Christianity Today
CHRISTIANITY TODAY - ITS PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS
This once all powerful master of the Europeans is now a shadow of its former self and despite occasional and local comeback-like stirrings is overall in decline. What is even worse most of those believers who still love and go to church otherwise live as secular and often dissolute lives as their atheistic countrymen. Often churchgoing boys date churchgoing girls and establish premarital sexual relations with no blame from any quarters. The spirit has simply gone out of Christianity and when and where it lives on it only means fanaticism, sectarian prejudice and often also escapist delusions. This is more the case with deviant forms of Christianity like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons. Each such group imagine themselves as the ‘New Israel’ and are fired by Old Testament claims like being the chosen elites and emotions like hating all who refuse those who fail to be impressed. They are extremely proselytising, literalist to a fault and prepared to lie if that will help to proselytise their audience. Miracles may be faked while self-delusion is heartily practiced. Once I was debating religion with such some fanatic; I read out to him verses from the Qur’an to impress him with its unanswerable diagnoses about Christianity alongside with its reverence for Jesus; he was gradually disoriented under the relevance and brilliance of the Qur’anic statements and throwing his hands up in desperation called out to God as if he was knocking on the door of a neighbour: Eyes closed and the face flushing in emotion he called “God! Let me know what you think!”
This pretension by almost all fundamentalist or deviant Christians to assume that they have instant access to God in the face of the fact that even the Biblical prophets including Jesus had no such privilege is very characteristic and disturbing. In Islam a prophet is regarded so highly and exclusively that no Muslim in his right mind dares to claim prophetic status while among the fundamentalist or deviant Christians every ambitious preacher can claim to be and call himself a prophet; it is only a matter of self-declaration followed by pompous claims and absolutists statements the audience can doubt at their damnable risk. For their part Muslim deviants have to make do with a claim to sainthood and then perhaps moving on and make it as good as prophethood in practice.
In this sense they may claim revelations from God as if they are prophets but take care to use not the term ‘wahy’/revelation but ‘Ilham’/inspiration. Not that inspiration and even revelation is closed to a Muslim, they are- but not like to a prophet. A prophet’s revelations can extend to the most universal and deepest spiritual matters while for a mere Muslim these are confined to his personal needs or circumstances in general and at most feature prophecies intimating some role for the recipient in connection with his or her being instrumental in the creation of some future prophetic developments. It was thus that Allah revealed to the mother of Moses what to do about the baby Moses and what awaited him; to Mary that she was to conceive Jesus the Christ and what would become of him. Some ‘saints’ among us exceeded these limits and dared to claim Cosmic revelations outclassing those to the Prophets’ but they could not prove their point- their claims often flied in the face of the Qur’an. One regular characteristic of such ‘saints’ is gloating and boasting every few pages, gloating in terms which no prophet could get away with had he done it.
If you will kindly forgive this brief detour we may continue with the present state of Christianity. Sadly again, it is not only the deviants who subvert the religion they inherited.
The mainstream churches like the Anglican for example are continuing at increasing pace to accommodate all the passing or deepening innovations the secular and often also anti-religious fads and inclinations apparently in order to remain relevant even in a brothel I am sorry to say. Any and everything damned by the Bible is open to negotiation, revision and even reversal; homosexuality and its last atrocity gay marriage are increasingly becoming acceptable on top of being sometimes home-grown as is premarital sex. Gays as well as the promiscuous are perhaps passing from toleration to favour and now can hope to be ordained priests or promoted to a bishopric. The acceptance of Atheists are on the cards and ordained priests are basically free to deny any dogmas of Christianity. Bending, twisting and drifting thus the church is apparently after survival at all cost and survive even when itself totally converts to Atheism. Nothing is sacred or indispensable but the survival of the edifice and the cadres filling it. The church now is more the guided party than the guiding and I am afraid it will end up in the same hellhole as Atheist mentality and secular dissipation will.
THE RIGHTS AND WRONGS IN THE EVOLUTION OF POPULAR ISLAM
Islam is the least defeated of all religions in the sense of succumbing to influences coming from outside of it. In its Sunni and mainstream form observed by the great majority of Muslims its theological and legal teaching can be, in their basic details, traced to the Qur’an and the more reliable (sahih and hasan) hadiths. Further and finer details cannot be said to be so but could not be either. For as Islam expanded and new challenges multiplied the ulema, as required by the Prophet sws himself resorted to original thinking; they developed reasonable and largely reliable criteria and methods which enabled them to extract more from the two sources above by plausible extrapolations. In many cases the extrapolations could only be based on very general principles, like in the Hanafi method of istihsan. When no direct analogue could be found for a question in the Qur’an and the Hadith the jurists relied upon the very many general principles in the two. For example the principle stated in the verse “Allah desires ease for you and does not desire hardship for you” (2: 185) enabled them to dismiss all the harder options in dilemmas facing the Muslims and to adopt the easier.
The Prophet’s sws habit of not interfering with the harmless traditions of groups of people could be used as another general principle. For example, the Prophet’s sws own regime was, like in all primitive tribal societies essentially democratic in the sense that all who cared could have their say and a majority view could cause a leader to go for it instead of sticking with his own unpopular view. Yet many Arab communities outside Hejaz, influenced by the imperial regimes like Persia and Rome which kept them under some subjection, were hereditary kingdoms and when these kings accepted Islam and the suzerainty of the Prophetic rule in Medina he sws allowed them to remain hereditary monarchies, like in Bahrain. He did not ask them to dismantle the monarchy and set up a consultative and non-dynastic rule as in
Closer at home, the Muslims after the Prophet sws had four democratically elected rulers but after them accepted caliphs who made themselves caliphs by force of arms, simply because the alternative was total chaos, civil war and possibly the collapse of the Muslim power. In this respect it is interesting to see how Muawiya RA as the rival of Ali RA said to the Roman emperor when the latter wanted to take advantage of the bloody division among Muslims. Muawiya RA warned the emperor basically along the following lines “Look man, do not have hopes of conquering us by taking advantage of our division. By Allah nothing can stop me making up with my fellow (Ali RA) and come against you as a single force and bring down on your head that misty and miserable capital of yours”, i.e. Constantinople. The emperor froze.
Such examples of flexibility and adaptation of the Prophet sws himself and his immediate successors as well as the early jurists show that Islam has no hard but fragile cast iron body with arthritic joints or an ankylosed spine but it is supple like a best-trained athlete and resourceful like a most brilliant mind. The very evolution of Islamic law in the Qur’an itself shows that Allah both allowed time for the law to grow and responded to public opinion on the basis of needs and weaknesses of His servants as the recipients of it. It is for this reason that we have some verses abrogating some earlier others.
It is true though that once Islam became a dynastic imperial regime like in the the Abbasid empire things naturally took a rather well stetted rigid order as all regimes become when they suit their times well; having attained its greatest prosperity and orderliness why should either the ulema or the public bother about what other political regime could offer to them? Accordingly most later ulema not only declared dynastic monarchy as the order of Islam and just like the Persians and the Romans declared the caliph or the sultan as the beneficiary of a divine right to rule as he wished so long he did not commit explicit blasphemy but also they discouraged those who asked for a return to an elective caliphate on the early caliphs’ lines. In fact the greatest victims of the Sunni dynastic caliphates like the Umayyads and the Abbasids, namely the Shia themselves believed in a dynastic monarchy with the only difference that the Family of the Prophet sws through Ali RA Fatima RA should be the dynasts! What is more, any who dared to challenge the established dynastic order on the grounds that it was a bid’ah (innovation) contradicting the sunna of the first four caliphs were declared as rebels and fought against and killed if they resorted to or were expected to resort to arms. Apparently the nomadic and tribal phase of Muslim body politic was over and imperial phase had to be played under its own rules.
Among the other perhaps legitimate adaptations to the new Roman and Persian imperial environments was the civil law. Pagan Arab women, like in all nomads were freely if decently mixing with men and in the Islamic Medina this remained the same but with added moral and spiritual protective measures. So, we find the Prophet sws sending a poor man to be fed by a pious couple who happen not to have enough even for themselves. They send the children to sleep, sit for the dinner with their guest but put the light out saying that it is not really necessary and pretending to eat together allow the hungry guest to eat all food available. This shows that at a meal both the couple and their male guest could sit together. Caliph Umar RA is reported to visit widowed and destitute young women with young children, enter their home, talk to the women and learning of their desperate poverty and hunger go and bring food from the state store and cook for and feed the children. A slave girl could grab the Prophet sws from his hand and taking him to a corner put to him her problems.
The Prophet, on his way to Khaibar sws took a pubescent girl to ride behinf him on his camel, obviously she had to grab the Prophet sws not to fall. When they dismounted the Prophet sws found that his saddle was wet with blood and that was because the girl was menstruating. On the way back from an expedition Aisha RA had slept over at a camp site and the caravan had left; She was discovered by a young man acting as the rear guard and had to ride with him all the way to the main body of the army. It was not regarded a crime or sacrilege per se but some hypocrites used the accident to insinuate a sexual escapade which eventually had to fizzle out. Neither Allah nor the Prophet sws blamed Aisha or the rescuer for the inevitable companionship; it was one of necessity and emergency. It is true that Allah and His Messenger sws did not condone wanton or unnecessary contact of the two sexes, but they neither went as far as to segregate them as totally as the Romans and Persians did. This became the norm when ex-Romans and ex-Persians became Muslims and the ulema had to accommodate their sensibilities. After all Arabs were fast becoming a minority among Muslims and the new converts were overwhelming them in numbers on top of being the urban population with real and settled economic power.
It was not only the total segregation of the sexes which was taking over; also the status of the woman had to take a tumble. We see this most graphically in the subject of marriage. Despite the several hadiths of the Prophet sws encouraging future spouses to see and approve each other the Abbasid era laws worked out by jurists tended to play down if not entirely ignore these and rather bow to the pressures of the Roman and Persian (and pre-Islamic) values on the issue (the Prophet sws for example had asked Fatima RA whether she would like to be married to Ali RA). Girls could be given to husband as the fathers saw fit. It was a sale basically whereby the amount of the wedding gift ‘mihr’ and social status ‘kufw’ considerations as seen by the fathers left no room for a girl’s or woman’s own wishes. Not that marrying off a girl entirely in her parent’s choice necessarily means trouble for her; good parents most of the time make the right choices. Again two youth’s love for each other is hardly a guarantee that the marriage will be successful. The Prophet’s sws practice indicates a middle way where the both sides of the coin are considered and a choice is made by the parents which will neither be cruel nor too indulgent. A wise choice by insightful and loving parents is often vindicated by love being born between the spouses after the marriage!
Again, in the imperial phase of Islam, divorce was similarly formulated to give men absolute power over women like under the Roman and Persian patriarchal systems. What is worse even men also were sometimes left unprotected from abuse by third parties. For example in an incredible travesty of justice the some Hanafi jurists came to rule that a divorce forced on a man who did not want to divorce his wife by threats or violence was valid. This obviously left the door open to any other man who for some reason coveted the wife of another to steal her from her husband by that legal trickery. Surely such abuses were not common; most rulings were just, fair and conforming to the Qur’an and the Hadith. But some bad judgments could not also be avoided.
Thankfully we have more than one mazhab and may resort to another if one mazhab does not do justice to us in our opinion, provided we also seek advice from a good mufti and not assume the powers of a jurist without ourselves being one. Another bad example is the rule that if a man is given an underage (not yet menstruating) girl and because she is too small or slim he cannot penetrate her and divorces her he is entitled to recover half of the mihr he paid: Nobody considered that how on earth a girl so young and small was not fit for being an active wife but only a fiancée perhaps and attempting to penetrate her amounted to cruelty and failure to achieve that terror entitles the ‘husband’ to punish the wife by taking back half of the price paid. Or what to make of another clever ruling: For murder to be the case the death inflicted on the victim must be by a cutting or piercing instrument (only Allah knows why this restriction); drowning, strangulating, throwing from a precipice or poisoning does not amount to murder but only manslaughter.
So, if one wants to kill somebody for the unjustest and meanest of reasons he only has to use the right method. It is simply impossible to think that Allah in His Wisdom and Justice or Rasullullah sws in his sharp vision could fail to see the disgusting cleverness behind such tricks. Yet, I must remind my readers that such rulings are always exceptions and always have their far better alternatives in the rulings of other jurists. Obviously the bad rulings can be traced to some case involving a strong criminal trying to escape justice and employing a jurist to get him off the hook. One successful a ruling which wins a case becomes a precedent in all legal systems and any lesser judges unable to overturn any bad precedents cause its continuation.
Why I am mentioning such bad exceptions is for warning any students of the Sharia to realise that precedents are not absolutes and any which offends our sense of justice and fair play need be investigated and if found untenable ignored. Cruelty should remain cruelty, murder murder, trickery trickery. After all it was Rasulullah sws who said “Even if muftis rule something as the correct course take your ruling from your conscience”. One cannot poison anoter man and cause a proplonged, very painful and horrible death torture him, like blood gushing from all his orifices, and all his body going from one grotesque distortion to another and die with his eyes shot out of his sockets and that to be only manslaughter and not murder! Apparently powerful criminals in order to get away with murder could get no better ruling to safeguard their own lives and just pay compensation if caught. Arguing that none could stoop to being such accomplices to cruelty amounts to ignorance of human nature: Even the holy sahaba at times lapsed: When Khalid b. Walid RA was accused of summarily killing a man who had just protested his Islam the Prophet sws threw his arms up in shock and said “O Allah I am far from what Khalid did”.
To be conscientious though we must also grant that each generation of jurists find themselves in a culture and ethos they cannot entirely ignore or its variation from original Islamic circumstances entirely grasp. As wise or fallible men, depending who they are responding to what situation they had to make concessions here and there; after all we find none other than Allah changing His rulings or endorsing changes forced on the Prophet sws by his environment, like the introduction of execution for adultery instead of Allah’s revelation of a hundred lashes for the same offence, because some ashab were far too jealous than that. In Umayyad times many ulema had to agree that dynastic rule could be legitimate given the apparent impossibility of dislodging the Umayyads and this carried over into the Abbasid times and beyond. Abdullah b. Zubair’s elective appointment looked for a while to bring back the Rashidun era but fizzled out. It was simply the case that the Muslim society was no longer Arab but Romano-Persian if we may call it so. Ulema had to follow the times they found themselves in or be put down or ignored. They had to help the society and if that involved some flexibility so be it.
Incidentally among many naïve intellectuals there is a delusion that abstract principles like equality or idealism should impose on a society while the reality is that it is always the society as real men and women who in the long run, repeat, long run, prevail. All rulers ultimately depend on the consent and cooperation from their subjects and if they insist too much on imposing their personal variant will they should be aware that they have stepped on some concealed buttons in the society which started a process for their very possible eventual fall. They may still get their way, at least for a time but they must be very intelligent and tactful as well as very lucky. Going too much against the grain of a subject group or a group at the receiving end of the price of our ambitions signals mortal danger and only prophets can afford to risk it frankly calculating that Allah will either come to their aid and make them win or take them away as martyrs with even more glory and reward. A jurist not only be less brave than a prophet but may also see that a compromise may be more in the interests of all parties. Thus our jurists could respond to their time’s ethos and at a bearable price keep Islam reasonably maintained.
The adaptation of Islam to its social and political environment did not stop at the form of political regime or Roman and Persian mentalities about sex or the accommodation of the crueller men with overwhelming power. It also embraced spiritual adaptation. But this can wait a bit more and at the expense of regressing to the formalistic things like the strict isolation of women in homes and their restricted outdoor lives which, according to Medieval eastern males, should be allowed only under most stringent purdah orders. This should be understandable- Medieval societies stood or fell on account of family integrity which, among other sine qua nons (cannot do withouts) was the genuineness of the offspring. No father could contemplate to feed and raise another man’s bastard and then pass on him or her his property after his death. In an urban crowd a woman going about freely was and remains a vulnerable asset and today’s almost axiomatic promiscuity in the Western society is proof enough.
One could realistically hope that within the nomad tribe as well as in a small town like
In fact how bad the sexual scene can be when beliefs are too artificial and rules too harsh from the example of Medieval Europe’s unique combination of hysterical satanisation of sex with its allowing men and women to mix in the belief that they would just behave like brothers and sisters could be pointed at. In the West no age and no social environment like the royal palace, the papal and other lordly or bishoply courts or even monasterties and nunneries could escape sexual abuses and escapades showing that the appeal of sex is often stronger than the fear of God in most people whatever their claims to intellectual achievement or spiritual refinement. That must be why the Messenger of Allah sws said
“When a man and woman outside the legitimate intimacy limits meet in a place away from others’ sights the Satan is their third”. The hormonal signals most probably shall dictate as aided and abetted by even minimal good looks. No doubt there are men and women who can resist almost any temptation but these are very rare souls especially cultivated by the Most Merciful when they cultivate the Most Merciful with their sincere and life-long devotions. Allah says about them “Beware of the Friends of Allah for whom neither fear is nor shall they ever grieve. They are those who believed and have been ever-fearing (Allah)” (10: 62- 63).
From this extreme was born the other extreme of the Western sexual ethos- today’s extreme toleration and even encouragement of all possible variations of the ways leading to satisfaction in the most mechanical sense of the sexual lust no matter the medical and social dangers and costs. History always show that extremes always lead to opposite extremes and in fact reaction being in the opposite direction and of equal power to the action is a law of physics first enunciated by the 17th century English scientist Newton.
AT this point we must explain a bit more how and why Islam began its adaptation to any prevailing too powerful conditions affecting believers. It features the occasional sharp contrast between what Allah revealed or the Prophet prescribed on a certain matter and what Allah and the Messenger of Allah had to grant out of overwhelming necessity. One is the scope of fasting. Initially food could be taken just once after the sunset and conjugal relations were banned throughout Ramadan. It bore a bit too heavily on people- soon a new Revelation relaxed the rules beyond most could dream of. Now it was a full licence for both food and sex throughout the dark hours.
Similarly and as we know, the punishment prescribed in the Qur’an for all kinds of sexual sins is a hundred lashes inflicted in public. They should not break the skin and cause bleeding though. As such this single form of punishment and relatively very lenient regard of sexual weakness looked like a joke to the public at the time. It still looks like a joke to most Muslims who are very well known for their murderous anger against all sexual misconduct. In both Muslim as well as more traditional countries of whatever prevailing religion even light dalliances in sexual temptation, like young lad timidly and cautiously courting the young lass may lead to murder on the part of the female’s guardians, often of both parties. So, it was perfectly understandable that some companions found such leniency intolerable and with due respect to the Prophet sws registered their dissent as well as protest. We find a very instructive hadith about this matter.
Sa’d b. Ubada was the second greatest leader of the Helpers after his namesake the other Sa’d, the son of Muadh. When the verses about the sexual offences came and stipulated that for a charge of adultery to stand it was necessary for four reputable witnesses to witness it en flagrante in the fullest sense this first Sa’d was incensed in the extreme. After making sure that the Prophet sws confirmed the revelation he said “Should I wait for four witnesses to come and testify, is that so? By Allah Who sent you If I see my woman leg to leg with a man I will kill both of them with this sword of mine there and then!”. The Prophet sws was taken aback and he could only say “Well, Sa’d is jealous, I am more jealous than him and Allah is more jealous than me”.
This looks like a perfect diplomatic withdrawal since neither Allah nor His Messenger could be seen to have made a blunder nor did Allah withdrew His ruling by abrogating it with another verse conceding the point to Sa’d. The verse still stands today but not implemented. Instead the Prophet sws looked elsewhere for some sort of Divine precedent and as usual found it in the Jewish Law where stoning to death of adulterers was the norm. He reluctantly allowed that but was never happy or too willing to implement it afterwards. Now, we firmly believe that neither Allah nor His Messenger sws was caught in the wrong and had to withdraw their ruling in any abject sense; this episode, like many others indicated the unavoidable difference between a judgment which a nobler and superior mind could issue and another less noble and less well developed mind could. The Arab society was and still remains (and many societies which embraced Islam subsequently were and remain) basically primitive in spiritual terms and this replacement of Allah’s original lenient judgement with the violent sexual temper of the public still prevails.
Why these apparent volte-faces (abrupt turns)? Are they indicative of weakness? No! They are deliberate lessons from Allah and His Messenger sws to the effect that rulers and legislators must always hold a finger on the public pulse and like a doctor must modify prescriptions to take account of the needs and circumstances of the public. If more harshness is what they want too badly so be it; if more lenience is what they cannot do without so be it! Softer options must await more education and development whereby what is now legal sanction will become sanction coming from personal conscience- in fact this is exactly the aim of religion and more particularly Sufism as the more profound version of it.
Not that the Western lenience towards sexual infidelity is a more advanced attitude; the Western sexual libertinism is not borne of compassion but on a short-sighed and foolish tacit agreement by all parties involved to the effect that it is more fun just to enjoy sex anyhow anytime anywhere than worry about its consequences. And its consequences are often horrible- premature exposure to sex like in paedophilia, improper relations like in incest, simply silly and dirty relations like in homosexuality, and that illness-spreading promiscuity. What is more violence and murder are never away from Western sexual indulgences. Prostitution make up more than half of all sexual acts and rape is as common as to constitute about a third of the rest. It is very underreported though. About one in ten of all acts confers a venereal disease to one party (and also to any offspring) from the other which VD can be very serious. Whatever the claims of tolerance spouses or lovers do sometimes commit murders of jealousy and the so-called gays are even more notorious for their volatile tempers and hysterical reactions to rivalry and desertions. Their murders of jealousy is especially macabre.
The Western sexual scene is one of filth and disaster and has nothing whatsoever to commend itself to anybody outside it let alone to a Muslim. But the gaping difference between Allah’s revealed prescription and the prescription of the Prophet sws imposed on him by the implacable Muslim public opinion in whose context he necessarily operated is still there. This may well mean that one day Muslims can mature up enough to see that sexual offences are only too human and need not be treated so harshly after all. The Prophet sws always tried to avoid the fatal punishments and in fact all gratuitous exposure of sin. If we are following his Sunna why are we not doing likewise? What better of fuller Sunna we have than his gracious, merciful character?
It looks quite possible that an adequate public education may elevate the minds and hearts of most members of the public to make the citizens both far less likely to offend on account of their very well-developed sense of shame on the one hand and much less likely to expose and destroy the failures.
With these said we may perhaps generalise that Islam is as much about covering up defects and sins and forgiving and forgetting offences as remedying or discouraging them. After all it has been none other the Prophet sws who tried to cover up sexual sins any self-confessors confessed to him. We see it in the case of a woman and then a man who disclosed to the Prophet sws their respective adulteries; the Prophet asked whether anyone knew and when he was told that there were no witnesses he advised the confessor to go back and repent privately and Allah would forgive. To this day this Sunna of the Prophet is shunned and the sunna of Jahiliyya (pre-Islamic Ignorance) is avidly stuck to! Muslims whether individuals or governments prefer espying on people and destroying them sometimes on the scantiest or most dubious evidence. Confessors however repentant are shown no mercy; they are gleefully exposed by third parties and summarily killed close relations. Even worse and more in line with Jahiliyya, men’s sexual exploits are tolerated and even at times envied while women’s are most mercilessly punished. This must be another point where Muslims went wrong. Allah and His Prophet sws condemned sexual wrongs equally in both sexes.