world. This is because Al-Islam stressed the importance and respect of learning, forbade destruction, developed in Muslims the respect for authority, discipline, and tolerance for other religions. The Muslims recognized excellence and hungered intellectually. The teachings of Qur'an and Sunnah drove many Muslims to their accomplishments in sciences and medicine.
By the tenth century their zeal and enthusiasms for learning resulted in all essential Greek medical and scientific writings being translated into Arabic in Damascus, Cairo, and Baghdad. Arabic became the international language of learning and diplomacy. The center of scientific knowledge and activity shifted eastward, and Baghdad emerged as the capitol of the scientific world. The Muslims became scientific innovators with originality and productivity. The rise of Muslims to the zenith of civilization lasted over a thousand years. During this millennium Muslims contributed vastly to the enhancements of arts, science and cultural growth of mankind.
For example Islamic medicine is one of the most famous and best-known facets of Islamic civilization, and in which the Muslims most excelled. The Muslims were the great torchbearers of international scientific research. Some of the best and most eloquent praises of science ever written came from the pens of Muslim scientists who considered their work to be acts of worship. The same motives led to the establishment of Al-Azhar (800 AD) the first university in the world. They hit the "source ball of knowledge" over the fence to Europe. In the words of Campbell, "The European medical system is Arabian not only in origin but also in its structure. The Arabs are the intellectual forbearers of the Europeans." In fact the Muslims are directly responsible for the European Renaissance.
At the apex of its glory around the tenth century Cordoba, the Capital of Muslim Spain, had pavements, street lighting, three hundred public baths, parks, palaces, one hundred thousand houses and seventy libraries. There were close to half a million books in a single library whereas the whole of France contained much less than this figure. The Muslim physicians performed complicated eye surgery 600 years earlier than in Europe. The Muslim scientists used paper 200 years before Europe; they had paper mills, banks, and police stations and invented spherical trigonometry (indispensable for space sciences) in the late 10th century, solved equations of the third and fourth degree, binomials to the nth degree, and developed differential and integral mathematics. They discovered the force of gravitation, blood circulation, laws of motion, and even developed they theory of evolution and taught it in their universities. They measured the circumferences of the earth and value for specific gravities correct to three decimal places almost a thousand years ago. There is hardly a field of knowledge where Muslims did not research, thinks, or investigate and explore or invent something exemplary.
PRESENT STATUS OF MUSLIM UMMAH
The status of the Muslim Ummah is of great concern to all the Muslim intellectuals. No one can deny that the Muslim Ummah occupies a position, which is at the lowest rung of the ladder in the world. The share of the Muslims in Nobel Prizes and the Olympic Games is close to nothing. Muslims' contributions to literature both general and scientific are marginal at the best. It is very sad to see the status of Muslims in the present world at
the bottom. Muslims have been economically exploited and politically subjugated. Economically, Muslims are poor; in education they are backward; and in science and technology they are marginal. Even very small countries export arms, medicine and
technology to the Muslim countries. The average literacy rate is around 38 percent and in rural areas in Muslim countries, the illiteracy rate among Muslim women is 93 to 97 percent. This is contradictory to the message of the Qur'an and Prophet Muhammad (SAS) as mentioned earlier. The Muslims educated in the western world know about western books and western scholars but they know very little about Muslims books and the intellectual achievements of the Muslims (Fig. 1). The data presented in Table 1 show the Muslims to be at the bottom of the three measures identified. Inspite of the comparable levels of development the mean rate for literacy for the Muslims is 35 per cent lower than
that for the Third World, and 40 percent below the world's average. The data suggests that almost two-thirds of the Muslims worldwide are illiterate. This low level of literacy, evidently, is responsible for the grinding poverty, the backwardness, and the deplorable conditions under which the vast majority of the Muslims live at present( 4). In Table 2 gives the literacy rates for the most populous nations. Pakistan is the most advanced Muslim country in science and technology among Muslim nations. However, the literacy rate for Pakistan, home to the second largest Muslim ummah in the world, ranks the lowest among the most populous nations, is even below the average for the Muslim nations. What is shocking is India the second most populous nation in the world, has a significantly higher rate of literacy than Pakistan and Bangladesh. At one time the three countries constituted a single country(British India) with a literacy rate of 12 percent on the eve of the partition in 1947.
The rise of the Muslims to the zenith of civilization in a period of four decades was based on Al-Islam's emphasis on learning. This is obvious when one takes a look at the Qur'an and the traditions of Prophet Muhammad(SAS) which are filled with references to learning, education, observation, and the use of Reason. The very first verse of the Qur'an revealed to the Prophet Of Al-Islam (SAS) on the night of power (Laylathul Qadr) in the month of Ramadan in 611 AD reads:
"Read: In the name of thy Lord who created man from a clot.
Read: And they Lord is the Most Generous Who taught by the pen,
Taught man that which he knew not." Surah Al-Alaq, 96:1-5
"And they shall say had we but listened or used reason, we
Would not among the inmates of the burning fire." Al Mulk, 67:10
"Are those who have knowledge and those who have no knowledge
Alike? Only the men of understanding are mindful." Al Zumar, 39:9.
The Qur'an exhorts the Muslims to do scientific research:
" And whoso bringeth the truth and believeth therein such are
the dutiful." Surah Al Zumar, 39:33
Every Muslim man's and every Muslim woman's prayer should be:
"My Lord! Enrich me with knowledge." Surah TA HA, 20:114.
The pursuit of knowledge and the use of reason, based on sense
of observation is made obligatory on every Muslim man and woman.
The following traditions of the Prophet(SAS) supplement the
foregoing teachings of the Qur'an in the following way:
(1) Seek knowledge "even though it be in China."
(2) "The acquisition of knowledge is compulsory for every
Muslim, whether male or female."
(3) "The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of
the martyr."
(4) "Seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave."
(5) "God has revealed to me, 'Whoever walks in the pursuit of
knowledge I facilitate for him the way to heaven.'
(6) "The best form of worship is the pursuit of knowledge."
(7) "Scholars should endeavor to spread knowledge and provide
education to people who have been deprived of it. For,
where knowledge is hidden it disappears."
(8) Some one asked the Prophet(SAS): "Who is the biggest
scholar?" He replied: "He who is constantly trying to
learn from others, for a scholar is every hungry for more
knowledge."
(9) "Seek for knowledge and wisdom, for whatever the vessel
from which it flows, you will never be the loser."
(10) "Thinking deep for one hour(with sincerity) is better
than 70 years of (mechanical) worship."
(11) "Worship without knowledge, has no goodness in it and
knowledge without understanding has no goodness in it.
And the recitation of the Qur'an, which is not thoughtful
has no goodness in it."
(12) "To listen to the words of the learned and to instill
unto others the lessons of science is better than
religious exercises."
(13) "Acquire knowledge: it enables its possessor to
distinguish right from the wrong, it lights the way to
heaven; it is our friend in the desert, our society in
solitude, our companion when friendless; it guides us
to happiness; it sustains us in misery; it is an ornament
among friends and an armor against enemies."
MUSLIM HERITAGE IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Prophet Muhammad(SAS) was able to unite the Arab tribes who had been torn by revenge, rivalry, and internal fights, and produced a strong nation, that acquired and ruled simultaneously the two known empires at that time, namely the Persian and Byzantine Empires. The Islamic Empire extended from the Atlantic Ocean on the West to the borders of China on the East. Only 80 years after the death of their Prophet the Muslims crossed to
Europe to rule Spain for more than 700 years. The Muslims preserved the cultures of the conquered lands.
The Islamic Empire for more than 1,000 years remained the most advanced and civilized nation in the world. This is because Al-Islam stressed the importance and respect of learning, forbade destruction, developed in Muslims the respect for authority, discipline, and tolerance for other religions. The Muslims recognized excellence and hungered intellectually. The teachings of Qur'an and Sunnah drove many Muslims to their accomplishments in sciences and medicine.
By the tenth century their zeal and enthusiasms for learning resulted in all essential Greek medical and scientific writings being translated into Arabic in Damascus, Cairo, and Baghdad. Arabic became the international language of learning and diplomacy. The center of scientific knowledge and activity shifted eastward, and Baghdad emerged as the capitol of the scientific world. The Muslims became scientific innovators with originality and productivity. The rise of Muslims to the zenith of civilization lasted over a thousand years. During this millennium Muslims contributed vastly to the enhancements of arts, science and cultural growth of mankind.
For example Islamic medicine is one of the most famous and best-known facets of Islamic civilization, and in which the Muslims most excelled. The Muslims were the great torchbearers of international scientific research. Some of the best and most eloquent praises of science ever written came from the pens of Muslim scientists who considered their work to be acts of worship. The same motives led to the establishment of Al-Azhar (800 AD) the first university in the world. They hit the "source ball of knowledge" over the fence to Europe. In the words of Campbell, "The European medical system is Arabian not only in origin but also in its structure. The Arabs are the intellectual forbearers of the Europeans." In fact the Muslims are directly responsible for the European Renaissance.
At the apex of its glory around the tenth century Cordoba, the Capital of Muslim Spain, had pavements, street lighting, three hundred public baths, parks, palaces, one hundred thousand houses and seventy libraries. There were close to half a million books in a single library whereas the whole of France contained much less than this figure. The Muslim physicians performed complicated eye surgery 600 years earlier than in Europe. The Muslim scientists used paper 200 years before Europe; they had paper mills, banks, and police stations and invented spherical trigonometry (indispensable for space sciences) in the late 10th century, solved equations of the third and fourth degree, binomials to the nth degree, and developed differential and integral mathematics. They discovered the force of gravitation, blood circulation, laws of motion, and even developed they theory of evolution and taught it in their universities. They measured the circumferences of the earth and value for specific gravities correct to three decimal places almost a thousand years ago. There is hardly a field of knowledge where Muslims did not research, thinks, or investigate and explore or invent something exemplary.
PRESENT STATUS OF MUSLIM UMMAH
The status of the Muslim Ummah is of great concern to all the Muslim intellectuals. No one can deny that the Muslim Ummah occupies a position, which is at the lowest rung of the ladder in the world. The share of the Muslims in Nobel Prizes and the Olympic Games is close to nothing. Muslims' contributions to literature both general and scientific are marginal at the best. It is very sad to see the status of Muslims in the present world at
the bottom. Muslims have been economically exploited and politically subjugated. Economically, Muslims are poor; in education they are backward; and in science and technology they are marginal. Even very small countries export arms, medicine and
technology to the Muslim countries. The average literacy rate is around 38 percent and in rural areas in Muslim countries, the illiteracy rate among Muslim women is 93 to 97 percent. This is contradictory to the message of the Qur'an and Prophet Muhammad (SAS) as mentioned earlier. The Muslims educated in the western world know about western books and western scholars but they know very little about Muslims books and the intellectual achievements of the Muslims (Fig. 1). The data presented in Table 1 show the Muslims to be at the bottom of the three measures identified. Inspite of the comparable levels of development the mean rate for literacy for the Muslims is 35 per cent lower than
that for the Third World, and 40 percent below the world's average. The data suggests that almost two-thirds of the Muslims worldwide are illiterate. This low level of literacy, evidently, is responsible for the grinding poverty, the backwardness, and the deplorable conditions under which the vast majority of the Muslims live at present( 4). In Table 2 gives the literacy rates for the most populous nations. Pakistan is the most advanced Muslim country in science and technology among Muslim nations. However, the literacy rate for Pakistan, home to the second largest Muslim ummah in the world, ranks the lowest among the most populous nations, is even below the average for the Muslim nations. What is shocking is India the second most populous nation in the world, has a significantly higher rate of literacy than Pakistan and Bangladesh. At one time the three countries constituted a single country(British India) with a literacy rate of 12 percent on the eve of the partition in 1947.
Women in Islam: Hijab
Literally, Hijab means "a veil", "curtain", "partition" or "separation." In a meta- physical sense, Hijab means illusion or refers to the illusory aspect of creation. Another, and most popular and common meaning of Hijab today, is the veil in dressing for women. It refers to a certain standard of modest dress for women. "The usual definition of modest dress according to the legal systems does not actually require covering everything except the face and hands in public; this, at least, is the practice which originated in the Middle East." 1
While Hijab means "cover", "drape", or "partition"; the word KHIMAR means veil covering the head and the word LITHAM or NIQAB means veil covering lower face up to the eyes. The general term hijab in the present day world refers to the covering of the face by women. In the Indian sub-continent it is called purdah and in Iran it called chador for the tent like black cloak and veil worn by many women in Iran and other Middle Eastern countries. By socioeconomic necessity, the obligation to observe the hijab now often applies more to female "garments"(worn outside the house) than it does to the ancient paradigmatic feature of women's domestic "seclusion." In the contemporary normative Islamic language of Egypt and elsewhere, the hijab now denotes more a "way of dressing" than a "way of life," a (portable) "veil" rather than a fixed "domestic screen/seclusion." In Egypt and America hijab presently denotes the basic head covering ("veil") worn by fundamentalist/Islamist women as part of Islamic dress (zayy islami, or zayy shar'i); this hijab-headcovering conceals hair and neck of the wearer.
The Qur'an advises the wives of the Prophet (SAS) to go veiled (33: 59).
In Surah 24: 31(Ayah), the Qur'an advises women to cover their "adornments" from strangers outside the family. In the traditional and modern Arab societies women at home dress quite differently compared to what they wear in the streets. In this verse of the Qur'an, it refers to the institution of a new public modesty rather than veiling the face.
...When the pre-Islamic Arabs went to battle, Arab women seeing the men off to war would bare their breasts to encourage them to fight; or they would do so at the battle itself, as in the case of the Meccan women led by Hind at the Battle of Uhud. This changed with Islam, but the general use of the veil to cover the face did not appear until 'Abbasid times. Nor was it entirely unknown in Europe, for the veil permitted women the freedom of anonymity. None of the legal systems actually prescribe that women must wear a veil, although they do prescribe covering the body in public, up to the neck, the ankles, and below the elbow. In many Muslim societies, for example in traditional South East Asia, or in Bedouin lands a face veil for women is either rare or non-existent; paradoxically, modern fundamentalism is introducing it. In others, the veil may be used at one time and European dress another. While modesty is a religious prescription, the wearing of a veil is not a religious requirement of Islam, but a matter of cultural milieu.2
"The Middle Eastern norm for relationships between the sexes is by no means the only one possible for Islamic societies everywhere, nor is it appropriate for all cultures. It does not exhaust the possibilities allowed within the framework of the Qur'an and Sunnah, and is neither feasible nor desirable as a model for Europe or North America. European societies possess perfectly adequate models for marriage, the family, and relations between the sexes which are by no means out of harmony with the Qur'an and the Sunnah. This is borne out by the fact that within certain broad limits Islamic societies themselves differ enormously in this respect." 3
The Qur'an lays down the principle of the law of modesty. In Surah 24: An-Nur: 30 and 31, modesty is enjoined both upon Muslim men and Muslim women 4:
Say to the believing men that they Should lower their gaze and guard Their modesty: that will make for Greater purity for them: And God is Well-acquainted with all that they Do. And say to the believing women That they should lower their gaze And guard their modesty: and they Should not display beauty and Ornaments expect what (must Ordinarily) appear thereof; that They must draw their veils over Their bosoms and not display their Beauty except to their husbands, Their fathers, their husband's Fathers, their sons, their husband's Sons, or their women, or their Slaves whom their right hands Possess, or male servants free of Physical needs, or small children
Who have no sense of the shame of
Sex; and that they should not strike
Their feet in order to draw
Attention to their ornaments.
The following conclusions may be made on the basis of the above-cited verses5:
1. The Qur'anic injunctions enjoining the believers to lower their gaze and behave modestly applies to both Muslim men and women and not Muslim women alone.
2. Muslim women are enjoined to "draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty" except in the presence of their husbands, other women, children, eunuchs and those men who are so closely related to them that they are not allowed to marry them. Although a self-conscious exhibition of one's "zeenat" (which means "that which appears to be beautiful" or "that which is used for embellishment or adornment") is forbidden, the Qur'an makes it clear that what a woman wears ordinarily is permissible. Another interpretation of this part of the passage is that if the display of "zeenat" is unintentional or accidental, it does not violate the law of modesty.
3. Although Muslim women may wear ornaments they should not walk in a manner intended to cause their ornaments to jingle and thus attract the attention of others.
The respected scholar, Muhammad Asad6, commenting on Qur'an 24:31 says " The noun khimar (of which khumur is plural) denotes the head-covering customarily used by Arabian women before and after the advent of Islam. According to most of the classical commentators, it was worn in pre-Islamic times more or less as an ornament and was let down loosely over the wearer's back; and since, in accordance with the fashion prevalent at the time, the upper part of a woman's tunic had a wide opening in the front, her breasts were left bare. Hence, the injunction to cover the bosom by means of a khimar (a term so familiar to the contemporaries of the
Prophet) does not necessarily relate to the use of a khimar as such but is, rather, meant to make it clear that a woman's breasts are not included in the concept of "what may decently be apparent" of her body and should not, therefore, be displayed.
The Qur'anic view of the ideal society is that the social and moral values have to be upheld by both Muslim men and women and there is justice for all, i.e. between man and man and between man and woman. The Qur'anic legislation regarding women is to protect them from inequities and vicious practices (such as female infanticide, unlimited polygamy or concubinage, etc.) which prevailed in the pre-Islamic Arabia. However the main purpose is to establish to equality of man and woman in the sight of God who created them both in like manner, from like substance, and gave to both the equal right to develop their own potentialities. To become a free, rational person is then the goal set for all human beings. Thus the Qur'an liberated the women from the indignity of being sex-objects into persons. In turn the Qur'an asks the women that they should behave with dignity and decorum befitting a secure,
Self-respecting and self-aware human being rather than an insecure female who felt that her survival depends on her ability to attract or cajole those men who were interested not in her personality but only in her sexuality.
One of the verses in the Qur'an protects a woman's fundamental rights. Aya 59 from Sura al-Ahzab reads:
O Prophet! Tell Thy wives And daughters, and the Believing women, that They should cast their Outer garments over Their Persons (when outside): That they should be known (As such) and not Molested.
Although this verse is directed in the first place to the Prophet's "wives and daughters", there is a reference also to "the believing women" hence it is generally understood by Muslim societies as applying to all Muslim women. According to the Qur'an the reason why Muslim women should wear an outer garment when go out of their houses is so that they may be recognized as "believing" Muslim women and differentiated from street-walkers for whom sexual harassment is an occupational hazard. The purpose of this verse was not to confine women to their houses but to make it safe for them to go about their daily business without attracting unwholesome attention. By wearing the outergarment a "believing" Muslim woman could be distinguished from the others. In societies where there is no danger of "believing" Muslim being
confused with the others or in which "the outer garment" is unable to function as a mark of identification for "believing" Muslim women, the mere wearing of "the outer garment" would not fulfill the true objective of the Qur'anic decree. For example that older Muslim women who are "past the prospect of marriage" are not required to wear "the outer garment". Surah 24: An-Nur, Aya 60 reads:
Such elderly women are Past the prospect of Marriage,-- There is no blame on them, if They lay aside Their (outer) Garments, provided they make Not wanton display of their Beauty; but it is best for them
To be modest: and Allah is One
Who sees and knows all things.
Women who on account of their advanced age are not likely to be regarded as sex-objects are allowed to discard "the outer garment" but there is no relaxation as far as the essential Qur'anic principle of modest behavior is concerned. Reflection on the above-cited verse shows that "the outer garment" is not required by the Qur'an as a necessary statement of modesty since it recognizes the possibility identification women may continue to be modest even when they have discarded "the outer garment."
The Qur'an itself does not suggest either that women should be veiled or they should be kept apart from the world of men. On the contrary, the Qur'an is insistent on the full participation of women in society and in the religious practices prescribed for men.
Nazira Zin al-Din stipulates that the morality of the self and the cleanness of the conscience are far better than the morality of the chador. No goodness is to be hoped from pretence, all goodness is in the essence of the self. Zin al-Din also argues that imposing the veil on women is the ultimate proof that men suspect their mothers, daughters, wives and sisters of being potential traitors to them. This means that men suspect 'the women closest and dearest to them.' How can society trust women with the most consequential job of bringing up children when it does not trust them with their faces and bodies? How can Muslim men meet rural and European women who are not veiled and treat them respectfully but not treat urban Muslim women in the same way? 7 She concludes this part of the book, al-Sufur Wa'l-hijab 8 by stating that it is not an Islamic duty on Muslim women to wear hijab. If Muslim legislators have decided that it is, their opinions are wrong. If hijab is based on women's lack of intellect or piety, can it be said that all men are more perfect in piety and intellect than all women? 9 The spirit of a nation and its civilization is a reflection of the spirit of the mother. How can any mother bring up distinguished children if she herself is deprived of her personal freedom? She concludes that in enforcing hijab, society becomes a prisoner of its customs and traditions rather than Islam.
There are two ayahs which are specifically addressed to the wives of the Prophet Muhammad (S) and not to other Muslim women.
These are ayahs 32 and 53 of Sura al-Ahzab. ".. And stay quietly in Your houses," did not mean confinement of the wives of the Prophet (S) or other Muslim women and make them inactive. Muslim women remained in mixed company with men until the late sixth century (A.H.) or eleventh century (CE). They received guests, held meetings and went to wars helping their brothers and husbands, defend their castles and bastions.10
Zin al-Din reviewed the interpretations of Aya 30 from Sura al-Nur and Aya 59 from sura al-Ahzab which were cited above by al-Khazin, al-Nafasi, Ibn Masud, Ibn Abbas and al-Tabari and found them full of contradictions. Yet, almost all interpreters agreed that women should not veil their faces and their hands and anyone who advocated that women should cover all their bodies including their faces could not face his argument on any religious text. If women were to be totally covered, there would have been no need for the ayahs addressed to Muslim men: 'Say to the believing men that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty.'(Sura al-Nur, Aya 30). She supports her views by referring to the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (S), always taking into account what the Prophet himself said 'I did not say a thing that is not in harmony with God's book.'11 God says: 'O consorts of the Prophet! ye are not like any of the(other) women' (Ahzab, 53). Thus it is very clear that God did not want women to measure themselves against the wives of the Prophet and wear hijab like them and there is no ambiguity whatsoever regarding this aya. Therefore, those who imitate the wives of the Prophet and wear hijab are disobeying God's will.12
In Islam ruh al-madaniyya (Islam: The Spirit of Civilization) Shaykh Mustafa Ghalayini reminds his readers that veiling pre-dated Islam and that Muslims learned from other peoples with whom they mixed. He adds that hijab as it is known today is prohibited by the Islamic shari'a. Any one who looks at hijab as it is worn by some women would find that it makes them more desirable than if they went out without hijab13. Zin al-Din points out that veiling was a custom of rich families as a symbol of status. She quotes Shaykh Abdul Qadir al-Maghribi who also saw in hijab an aristocratic habit to distinguish the women of rich and prestigious families from other women. She concludes that hijab as it is known today is prohibited by the Islamic shari'a.14
Shaykh Muhammad al-Ghazali in his book Sunna Between Fiqh and Hadith 15 declares that those who claim that women's reform is conditioned by wearing the veil are lying to God and his Prophet. He expresses the opinion that the contemptuous view of women has been passed on from the first jahiliya (the Pre-Islamic period) to the Islamic society. Al-Ghazali's argument is that Islam has made it compulsory on women not to cover their faces during haj and salat (prayer) the two important pillars of Islam. How then could Islam ask women to cover their faces at ordinary times?16 Al-Ghazali is a believer and is confident that all traditions that function to keep women ignorant and prevent them from functioning in public are the remnants of jahiliya and that following them is contrary to the spirit of Islam.
Al-Ghazali says that during the time of the Prophet women were equals at home, in the mosques and on the battlefield. Today true Islam is being destroyed in the name of Islam.
Another Muslim scholar, Abd al-Halim Abu Shiqa wrote a scholarly study of women in Islam entitled Tahrir al-mara'a fi 'asr al-risalah: (The Emancipation of Women during the Time of the Prophet)17 agrees with Zin al-Din and al-Ghazali about the discrepancy between the status of women during the time of the Prophet Muhammad and the status of women today. He says that Islamists have made up sayings which they attributed to the Prophet such as 'women are lacking both intellect and religion' and in many cases they brought sayings which are not reliable at all and promoted them among Muslims until they became part of the Islamic culture.
Like Zin al-Din and al-Ghazali, Abu Shiqa finds that in many countries very weak and unreliable sayings of the Prophet are invented to support customs and traditions which are then considered to be part of the shari'a. He argues that it is the Islamic duty of women to participate in public life and in spreading good (Sura Tauba, Aya 71). He also agrees with Zin al-Din and Ghazali that hijab was for the wives of the Prophet and that it was against Islam for women to imitate the wives of the Prophet. If women were to be totally covered, why did God ask both men and women to lower their gaze? (Sura al-Nur, Ayath 30-31).
The actual practice of veiling most likely came from areas captured in the initial spread of Islam such as Syria, Iraq, and Persia and was adopted by upper-class urban women. Village and rural women traditionally have not worn the veil, partly because it would be an encumbrance in their work. It is certainly true that segregation of women in the domestic sphere took place increasingly as the Islamic centuries unfolded, with some very unfortunate consequences. Some women are again putting on clothing that identifies them as Muslim women. This phenomenon, which began only a few years ago, has manifested itself in a number of countries.
It is part of the growing feeling on the part of Muslim men and women that they no longer wish to identify with the West, and that reaffirmation of their identity as Muslims requires the kind of visible sign that adoption of conservative clothing implies. For these women the issue is not that they have to dress conservatively but that they choose to. In Iran Imam Khomeini first insisted that women must wear the veil and chador and in response to large demonstrations by women, he modified his position and agreed that while the chador is not obligatory, modest dress is, including loose clothing and non-transparent stockings and scarves.18
With Islam's expansion into areas formerly part of the Byzantine and Sasanian empires, the scripture-legislated social paradigm that had evolved in the early Medinan community came face to face with alien social structures and traditions deeply rooted in the conquered populations. Among the many cultural traditions assimilated and continued by Islam were the veiling and seclusion of women, at least among the urban upper and upper-middle classes. With these traditions' assumption into "the Islamic way of life," they of need helped to shape the normative interpretations of Qur'anic gender laws as formulated by the medireview (urbanized and acculturated) lawyer-theologians. In the latter's consensus-based prescriptive systems, the Prophet's wives were recognized as models for emulation (sources of Sunna). Thus, while the scholars provided information on the Prophet's wives in terms of, as well as for, an ideal of Muslim female morality, the Qur'anic directives addressed to the Prophet's consorts were naturally seen as applicable to all Muslim women.19
Semantically and legally, that is, regarding both the terms and also the parameters of its application, Islamic interpretation extended the concept of hijab. In scripturalist method, this was achieved in several ways. Firstly, the hijab was associated with two of the Qur'an's "clothing laws" imposed upon all Muslim females: the "mantle" verse of 33:59 and the "modesty" verse of 24:31. On the one hand, the semantic association of domestic segregation (hijab) with garments to be worn in public (jilbab, khimar) resulted in the use of the term hijab for concealing garments that women wore outside of their houses. This language use is fully documented in the medireview Hadith. However, unlike female garments such as jilbab, lihaf, milhafa, izar, dir' (traditional garments for the body), khimar, niqab, burqu', qina', miqna'a (traditional garments for the head and neck) and also a large number of other articles of clothing, the medireview meaning of hijab remained conceptual and generic. In their debates on which parts of the woman's body, if any, are not "awra" (literally, "genital," "pudendum") and many therefore be legally exposed to nonrelatives, the medireview scholars often contrastively paired woman's' awra with this generic hijab. This permitted the debate to remain conceptual rather than get bogged down in the specifics of articles of clothing whose meaning, in any case, was prone to changes both geographic/regional and also chronological. At present we know very little about the precise stages of the process by which the hijab in its multiple meanings was made obligatory for Muslim women at large, except to say that these occurred during the first centuries after the expansion of Islam beyond the borders of Arabia, and then mainly in the Islamicized societies still ruled by preexisting (Sasanian and Byzantine) social traditions.
With the rise of the Iraq-based Abbasid state in the mid-eighth century of the Western calendar, the lawyer-theologians of Islam grew into a religious establishment entrusted with the formulation of Islamic law and morality, and it was they who interpreted the Qur'anic rules on women's dress and space in increasingly absolute and categorical fashion, reflecting the real practices and cultural assumptions of their place and age. Classical legal compendia, medireview Hadith collections and Qur'anic exegesis are here mainly formulations of the system "as established" and not of its developmental stages, even though differences of opinion on the legal limits of the hijab garments survived, including among the doctrinal teachings of the four orthodox schools of law (madhahib). 20
Attacked by foreigners and indigenous secularists alike and defended by the many voices of conservatism, hijab has come to signify the sum total of traditional institutions governing women's role in Islamic society. Thus, in the ideological struggles surrounding the definition of Islam's nature and role in the modern world, the hijab has acquired the status of "cultural symbol."
Qasim Amin, the French-educated, pro-Western Egyptian journalist, lawyer, and politician in the last century wanted to bring Egyptian society from a state of "backwardness" into a state of "civilization" and modernity. To do so, he lashed out against the hijab, in its expanded sense, as the true reason for the ignorance, superstition, obesity, anemia, and premature aging of the Muslim woman of his time. He wanted the Muslim women to raise from the "backward" hijab into the desirable modernist ideal of women's right to an elementary education, supplemented by their ongoing contact with life outside of the home to provide experience of the "real world" and combat superstition. He understood the hijab as an amalgam of institutionalized restrictions on women that consisted of sexual segregation, domestic seclusion, and the face veil. He insisted as much on the woman's right to mobility outside the home as he did on the adaptation of shar'i Islamic garb, which would leave a woman's face and hands uncovered. Women's domestic seclusion and the face veil, then, were primary points in Amin's attack on what was wrong with the Egyptian social system of his time.21 Muhammad Abdu tried to restore the dignity to Muslim woman by way of educational and some legal reforms, the modernist blueprint of women's Islamic rights eventually also included the right to work, vote, and stand for election-that is, full participation in public life. He separated the forever-valid-as-stipulated laws of 'ibadat (religious observances) from the more time-specific mu'amalat (social transactions) in Qur'an and shari'a, which latter included the Hadith as one of its sources. Because modern Islamic societies differ from the seventh-century umma, time-specific laws are thus no longer literally applicable but need a fresh legal interpretation (ijtihad). What matters is to safeguard "the public good" (al-maslah al'-amma) in terms of Muslim communal morality and spirituality. 22
In the Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam, the Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi
attacks the age-old conservative focus on women's segregation as mere institutionalization of authoritarianism, achieved by way of manipulation of sacred texts, "a structural characteristic of the practice of power in Muslim societies." In describing the feminist model of the Prophet's wives' rights and roles both domestic and also communal, Mernissi uses the methodology of "literal" interpretation of Qur'an and Hadith. In the selection and interpretations of traditions, she discredits some of textual items as unauthentic by the criteria of classical Hadith criticism. In Mernissi's reading of Qur'an and Hadith, Muhammad's wives were dynamic, influential, and enterprising members of the community, and fully involved in Muslim public affairs. He listened to their advice. In the city, they were leaders of women's protest movements, first for equal status as believers and thereafter regarding economic and sociopolitical rights, mainly in the areas of inheritance, participation in warfare and booty, and personal (marital) relations. Muhammad's vision of Islamic society was egalitarian, and he lived this ideal in his own household. Later the Prophet had to sacrifice his egalitarian vision for the sake of communal cohesiveness and the survival of the Islamic cause. To Mernissi, the seclusion of Muhammad's wives from public life (the hijab, Qur'an 33.53) is a symbol of Islam's retreat from the early principle of gender equality, as is the "mantel" (jilbab) verse of 33:59 which relinquished the principle of social responsibility, the individual sovereign will that internalizes control rather than place it within external barriers. Concerning A'isha's involvement in political affairs (the Battle of the Camel), Mernissi engages in classical Hadith criticism to prove the inauthenticity of the (presumably Prophetic) traditions "a people who entrust their command [or, affair, amr] to a woman will not thrive" because of historical problems relating to the date of its first transmission and also selfserving motives and a number of moral deficiencies recorded about its first transmitter, the Prophet's freedman Abu Bakra. Modernists in general disregard hadith items rather than question their authenticity by scrutinizing the transmitters' reliability.23 After describing the active participation of Muslim women in the battlefields as warriors and nurses to the wounded, Maulana Maudoodi24 says " This shows that the Islamic purdah is not a custom of ignorance which cannot be relaxed under any circumstances, on the other hand, it is a custom which can be relaxed as and when required in a moment of urgency. Not only is a woman allowed to uncover a part of her satr (coveredness) under necessity, there is no harm."
In the matter of hijab, the conscience of an honest, sincere Believer alone can be the true judge, as has been said by the Noble Prophet: "Ask for the verdict of your conscience and discard what pricks it."
Islam cannot be properly followed without knowledge. It is a rational law and to follow it rightly one needs to exercise reason and understanding at every step.25
REFERENCES
1. Cyril Glasse. The Concise Encyclopedia of Islam. Harper and Row Publishers, New York, N.Y., 1989, p. 156
2. Ibid, p. 413
3. Ibid, p. 421
4. Translation by Abdullah Yusuf Ali. The Holy Quran (Amana Corp., Brentwood, Maryland), 1989. Pp 873-874
5. Riffat Hassan. Women's Rights and Islam: From the I.C.P.D. to Beijing. Louisville, Kentucky, 1995. pp. 65-76
6. Translated and explained by Muhammad Asad. The Message of the Qur'an. Dar al-Andalus, Gibraltar. 1984. p.538
7. Bouthaina Shaaban.The Muted Voices of Women Interpreters. In
FAITH AND FREEDOM: Women's Human Rights in the Muslim World, Mahnaz Afkhami (Editor). I. B. Tauris Publishers, New York, 1995. p.68.
8. Nazira Zin al-Din, al-Sufur Wa'l-hijab (Beirut: Quzma Publications, 1928), p 37
9. Bouthaina Shaaban, op.cit. P.69
10. Nazira Zin al-Din, op.cit.pp. 191-2
11. Ibid, p.226
12. Bouthaina Shaaban, op. cit. p.72
13. Shaykh Mustafa al-Ghalayini, Islam ruh al-madaniyya (Islam:
The Spirit of Civilization)(Beirut: al-Maktabah al-Asriyya,
1960) P.253
14. Ibid, pp.255-56
15. Shaykh Muhammad al-Ghazali.: Sunna Between Fiqh and Hadith
(Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 1989, 7th edition, 1990)
16. Ibid, p.44
17. Abd al-Halim Abu Shiqa.: Tahrir al-mara' fi 'asr al-risalah
(Kuwait: Dar al-Qalam, 1990)
18. Jane I. Smith.:The Experience of Muslim Women:Considerations
of Power and Authority. In The Islamic Impact. Haddad, Y.Y. (Editor), Syracuse University Press. 1984. Pp. 89-112
19. Barbara Freyer Stowasser.: Women in the Qur'an, Traditions, and Interpretation.Oxford University Press. 1994. P. 92
20. Ibid, p.93
21. Ibid, p.127
22. Ibid, p.132
23. Ibid, p.133
24. Syed Abu Ala Maudoodi. Purdah and the Status of Woman in Islam. Islamic Publications. Lahore, Pakistan. 1972. P.215
25. Ibid, p.203
While Hijab means "cover", "drape", or "partition"; the word KHIMAR means veil covering the head and the word LITHAM or NIQAB means veil covering lower face up to the eyes. The general term hijab in the present day world refers to the covering of the face by women. In the Indian sub-continent it is called purdah and in Iran it called chador for the tent like black cloak and veil worn by many women in Iran and other Middle Eastern countries. By socioeconomic necessity, the obligation to observe the hijab now often applies more to female "garments"(worn outside the house) than it does to the ancient paradigmatic feature of women's domestic "seclusion." In the contemporary normative Islamic language of Egypt and elsewhere, the hijab now denotes more a "way of dressing" than a "way of life," a (portable) "veil" rather than a fixed "domestic screen/seclusion." In Egypt and America hijab presently denotes the basic head covering ("veil") worn by fundamentalist/Islamist women as part of Islamic dress (zayy islami, or zayy shar'i); this hijab-headcovering conceals hair and neck of the wearer.
The Qur'an advises the wives of the Prophet (SAS) to go veiled (33: 59).
In Surah 24: 31(Ayah), the Qur'an advises women to cover their "adornments" from strangers outside the family. In the traditional and modern Arab societies women at home dress quite differently compared to what they wear in the streets. In this verse of the Qur'an, it refers to the institution of a new public modesty rather than veiling the face.
...When the pre-Islamic Arabs went to battle, Arab women seeing the men off to war would bare their breasts to encourage them to fight; or they would do so at the battle itself, as in the case of the Meccan women led by Hind at the Battle of Uhud. This changed with Islam, but the general use of the veil to cover the face did not appear until 'Abbasid times. Nor was it entirely unknown in Europe, for the veil permitted women the freedom of anonymity. None of the legal systems actually prescribe that women must wear a veil, although they do prescribe covering the body in public, up to the neck, the ankles, and below the elbow. In many Muslim societies, for example in traditional South East Asia, or in Bedouin lands a face veil for women is either rare or non-existent; paradoxically, modern fundamentalism is introducing it. In others, the veil may be used at one time and European dress another. While modesty is a religious prescription, the wearing of a veil is not a religious requirement of Islam, but a matter of cultural milieu.2
"The Middle Eastern norm for relationships between the sexes is by no means the only one possible for Islamic societies everywhere, nor is it appropriate for all cultures. It does not exhaust the possibilities allowed within the framework of the Qur'an and Sunnah, and is neither feasible nor desirable as a model for Europe or North America. European societies possess perfectly adequate models for marriage, the family, and relations between the sexes which are by no means out of harmony with the Qur'an and the Sunnah. This is borne out by the fact that within certain broad limits Islamic societies themselves differ enormously in this respect." 3
The Qur'an lays down the principle of the law of modesty. In Surah 24: An-Nur: 30 and 31, modesty is enjoined both upon Muslim men and Muslim women 4:
Say to the believing men that they Should lower their gaze and guard Their modesty: that will make for Greater purity for them: And God is Well-acquainted with all that they Do. And say to the believing women That they should lower their gaze And guard their modesty: and they Should not display beauty and Ornaments expect what (must Ordinarily) appear thereof; that They must draw their veils over Their bosoms and not display their Beauty except to their husbands, Their fathers, their husband's Fathers, their sons, their husband's Sons, or their women, or their Slaves whom their right hands Possess, or male servants free of Physical needs, or small children
Who have no sense of the shame of
Sex; and that they should not strike
Their feet in order to draw
Attention to their ornaments.
The following conclusions may be made on the basis of the above-cited verses5:
1. The Qur'anic injunctions enjoining the believers to lower their gaze and behave modestly applies to both Muslim men and women and not Muslim women alone.
2. Muslim women are enjoined to "draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty" except in the presence of their husbands, other women, children, eunuchs and those men who are so closely related to them that they are not allowed to marry them. Although a self-conscious exhibition of one's "zeenat" (which means "that which appears to be beautiful" or "that which is used for embellishment or adornment") is forbidden, the Qur'an makes it clear that what a woman wears ordinarily is permissible. Another interpretation of this part of the passage is that if the display of "zeenat" is unintentional or accidental, it does not violate the law of modesty.
3. Although Muslim women may wear ornaments they should not walk in a manner intended to cause their ornaments to jingle and thus attract the attention of others.
The respected scholar, Muhammad Asad6, commenting on Qur'an 24:31 says " The noun khimar (of which khumur is plural) denotes the head-covering customarily used by Arabian women before and after the advent of Islam. According to most of the classical commentators, it was worn in pre-Islamic times more or less as an ornament and was let down loosely over the wearer's back; and since, in accordance with the fashion prevalent at the time, the upper part of a woman's tunic had a wide opening in the front, her breasts were left bare. Hence, the injunction to cover the bosom by means of a khimar (a term so familiar to the contemporaries of the
Prophet) does not necessarily relate to the use of a khimar as such but is, rather, meant to make it clear that a woman's breasts are not included in the concept of "what may decently be apparent" of her body and should not, therefore, be displayed.
The Qur'anic view of the ideal society is that the social and moral values have to be upheld by both Muslim men and women and there is justice for all, i.e. between man and man and between man and woman. The Qur'anic legislation regarding women is to protect them from inequities and vicious practices (such as female infanticide, unlimited polygamy or concubinage, etc.) which prevailed in the pre-Islamic Arabia. However the main purpose is to establish to equality of man and woman in the sight of God who created them both in like manner, from like substance, and gave to both the equal right to develop their own potentialities. To become a free, rational person is then the goal set for all human beings. Thus the Qur'an liberated the women from the indignity of being sex-objects into persons. In turn the Qur'an asks the women that they should behave with dignity and decorum befitting a secure,
Self-respecting and self-aware human being rather than an insecure female who felt that her survival depends on her ability to attract or cajole those men who were interested not in her personality but only in her sexuality.
One of the verses in the Qur'an protects a woman's fundamental rights. Aya 59 from Sura al-Ahzab reads:
O Prophet! Tell Thy wives And daughters, and the Believing women, that They should cast their Outer garments over Their Persons (when outside): That they should be known (As such) and not Molested.
Although this verse is directed in the first place to the Prophet's "wives and daughters", there is a reference also to "the believing women" hence it is generally understood by Muslim societies as applying to all Muslim women. According to the Qur'an the reason why Muslim women should wear an outer garment when go out of their houses is so that they may be recognized as "believing" Muslim women and differentiated from street-walkers for whom sexual harassment is an occupational hazard. The purpose of this verse was not to confine women to their houses but to make it safe for them to go about their daily business without attracting unwholesome attention. By wearing the outergarment a "believing" Muslim woman could be distinguished from the others. In societies where there is no danger of "believing" Muslim being
confused with the others or in which "the outer garment" is unable to function as a mark of identification for "believing" Muslim women, the mere wearing of "the outer garment" would not fulfill the true objective of the Qur'anic decree. For example that older Muslim women who are "past the prospect of marriage" are not required to wear "the outer garment". Surah 24: An-Nur, Aya 60 reads:
Such elderly women are Past the prospect of Marriage,-- There is no blame on them, if They lay aside Their (outer) Garments, provided they make Not wanton display of their Beauty; but it is best for them
To be modest: and Allah is One
Who sees and knows all things.
Women who on account of their advanced age are not likely to be regarded as sex-objects are allowed to discard "the outer garment" but there is no relaxation as far as the essential Qur'anic principle of modest behavior is concerned. Reflection on the above-cited verse shows that "the outer garment" is not required by the Qur'an as a necessary statement of modesty since it recognizes the possibility identification women may continue to be modest even when they have discarded "the outer garment."
The Qur'an itself does not suggest either that women should be veiled or they should be kept apart from the world of men. On the contrary, the Qur'an is insistent on the full participation of women in society and in the religious practices prescribed for men.
Nazira Zin al-Din stipulates that the morality of the self and the cleanness of the conscience are far better than the morality of the chador. No goodness is to be hoped from pretence, all goodness is in the essence of the self. Zin al-Din also argues that imposing the veil on women is the ultimate proof that men suspect their mothers, daughters, wives and sisters of being potential traitors to them. This means that men suspect 'the women closest and dearest to them.' How can society trust women with the most consequential job of bringing up children when it does not trust them with their faces and bodies? How can Muslim men meet rural and European women who are not veiled and treat them respectfully but not treat urban Muslim women in the same way? 7 She concludes this part of the book, al-Sufur Wa'l-hijab 8 by stating that it is not an Islamic duty on Muslim women to wear hijab. If Muslim legislators have decided that it is, their opinions are wrong. If hijab is based on women's lack of intellect or piety, can it be said that all men are more perfect in piety and intellect than all women? 9 The spirit of a nation and its civilization is a reflection of the spirit of the mother. How can any mother bring up distinguished children if she herself is deprived of her personal freedom? She concludes that in enforcing hijab, society becomes a prisoner of its customs and traditions rather than Islam.
There are two ayahs which are specifically addressed to the wives of the Prophet Muhammad (S) and not to other Muslim women.
These are ayahs 32 and 53 of Sura al-Ahzab. ".. And stay quietly in Your houses," did not mean confinement of the wives of the Prophet (S) or other Muslim women and make them inactive. Muslim women remained in mixed company with men until the late sixth century (A.H.) or eleventh century (CE). They received guests, held meetings and went to wars helping their brothers and husbands, defend their castles and bastions.10
Zin al-Din reviewed the interpretations of Aya 30 from Sura al-Nur and Aya 59 from sura al-Ahzab which were cited above by al-Khazin, al-Nafasi, Ibn Masud, Ibn Abbas and al-Tabari and found them full of contradictions. Yet, almost all interpreters agreed that women should not veil their faces and their hands and anyone who advocated that women should cover all their bodies including their faces could not face his argument on any religious text. If women were to be totally covered, there would have been no need for the ayahs addressed to Muslim men: 'Say to the believing men that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty.'(Sura al-Nur, Aya 30). She supports her views by referring to the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (S), always taking into account what the Prophet himself said 'I did not say a thing that is not in harmony with God's book.'11 God says: 'O consorts of the Prophet! ye are not like any of the(other) women' (Ahzab, 53). Thus it is very clear that God did not want women to measure themselves against the wives of the Prophet and wear hijab like them and there is no ambiguity whatsoever regarding this aya. Therefore, those who imitate the wives of the Prophet and wear hijab are disobeying God's will.12
In Islam ruh al-madaniyya (Islam: The Spirit of Civilization) Shaykh Mustafa Ghalayini reminds his readers that veiling pre-dated Islam and that Muslims learned from other peoples with whom they mixed. He adds that hijab as it is known today is prohibited by the Islamic shari'a. Any one who looks at hijab as it is worn by some women would find that it makes them more desirable than if they went out without hijab13. Zin al-Din points out that veiling was a custom of rich families as a symbol of status. She quotes Shaykh Abdul Qadir al-Maghribi who also saw in hijab an aristocratic habit to distinguish the women of rich and prestigious families from other women. She concludes that hijab as it is known today is prohibited by the Islamic shari'a.14
Shaykh Muhammad al-Ghazali in his book Sunna Between Fiqh and Hadith 15 declares that those who claim that women's reform is conditioned by wearing the veil are lying to God and his Prophet. He expresses the opinion that the contemptuous view of women has been passed on from the first jahiliya (the Pre-Islamic period) to the Islamic society. Al-Ghazali's argument is that Islam has made it compulsory on women not to cover their faces during haj and salat (prayer) the two important pillars of Islam. How then could Islam ask women to cover their faces at ordinary times?16 Al-Ghazali is a believer and is confident that all traditions that function to keep women ignorant and prevent them from functioning in public are the remnants of jahiliya and that following them is contrary to the spirit of Islam.
Al-Ghazali says that during the time of the Prophet women were equals at home, in the mosques and on the battlefield. Today true Islam is being destroyed in the name of Islam.
Another Muslim scholar, Abd al-Halim Abu Shiqa wrote a scholarly study of women in Islam entitled Tahrir al-mara'a fi 'asr al-risalah: (The Emancipation of Women during the Time of the Prophet)17 agrees with Zin al-Din and al-Ghazali about the discrepancy between the status of women during the time of the Prophet Muhammad and the status of women today. He says that Islamists have made up sayings which they attributed to the Prophet such as 'women are lacking both intellect and religion' and in many cases they brought sayings which are not reliable at all and promoted them among Muslims until they became part of the Islamic culture.
Like Zin al-Din and al-Ghazali, Abu Shiqa finds that in many countries very weak and unreliable sayings of the Prophet are invented to support customs and traditions which are then considered to be part of the shari'a. He argues that it is the Islamic duty of women to participate in public life and in spreading good (Sura Tauba, Aya 71). He also agrees with Zin al-Din and Ghazali that hijab was for the wives of the Prophet and that it was against Islam for women to imitate the wives of the Prophet. If women were to be totally covered, why did God ask both men and women to lower their gaze? (Sura al-Nur, Ayath 30-31).
The actual practice of veiling most likely came from areas captured in the initial spread of Islam such as Syria, Iraq, and Persia and was adopted by upper-class urban women. Village and rural women traditionally have not worn the veil, partly because it would be an encumbrance in their work. It is certainly true that segregation of women in the domestic sphere took place increasingly as the Islamic centuries unfolded, with some very unfortunate consequences. Some women are again putting on clothing that identifies them as Muslim women. This phenomenon, which began only a few years ago, has manifested itself in a number of countries.
It is part of the growing feeling on the part of Muslim men and women that they no longer wish to identify with the West, and that reaffirmation of their identity as Muslims requires the kind of visible sign that adoption of conservative clothing implies. For these women the issue is not that they have to dress conservatively but that they choose to. In Iran Imam Khomeini first insisted that women must wear the veil and chador and in response to large demonstrations by women, he modified his position and agreed that while the chador is not obligatory, modest dress is, including loose clothing and non-transparent stockings and scarves.18
With Islam's expansion into areas formerly part of the Byzantine and Sasanian empires, the scripture-legislated social paradigm that had evolved in the early Medinan community came face to face with alien social structures and traditions deeply rooted in the conquered populations. Among the many cultural traditions assimilated and continued by Islam were the veiling and seclusion of women, at least among the urban upper and upper-middle classes. With these traditions' assumption into "the Islamic way of life," they of need helped to shape the normative interpretations of Qur'anic gender laws as formulated by the medireview (urbanized and acculturated) lawyer-theologians. In the latter's consensus-based prescriptive systems, the Prophet's wives were recognized as models for emulation (sources of Sunna). Thus, while the scholars provided information on the Prophet's wives in terms of, as well as for, an ideal of Muslim female morality, the Qur'anic directives addressed to the Prophet's consorts were naturally seen as applicable to all Muslim women.19
Semantically and legally, that is, regarding both the terms and also the parameters of its application, Islamic interpretation extended the concept of hijab. In scripturalist method, this was achieved in several ways. Firstly, the hijab was associated with two of the Qur'an's "clothing laws" imposed upon all Muslim females: the "mantle" verse of 33:59 and the "modesty" verse of 24:31. On the one hand, the semantic association of domestic segregation (hijab) with garments to be worn in public (jilbab, khimar) resulted in the use of the term hijab for concealing garments that women wore outside of their houses. This language use is fully documented in the medireview Hadith. However, unlike female garments such as jilbab, lihaf, milhafa, izar, dir' (traditional garments for the body), khimar, niqab, burqu', qina', miqna'a (traditional garments for the head and neck) and also a large number of other articles of clothing, the medireview meaning of hijab remained conceptual and generic. In their debates on which parts of the woman's body, if any, are not "awra" (literally, "genital," "pudendum") and many therefore be legally exposed to nonrelatives, the medireview scholars often contrastively paired woman's' awra with this generic hijab. This permitted the debate to remain conceptual rather than get bogged down in the specifics of articles of clothing whose meaning, in any case, was prone to changes both geographic/regional and also chronological. At present we know very little about the precise stages of the process by which the hijab in its multiple meanings was made obligatory for Muslim women at large, except to say that these occurred during the first centuries after the expansion of Islam beyond the borders of Arabia, and then mainly in the Islamicized societies still ruled by preexisting (Sasanian and Byzantine) social traditions.
With the rise of the Iraq-based Abbasid state in the mid-eighth century of the Western calendar, the lawyer-theologians of Islam grew into a religious establishment entrusted with the formulation of Islamic law and morality, and it was they who interpreted the Qur'anic rules on women's dress and space in increasingly absolute and categorical fashion, reflecting the real practices and cultural assumptions of their place and age. Classical legal compendia, medireview Hadith collections and Qur'anic exegesis are here mainly formulations of the system "as established" and not of its developmental stages, even though differences of opinion on the legal limits of the hijab garments survived, including among the doctrinal teachings of the four orthodox schools of law (madhahib). 20
Attacked by foreigners and indigenous secularists alike and defended by the many voices of conservatism, hijab has come to signify the sum total of traditional institutions governing women's role in Islamic society. Thus, in the ideological struggles surrounding the definition of Islam's nature and role in the modern world, the hijab has acquired the status of "cultural symbol."
Qasim Amin, the French-educated, pro-Western Egyptian journalist, lawyer, and politician in the last century wanted to bring Egyptian society from a state of "backwardness" into a state of "civilization" and modernity. To do so, he lashed out against the hijab, in its expanded sense, as the true reason for the ignorance, superstition, obesity, anemia, and premature aging of the Muslim woman of his time. He wanted the Muslim women to raise from the "backward" hijab into the desirable modernist ideal of women's right to an elementary education, supplemented by their ongoing contact with life outside of the home to provide experience of the "real world" and combat superstition. He understood the hijab as an amalgam of institutionalized restrictions on women that consisted of sexual segregation, domestic seclusion, and the face veil. He insisted as much on the woman's right to mobility outside the home as he did on the adaptation of shar'i Islamic garb, which would leave a woman's face and hands uncovered. Women's domestic seclusion and the face veil, then, were primary points in Amin's attack on what was wrong with the Egyptian social system of his time.21 Muhammad Abdu tried to restore the dignity to Muslim woman by way of educational and some legal reforms, the modernist blueprint of women's Islamic rights eventually also included the right to work, vote, and stand for election-that is, full participation in public life. He separated the forever-valid-as-stipulated laws of 'ibadat (religious observances) from the more time-specific mu'amalat (social transactions) in Qur'an and shari'a, which latter included the Hadith as one of its sources. Because modern Islamic societies differ from the seventh-century umma, time-specific laws are thus no longer literally applicable but need a fresh legal interpretation (ijtihad). What matters is to safeguard "the public good" (al-maslah al'-amma) in terms of Muslim communal morality and spirituality. 22
In the Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam, the Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi
attacks the age-old conservative focus on women's segregation as mere institutionalization of authoritarianism, achieved by way of manipulation of sacred texts, "a structural characteristic of the practice of power in Muslim societies." In describing the feminist model of the Prophet's wives' rights and roles both domestic and also communal, Mernissi uses the methodology of "literal" interpretation of Qur'an and Hadith. In the selection and interpretations of traditions, she discredits some of textual items as unauthentic by the criteria of classical Hadith criticism. In Mernissi's reading of Qur'an and Hadith, Muhammad's wives were dynamic, influential, and enterprising members of the community, and fully involved in Muslim public affairs. He listened to their advice. In the city, they were leaders of women's protest movements, first for equal status as believers and thereafter regarding economic and sociopolitical rights, mainly in the areas of inheritance, participation in warfare and booty, and personal (marital) relations. Muhammad's vision of Islamic society was egalitarian, and he lived this ideal in his own household. Later the Prophet had to sacrifice his egalitarian vision for the sake of communal cohesiveness and the survival of the Islamic cause. To Mernissi, the seclusion of Muhammad's wives from public life (the hijab, Qur'an 33.53) is a symbol of Islam's retreat from the early principle of gender equality, as is the "mantel" (jilbab) verse of 33:59 which relinquished the principle of social responsibility, the individual sovereign will that internalizes control rather than place it within external barriers. Concerning A'isha's involvement in political affairs (the Battle of the Camel), Mernissi engages in classical Hadith criticism to prove the inauthenticity of the (presumably Prophetic) traditions "a people who entrust their command [or, affair, amr] to a woman will not thrive" because of historical problems relating to the date of its first transmission and also selfserving motives and a number of moral deficiencies recorded about its first transmitter, the Prophet's freedman Abu Bakra. Modernists in general disregard hadith items rather than question their authenticity by scrutinizing the transmitters' reliability.23 After describing the active participation of Muslim women in the battlefields as warriors and nurses to the wounded, Maulana Maudoodi24 says " This shows that the Islamic purdah is not a custom of ignorance which cannot be relaxed under any circumstances, on the other hand, it is a custom which can be relaxed as and when required in a moment of urgency. Not only is a woman allowed to uncover a part of her satr (coveredness) under necessity, there is no harm."
In the matter of hijab, the conscience of an honest, sincere Believer alone can be the true judge, as has been said by the Noble Prophet: "Ask for the verdict of your conscience and discard what pricks it."
Islam cannot be properly followed without knowledge. It is a rational law and to follow it rightly one needs to exercise reason and understanding at every step.25
REFERENCES
1. Cyril Glasse. The Concise Encyclopedia of Islam. Harper and Row Publishers, New York, N.Y., 1989, p. 156
2. Ibid, p. 413
3. Ibid, p. 421
4. Translation by Abdullah Yusuf Ali. The Holy Quran (Amana Corp., Brentwood, Maryland), 1989. Pp 873-874
5. Riffat Hassan. Women's Rights and Islam: From the I.C.P.D. to Beijing. Louisville, Kentucky, 1995. pp. 65-76
6. Translated and explained by Muhammad Asad. The Message of the Qur'an. Dar al-Andalus, Gibraltar. 1984. p.538
7. Bouthaina Shaaban.The Muted Voices of Women Interpreters. In
FAITH AND FREEDOM: Women's Human Rights in the Muslim World, Mahnaz Afkhami (Editor). I. B. Tauris Publishers, New York, 1995. p.68.
8. Nazira Zin al-Din, al-Sufur Wa'l-hijab (Beirut: Quzma Publications, 1928), p 37
9. Bouthaina Shaaban, op.cit. P.69
10. Nazira Zin al-Din, op.cit.pp. 191-2
11. Ibid, p.226
12. Bouthaina Shaaban, op. cit. p.72
13. Shaykh Mustafa al-Ghalayini, Islam ruh al-madaniyya (Islam:
The Spirit of Civilization)(Beirut: al-Maktabah al-Asriyya,
1960) P.253
14. Ibid, pp.255-56
15. Shaykh Muhammad al-Ghazali.: Sunna Between Fiqh and Hadith
(Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 1989, 7th edition, 1990)
16. Ibid, p.44
17. Abd al-Halim Abu Shiqa.: Tahrir al-mara' fi 'asr al-risalah
(Kuwait: Dar al-Qalam, 1990)
18. Jane I. Smith.:The Experience of Muslim Women:Considerations
of Power and Authority. In The Islamic Impact. Haddad, Y.Y. (Editor), Syracuse University Press. 1984. Pp. 89-112
19. Barbara Freyer Stowasser.: Women in the Qur'an, Traditions, and Interpretation.Oxford University Press. 1994. P. 92
20. Ibid, p.93
21. Ibid, p.127
22. Ibid, p.132
23. Ibid, p.133
24. Syed Abu Ala Maudoodi. Purdah and the Status of Woman in Islam. Islamic Publications. Lahore, Pakistan. 1972. P.215
25. Ibid, p.203
Monday, November 3, 2008
The Excellence of Tawheed
By: Shaykh Muhammad Bin Jameel Zainoo
1) Allaah the Most High says: "Those who believe and do not mix their belief with dhulm, they are those upon whom is security and they are the rightly guided". [Qur'an 6:82] From 'Abdullaah ibn Mas'ood, who said: "When this verse was revealed, some Muslims began to grieve, and said: "Which of us does not do dhulm (oppression) to his soul?" The Messenger of Allaah said: "It is not that, verily it is shirk, have you not heard the saying of Luqmaan to his son: 'Oh my Son! Do not make shirk with Allaah. Verily, shirk is a great dhulm'". [Qur'an 31:13]" [Bukhari & Muslim]. This verse gives glad tidings to the believers, those who single out Allaah alone for worship, those who do not mix their belief with shirk. Rather, they are far from it, they have complete security from the punishment of Allaah in the Hereafter and they are the rightly guided in this world.
2) The Prophet said: "Imaan consists of sixty something branches, the highest of them is the saying 'Laa ilaaha illa Allaah; and the lowest of them is to remove something harmful from the road" [Muslim].
3) Shaikh 'Abdullaah Khayaat mentions in his book entitled Daleel ul-Muslim Fil I'tiqaad wat-Tat-heer. "Because of the human nature of man and due to his lack of infallibility, his feet slip and he falls into disobedience to Allaah. When he is from the people of tawheed, pure from the blemishes of shirk, and he singles out Allaah alone for worship, and he is sincere in saying 'Laa ilaaha illa Allaah' it becomes the greatest factor for his happiness and an expiation for his sins and an elimination of his evil deeds, as has come in the hadeeth of the Messenger of Allaah: '"Whoever testifies that none has the right to he worshipped except A llaah, alone without any partners and that Muhammad is His slave and His messenger and that 'Eesaa is a slave of Allaah, and a Word delivered to Maryam and a Spirit from Him, and that Paradise is true and the Fire is true, Allaah will enter him into Paradise in accordance to his deeds' [Bukhari & Muslim].
Verily, 'Laa ilaaha illa Allaah', the testification that the Muslim testifies with, is the foundation necessary for his entrance into Paradise, the place of comfort, even if some of his actions had defects and shortcomings. As has come in the hadeeth Qudsee, Allaah, the Most High, says: 'O Son of Aadam, verily If you were to come to Me with the equivalent of the earth full of mistakes and then meet Me without associating partners with Me in anything then I would give to you its equivalent amount of Mercy' [Hasan - Tirmidhi & ad-Diyaa].
Meaning: If one of you came to Me with an equivalent amount of the earth full of sins and disobedience, but you died upon tawheed, then I would forgive your sins. It is reported from the Prophet that he said: 'Whoever meets Allaah without having associated with Him in anything will enter Paradise and whosoever meets Him associating partners with him in anything will enter the Fire' [Muslim]. All these narrations clearly show the Excellence of Tawheed, for it is that by which the happiness of the slave is achieved and the best means for the expiation of his sins and the elimination of his mistakes".
1) Allaah the Most High says: "Those who believe and do not mix their belief with dhulm, they are those upon whom is security and they are the rightly guided". [Qur'an 6:82] From 'Abdullaah ibn Mas'ood, who said: "When this verse was revealed, some Muslims began to grieve, and said: "Which of us does not do dhulm (oppression) to his soul?" The Messenger of Allaah said: "It is not that, verily it is shirk, have you not heard the saying of Luqmaan to his son: 'Oh my Son! Do not make shirk with Allaah. Verily, shirk is a great dhulm'". [Qur'an 31:13]" [Bukhari & Muslim]. This verse gives glad tidings to the believers, those who single out Allaah alone for worship, those who do not mix their belief with shirk. Rather, they are far from it, they have complete security from the punishment of Allaah in the Hereafter and they are the rightly guided in this world.
2) The Prophet said: "Imaan consists of sixty something branches, the highest of them is the saying 'Laa ilaaha illa Allaah; and the lowest of them is to remove something harmful from the road" [Muslim].
3) Shaikh 'Abdullaah Khayaat mentions in his book entitled Daleel ul-Muslim Fil I'tiqaad wat-Tat-heer. "Because of the human nature of man and due to his lack of infallibility, his feet slip and he falls into disobedience to Allaah. When he is from the people of tawheed, pure from the blemishes of shirk, and he singles out Allaah alone for worship, and he is sincere in saying 'Laa ilaaha illa Allaah' it becomes the greatest factor for his happiness and an expiation for his sins and an elimination of his evil deeds, as has come in the hadeeth of the Messenger of Allaah: '"Whoever testifies that none has the right to he worshipped except A llaah, alone without any partners and that Muhammad is His slave and His messenger and that 'Eesaa is a slave of Allaah, and a Word delivered to Maryam and a Spirit from Him, and that Paradise is true and the Fire is true, Allaah will enter him into Paradise in accordance to his deeds' [Bukhari & Muslim].
Verily, 'Laa ilaaha illa Allaah', the testification that the Muslim testifies with, is the foundation necessary for his entrance into Paradise, the place of comfort, even if some of his actions had defects and shortcomings. As has come in the hadeeth Qudsee, Allaah, the Most High, says: 'O Son of Aadam, verily If you were to come to Me with the equivalent of the earth full of mistakes and then meet Me without associating partners with Me in anything then I would give to you its equivalent amount of Mercy' [Hasan - Tirmidhi & ad-Diyaa].
Meaning: If one of you came to Me with an equivalent amount of the earth full of sins and disobedience, but you died upon tawheed, then I would forgive your sins. It is reported from the Prophet that he said: 'Whoever meets Allaah without having associated with Him in anything will enter Paradise and whosoever meets Him associating partners with him in anything will enter the Fire' [Muslim]. All these narrations clearly show the Excellence of Tawheed, for it is that by which the happiness of the slave is achieved and the best means for the expiation of his sins and the elimination of his mistakes".
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