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Misquoting Muhammad

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contemporary, Lady Montagu, who had actually frequented the harems of Istanbul and befriended Ottoman women, objected that ‘’tis very easy to see they have more liberty than we have,’ — location: 457 ^ref-51112

one awkward adjustment made by the British was to remedy how difficult they found it to sentence criminals to death in the Shariah courts they oversaw, since Shariah law acknowledged only five capital crimes. — location: 463 ^ref-20343

Ibn Rushd, as he was actually called, was the chief Shariah judge of Cordoba — location: 490 ^ref-12363

groundbreaking reconciliation of religion and philosophy. — location: 491 ^ref-22329

Mutazila scholar took on an intimidated representative of the embattled Sunnis on the issue of whether man brings about his own actions (the Mutazila stance) or whether God does (the Sunni one). When the Sunni let his arm dangle at the elbow and asked, ‘Who is moving this?’ – he expected the answer to be God – the Mutazila responded, ‘Someone whose mother is a whore.’ The caliph approved. — location: 1172 ^ref-63210

epic scholarly dual in the collective memory of North India’s ulama was the near-mythic disputation on language, logic and theology held between the two most vaunted scholars of Samarqand, — location: 1292 ^ref-41163

how could Muslims let their dead loved ones be eaten by worms beneath the ground? — location: 1326 ^ref-7127

The tradition of spiritual and ethical devotion that reaches above and beyond the required duties prescribed by the Shariah is known as Tasawwuf, or Sufism. — location: 1401 ^ref-41517

their Isnads of Sufi teachings most often passed through Hasan to the Prophet’s son-in-law Ali, proclaimed by Muhammad to be the gate to the city of his prophetic knowledge. — location: 1404 ^ref-58698

patron Sufi saint of the Mughals, Muin al-Din Chishti, — location: 1423 ^ref-27318

Mazhar Jan-e Janan, who affirmed that Krishna (in Hinduism, an avatar of the god Vishnu) had been a prophet and that the Hindu Rig Veda was divinely inspired scripture even if Hindus in his own time had descended into polytheism. — location: 1441 ^ref-49201

Where the Ash‘ari theologians used reason and an analysis of Arabic metaphor to hammer out specific explanations for God’s ‘hand’ and ‘face,’ the traditionalists such as Ibn Qudama and Ibn Taymiyya trusted in the instinctive understanding of the average believer. — location: 1500 ^ref-27856

This was agreed upon by all the Sunni schools of law (though the Hanafis only punished women apostates with prison). — location: 1577 ^ref-4841

Tawfiq Sidqi — location: 1617 ^ref-28618

Ibn Sina (Avicenna) upheld for the masses the Shariah ban on wine while holding that he, as a philosopher, could enjoy it. — location: 1780 ^ref-54202

Tirmidhi — location: 1864 ^ref-25693

Ibn Abbas confronted the Kharijites with his explanations, and some four thousand eventually recanted their extremism. — location: 1891 ^ref-38881

our modern esteem for the scientific method should not obscure the manifest reality of nature in pre-modern life. — location: 1894 ^ref-3641

Confronting the Kharijite rebels, who based their violent claims on what the Qur’an ‘said,’ Ali alerted them that ‘This Qur’an is but lines written between two covers, it does not speak, rather it is but men who speak for it.’ — location: 1925 ^ref-63566

All laws, he wrote, regardless of how finely worded, ‘are considered more or less obscure and equivocal’ until they are interpreted. — location: 1934 ^ref-59129

the ‘impurity’ of pagans in the Qur’an is figurative and not literal. — location: 2001 ^ref-24177

a type of preventative rebuke (zajr) and not a formal excommunication (takfir). — location: 2050 ^ref-57808

‘No compulsion in religion’ (2:256) was a Qur’anic command revealed in Medina when a child from one of the Muslim families who had been educated in the town’s Jewish schools decided to depart with the Jewish tribe being expelled from Medina. His distraught parents were told by God and the Prophet in this verse that they could not compel their son to stay. The verse, however, has been understood over the centuries as a general command that people cannot be forced to convert to Islam. — location: 2093 ^ref-34503

The Sufi jurist Sha‘rani considered all four Sunni madhhabs to be one great school of law, offering each believer a range of positions on any issue and thus the choice between relaxed or more stringent rules on any one issue. — location: 2306 ^ref-7784

In all but five cases, he found explanations for how to understand the relationship between scriptural passages without recourse to abrogation. — location: 2313 ^ref-49461

As he sought to understand his faith through reason, the twelfth-century Christian scholastic Anselm of Bec had professed that one had to believe in order to understand. — location: 2517 ^ref-45779

when the Prophet was set to engage in battle with a tribe, he would wait until the morning to hear if the call to prayer rang out in the enemy camp. — location: 2685 ^ref-62011

It is simplistic and naive to explain jihadism merely as an inevitable growth from Islam’s ‘violent’ scripture, or as no more than a miscarried interpretation triggered solely by some tragic misreading. — location: 2766 ^ref-6834

Muhammad declared: ‘Indeed I will expel the Jews and the Christians from the Peninsula of the Arabs so that I leave only Muslims.’ This was not accomplished until the reign of the second caliph, Umar, who acted on the Prophet’s order and expelled the Jews of the oasis of Khaybar, north of Medina, from the Hejaz. — location: 2776 ^ref-33897

Umar had not expelled the Jews of the Tayma oasis in the northern Hejaz because it was not considered part of ‘the Peninsula of the Arabs.’ — location: 2782 ^ref-17168

‘Series for Correcting Understandings,’ — location: 2816 ^ref-11134

Ibn Taymiyya and his disciple Ibn Qayyim had argued that the Qur’anic equation of two women to one man pertained only to notarizing a loan, not bearing witness in court. There a woman of sound mind and character was equal to a man. — location: 3055 ^ref-38388

no instance of anyone criticizing the Prophet’s marriage due to Aisha’s age or accusing him of pedophilia until the early twentieth century. — location: 3132 ^ref-12736

Even as late as the nineteenth century, societies in which the vast majority of the population worked the land in small agricultural communities (‘peasant’ societies) were generally characterized by marriage ages that we would consider extremely young. — location: 3140 ^ref-24569

when a scholar in fifteenth-century Damascus raised eyebrows by becoming a father at eleven it was because folk at the time were impressed, not outraged. — location: 3143 ^ref-63871

  • Several prominent Sunni ulama today, like Ali Gomaa and Taha Jabir Alwani, have concluded that Aisha was in her late teens based on arguments similar to ‘Aqqad’s. — location: 3206 ^ref-35543

They could find no effective deterrent in the practices of the Shariah courts because the evidentiary standards needed to amputate a thief’s hand were so strict that this punishment was unrealistic, and the discretionary punishment (ta‘zir) that Shariah judges would usually mete out instead were limited by Hadiths to only ten lashes. — location: 3293 ^ref-20122

Ironically, with all the weight and meaning that a canonical community invests in its scriptures, it is the interpreters who always matter the most. — location: 3455 ^ref-17754

In 1011, in fact, the Sunni caliph in Baghdad and the Iranian Shiite military junta that was exercising effective control over Iraq and Iran issued a rare joint manifesto. It was a condemnation of the Fatimid state and Ismailism. — location: 3771 ^ref-4846

colonial appeals court overturned a death sentence handed down by a local Shariah court in the case of a man who had murdered his wife’s lover. — location: 3853 ^ref-23775

crimes more lightly than comparable offenses all draw these laws from the Ottoman Criminal Code of 1858. It, in turn, translated this provision directly from the French Legal Code of 1810.42 — location: 3860 ^ref-40712

Moreover, the Prophet ordered Muslim judges to ‘ward off the Hudud [punishments] by ambiguities.’ — location: 3880 ^ref-36305

When the couple then retracted their confession, the senior Shariah judge in Cairo was sent into exile for insisting – correctly, other ulama affirmed – that the couple’s sentence had to be commuted and that ‘whoever executes them should be executed in turn.’ — location: 3894 ^ref-17887

some of the greatest Sunni scholars of Islamic civilization’s halcyon days came to the conclusion that a woman could lead mixed-gender prayers. — location: 4219 ^ref-17194

From the British Raj to the US invasion of Afghanistan, calling for the liberation of oppressed ‘brown women’ has been a mainstay in justifying cultural or military imperialism. — location: 4231 ^ref-7806

A woman once rose up and interrupted the caliph Umar while he was addressing the congregation from the pulpit of the Prophets’ mosque. Far from silencing her, he admitted the mistake she had pointed out. — location: 4249 ^ref-27483

another Muslim woman, Asma’ bint Yazid, killed nine enemy soldiers with her tent pole. — location: 4257 ^ref-43876

many of the greatest scholars would issue fatwas with their learned wives’ or daughters’ signatures attached in approval. — location: 4264 ^ref-23840

A humbling reminder of this is found in the life of Ibn Taymiyya, a learned and conservative Hanbali don but also an iconoclast unintimidated by mainstream censure. He used to admit how impressed he was by one Fatima bint Abbas (d. 1315), a female Hanbali scholar who had mastered the greatest works of law and took to the pulpits of Damascus mosques to harangue and inspire a sinful public with her preaching. Despite his respect for her, Ibn Taymiyya recalled that he had marked reservations about her speaking in the mosque pulpit. He intended to put a stop to it. Then the Prophet came to him in a dream. ‘This is a righteous woman,’ the Messenger of God counseled him. The inimitable scholar, who had stood unperturbed before sultans and had smashed idols, held his tongue. — location: 4275 ^ref-64156

Fazlur Rahman — location: 4315 ^ref-35120

The Quran: A Reformist Translation (2011). — location: 4358 ^ref-38270

As the immediate danger faded amid Muslim military triumph, the ulama immediately admitted Zoroastrian dualists and the polytheist pagans of India as protected ‘People of the Book’ with the right to practice their religions freely. — location: 4508 ^ref-2246

The loss of tradition had become political because, phrased differently, if the accepted framework around a discussion is removed, any claim that then assumes the presence of a framework is in actuality imposing it. This act is of political consequence in that it seeks to compel. And it is sure to be contested. — location: 4530 ^ref-32375

The universal ‘Reason’ touted by Western natural-law philosophers was an early casualty of the snapping of tradition’s last threads. Born in the rubble of postmodernity, contemporary critics of liberalism note that Reason cannot be the judge that rules impartially from outside discourse. It is part of the discourse, and any transcendent throne claimed for it is a stealthy grab for power. Stanley Fish observed that Reason(s) ‘always come from somewhere,’ and it is clear that once you have stepped outside of a tradition or leveled its authority, you cannot in fairness invoke ‘Reason’ without admitting its aims and assumptions and convincing others to accept them – precisely the unifying role that tradition used to perform. — location: 4532 ^ref-55425

‘the layperson has no madhhab.’ — location: 4762 ^ref-15789

The only verse that explicitly references the doctrine of the trinity (1 John 5:7) was not an authentic part of the biblical text. — location: 4976 ^ref-24811

Roman historians, who wrote history first and foremost as ‘the best medicine for a sick mind,’ as Livy phrased it. — location: 4987 ^ref-22811

hypostatized — location: 5675 ^ref-2605

Muslims’ duty to pursue the ‘aims of the Shariah (Maqasid al-Shariah)’ even if it meant breaking with consensus on the law’s details. — location: 5731 ^ref-16445

In other words, if after admonishing his wife and then sleeping in a separate bed, the husband finds that she has still not rectified her behavior, he leaves the marital home entirely. This was, in fact, what Hadiths described the Prophet doing in Medina when his wives’ conduct had so disappointed him that he almost divorced them. — location: 5737 ^ref-2194

there is no such thing as ‘literal meaning’ in its usual sense of ‘what a text really says.’ We often assume that, however much we differ on interpretations, a statement or text has an obvious and objective ‘literal’ aspect that preserves an unchanging core of meaning and cannot be escaped. — location: 5770 ^ref-55741

Muslim sects agreed that the Qur’an had to be read through the prism of the Prophet’s teachings as expounded by the ulama, who then disagreed endlessly on what those teachings should be. — location: 5801 ^ref-32726

Darimi, a teacher of both Tirmidhi and Muslim bin Hajjaj as well as a leading early scholar in Iran, collected all the Hadiths showing Muhammad’s disapproval of beating in a chapter entitled ‘The Prohibition on Striking Women.’ — location: 5830 ^ref-38991

Just as the Hudud punishments were meant more as signs of the grievous nature of certain offenses than as sentences to be enacted, so the command to strike a wife was intended to communicate the severity of her behaving disgracefully towards her husband, not as a license for domestic abuse. — location: 5840 ^ref-18300

any physical harm was grounds for compensation and divorce — location: 5852 ^ref-31782

people are not all the same in how they should be disciplined. ‘A slave might be hit with a stick,’ the judge noted as an analogy, ‘while with a free man it’s enough to point it at him.’ — location: 5885 ^ref-30761

Scripture’s definitive interpretation often came not in legal textbooks but in the actual application of Shariah law. — location: 5946 ^ref-2805

Shariah courts in the pre-modern Muslim world were surprisingly receptive to women seeking redress or protection from spousal abuse. If it were established that violence had been done, the wife could expect judicial remedy, and the husband’s excuse for why he beat his wife did not matter. — location: 5948 ^ref-37834

If a wife was innocent of any wrongdoing, the only consequence her husband faced for declaring a Talaq was that he forfeited the dower payment he had given her (or, more frequently by the 1800s, still owed her in part) and had to pay spousal maintenance for a period of time. — location: 5959 ^ref-46195

In 1529, the Ottoman Shariah court in a Greek town heard the complaint of a Christian family whose daughter had been beaten to death by her husband, ultimately awarding them her wergild amount. — location: 5988 ^ref-48376

If neighbors claimed they heard a wife screaming but saw nothing (i.e., they could provide no evidence of abuse), the judge would still punish the husband. — location: 6003 ^ref-46582

our notion that explanations are far-fetched if they are too far removed from the ‘literal’ meaning of a text. — location: 6063 ^ref-33709

all that mattered was that the interpretive distance was justified by sufficient evidence. — location: 6065 ^ref-7705

Since any set of commands allows for misunderstanding, the written word must be constrained and explained by living tradition. — location: 6073 ^ref-8833

acting on the evident meanings of the Qur’an and Hadiths alone is ‘one of the sources of unbelief.’ — location: 6078 ^ref-26614

the overarching teachings of Islam and empirical realities were more powerful than the specific words of God or the Prophet as contained in a Qur’anic passage or Hadith. — location: 6085 ^ref-36935

scriptures. The Qur’an clearly instructs Muslims to cut off the hand of thieves, but Hadiths and the consensus of jurists made this punishment almost impossible to enforce. — location: 6091 ^ref-51533

Had he not been so prickly at a time of such sectarian tension, his advocacy of the scientific method would have raised no furor. — location: 6115 ^ref-3820

How can Muslims distinguish between the hegemonic values of globalized modernity and ‘the true teachings of Islam’ when the markers once used to define Islam’s boundaries, such as a charitable approach to scripture, the Rule of Interpretation and Consensus, have been laid low by modern disenchantment? — location: 6132 ^ref-50572

debate between Sharīf al-Jurjānī and Sa‘d al-Dīn al-Taftazānī; — location: 6564 ^ref-34600

Al-Sha‘rānī, Kashf al-ghumma ‘an jamī‘ al-umma, 6–7; idem, al-Mīzān al-kubrā, 2:67; J. Baljon, Religion and Thought of Shāh Walī Allāh Dihlawī, — location: 6788 ^ref-45799

Justin McCarthy, The Ottoman Turks, — location: 7036 ^ref-47193

Empire of the Mahdi: The Rise of the Fatimids, — location: 7101 ^ref-37484