is this is what was wanted by the people there?
http://dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2009/04/16/story_16-4-2009_pg3_2
comment: After the flogging —Suroosh Irfani
The leaders of Wahhabi-Salafi movements such as Al Qaeda, Lashkar-e Tayyaba and Jama’at-ud Dawa are not trained jurists but “engineers or medical doctors”.
Such self-proclaimed jurists have reduced Islam to a combustible mix of intolerance, hatred and isolationist arrogance
Whatever the outcome of the public outrage that the Taliban’s flogging of an alleged adulteress in Swat gave rise to earlier this month,
the incident illustrates the deep split in Pakistan over what it means to be a Muslim.
While many critics termed the flogging barbaric and an affront to Islam, the Taliban and their supporters justified the flogging, and insisted it accorded with sharia law. Critics contested this claim by noting that the Taliban’s understanding of sharia law negated the basic requirements of the sharia the Taliban claimed to uphold.
Sharia law lays down rigorous requirements for ascertaining the facts of a case, and the procedures for administering punishment. Moreover, the immaculate moral character required of the four witnesses for confirming penetration are so meticulous that even former Chief Justice of Pakistan Syed Sajjad Ali Shah reportedly said he
doubted if he could measure up to the sublime standards of virtue required of a witness in such a case.
While the debate is bound to continue, it is important to note that the spontaneous outrage that swept across several Pakistani cities after the flogging video was aired reflects the first nationwide condemnation of the Taliban.
Indeed, the young woman’s screams under Taliban blows were a stark reminder of blown up schools, beheaded bodies, suicide bombings, and a million people forced out of Swat over the last sixteen months — a track record of barbarism that won Swat for the Taliban.
However, the basic paradox that underpins the Taliban’s sharia remains unresolved: the intimidation and violence leading to its enforcement is an outright negation of the Islamic spirit itself. Therefore, the MQM’s abstention from voting on the Nizam-e Adl Regulation in parliament on April 13 is justified.
Moreover, Sufi Muhammad, leader of the Tehreek-e Nifaz-e Shariat-e Muhammadi, who now controls Swat, might well have a very different understanding of sharia from that of trained Islamic jurists. The latter
view sharia as “the sum total of technical, legal methodologies, precedents, and decisions”, where the interaction of hadith with legal methodology to produce jurisprudence is an ongoing process.
However, rather than a trained jurist’s sharia,
Sufi Muhammad’s sharia seems an all purpose kit, doling out instant punishments, foreswearing introspection, and a refusal to acknowledge the wrongs one has been a party to in the name of Islam. An example is his interview with the Daily Times last month (March 19, 2009).
When asked whether the actions of Swat’s school-blasting warlord Fazlullah were un-Islamic (haram), Sufi said, “
the debate on past happenings is disallowed in Islam; a hadith sharif says what has happened in the past should not be discussed”.
Citing another hadith, he further explained that
“a Muslim should not discuss past happenings because he may not remember all the (details) and therefore, he may...sin by not speaking the truth.”
Given the coverage Fazullah’s statements and doings received in the electronic and print media over the last couple of years,
details of his war crimes could be retrieved, and especially against the army in terms of soldiers killed or beheaded. Therefore, the ‘sin’ of not remembering details seems no more than a lame excuse.
However, there was more to Sufi Muhammad’s interview:
he seemed heedless of human conscience and reparative justice. The plight of aggrieved families who lost innocent members during the Taliban’s onslaught on Swat seemed of no concern to him. When asked what measures he was taking to give justice to these families, Sufi invoked his standard response again, saying, “We will not discuss what has happened in the past. Sharia does not allow this.”
Such distortion of sharia that erases history, conscience, and the very essence of justice in the name of Islam amounts to the betrayal of Islam itself.
Such betrayal, were it to go unchallenged, would amount to a “greater sin” in the struggle to wrest Islam from the extremists, going by Khalid Abou el Fadl’s arguments in The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the extremists. (HarperOne, 2005)
Fadl’s book is a clarion call to Muslims to rise against the challenge of extremists holding Islam hostage. An accomplished Islamic jurist and professor of law at the UCLA Law School, Fadl’s book is the most comprehensive account yet published comparing and contrasting a ‘puritanical orientation’ in Islam, represented by the Wahhabi-Salafi consensus, on the one hand, and the ‘moderate orientation’ of the silent Muslim majority on the other.
Whether propounded by extremist groups, Al Qaeda, Lashkar-e Tayyaba, TNSM or the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan, the ‘puritanical orientation’ is a supremacist ideology “that compensates for feelings of defeatism, disempowerment and alienation with a sense of self-righteous arrogance vis-à-vis the ‘other’ — whether that other is the West, nonbelievers in general, Muslims, or even women.”
At the same time, puritanism is alienated not only from modernity, “but also from Islamic heritage and tradition, literature, aesthetics, music, mysticism, intellectual and cultural history. Religious texts are used “like a shield to avoid criticism or escape challenges that mandate the use of reason and rationality” — as the
TNSM chief’s interview amply shows. Indeed, for puritans, “religious texts [are] whips” wielded to further the aims of regressive forces in society.
Puritans “use the inherited tradition and law to silence their opponents and stunt critical and creative thinking.” However, they “are ignorant of jurisprudential theory and methodology, and therefore treat law in whimsical and opportunistic fashion. They search through thousands of statements and sayings attributed to the Prophet [pbuh] in order to find anything that they could use to support their already preconceived positions.”
Given the puritans’ ignorance of psychological and cultural dynamics in textual interpretation, they end up projecting “their social and political frustrations and insecurities upon the text”. Consequently,
“if a puritan is angry at the West, he will read the religious text in such a way as to validate this hostility. And if he needs to compensate for feelings of powerlessness by dominating women, he’ll read the text to validate the subjugation and disempowerment of women.”
In fact,
“in every situation we find that the proverbial arm of the text is being twisted to validate whatever the puritan orientation wishes to do. All along the puritan claims to be entirely literal and objective and faithfully implement what the text demands without personal interference.”
Fadl further notes that given the intellectual vacuum in the Muslim world, “virtually every Muslim with a modest knowledge of the Quran and the tradition of the Prophet [pbuh] considers [himself] qualified to speak for Islamic tradition and sharia law.”
Small wonder then that the leaders of Wahhabi-Salafi movements such as Al Qaeda, LeT and Jama’at-ud Dawa are not trained jurists but “engineers or medical doctors”. Such self-proclaimed jurists have reduced Islam to a combustible mix of intolerance, hatred and isolationist arrogance, exploding across the world, but most notably among Muslims themselves.
The misuse of sharia, therefore, calls for d
ifferentiating between “sharia as a technical, legal system” and “sharia as a symbol of Islamic legitimacy”. That sharia as a symbol is being misused by puritan extremists is as much reflected in the arbitrary fatwas of Al Qaeda as the flogging in Swat.
The question is whether the Supreme Court of Pakistan will remain indifferent following the TNSM and TTP threat that any member of the National Assembly opposed to the Taliban’s sharia will cease to be a Muslim.
Suroosh Irfani is an educationist and writer based in Lahore
