Ask Me Anything: Muslim Edition

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The legal aspects of marriage are mostly what’s treated in classical Islamic text and it establishes the basic ground rules, boundaries, what the duties of each partner basically are, and how to resolve conflicts and/or proceed with a divorce. Temporal marriage is mostly about providing a stable framework for society that allows children to be brought up in reasonably good environments and for people to meet their needs without sin. The idea of two people becoming one inseparable flesh doesn’t really exist in Islam, however the love between a husband and wife is considered to be something especially holy. Taking care of your spouse, loving them, and sticking by them is a method of practicing righteousness and so while divorce is freely permitted in the interest of dissolving situations that just do not work and which are not productive to society or the family, it falls into the category of things that are permissible but not commendable.

Because there are a lot of different situations that people find themselves in, there are several types of marriage permitted by various sects of Islam. The main, preferable practice is nikah, which is your typical marriage contract with all the stipulations of sharia law, registered with the state one lives in, etc. Nikah misyar is a marriage where the couple reside in separate households and provide their own material support for themselves, which can be the best option for young people and people who may live in separate countries for awhile before entering full nikah. An aunt of mine had a nikah misyar with her husband for a year or so until he had finished his work obligations and was able to move back to the US, for instance, during which time she lived with my grandparents and they both saved up money to buy a house.

Nikah urfi is recognized in some sects but its controversial. It’s a type of common law marriage where the marriage is never registered with the state. Nikah halala is even more controversial, as it’s basically a legal technicality used for people who have divorced each other twice to remarry (it only ever seems to come up in sketchy situations and it has tenuous legal backing, so it’s rare indeed).

Twelver Shia allow nikkah mutah, which is a temporary marriage. The term of the marriage is agreed in advance and it can be of any duration. It’s been exploited by a lot of people to allow prostitution and other things that would otherwise be classified as zina, and so it’s really controversial and has been getting a lot of attention in Iran. Sunni consider mutah to be invalid and basically a form of prostitution.
 
A lot has been made about Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb/Kufr, but those concepts are actually not in the Koran or the Hadith at all. They were political constructs used in the Caliphates centuries after the Prophet (peace be upon him) to refer to countries that were majority Muslim and countries that were not. Like other religions, the Koran and Islamic scholarship have to be interpreted through the linguistic and historical context. Early Islam was constantly under threat from outside forces, so the Koran allows Muslims who are engaged in a defensive war to protect themselves and eliminate the threat. In later centuries once Islamic caliphates became political powers, you see the same sort of expansionist themes crop up that exist pretty much everywhere, and it’s important to keep in mind that not all of that is based in the actual teachings of the religion.

On the whole, we’re commanded to be peaceful and to try and keep the peace with others, especially with people who worship the same God. Christians, Jews, and others in the Abrahamic tradition payed jizya as a sort of parallel to the zakat that Muslims pay, which goes towards supporting the poor and keeping the society safe and running, and like zakat, people who were poor, ill, or otherwise unable to afford jizya were exempt in most cases.

Politics messes up everything, basically.
 
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In the Christendom world, the manifestation of anti-Semitism is condemned, for in the last century there was a tragedy that claimed the lives of millions of Jews.
Sometimes I hear the term “intellectual anti-Semitism”, but this phenomenon is usually condemned by the civilized community.
But in some Islamic countries, anti-Semitism is practised at the state level, and Judo Filia is perceived as a betrayal of his homeland.
Is Islamic anti-Semitism forever? Is it an existential necessity, or are there mechanisms by which it will be eliminated over time?

The video shows the Algerian army. The usual line chanting.
 
I think in that case the appropriate term is “anti-Israel” and “anti-Jewish”?
 
Most likely, this is a rather sensitive question that is difficult to answer with one sentence.
The question is inconvenient for both Muslims and Jews.
 
I feel like it’s important to keep a distinction between religious features and socio-political features when talking about prejudice and religion. There is nothing in Islam that encourages anti-Semitism and in fact Jews, being People of the Book, are our brothers and we should treat them as such. Anti-semitism in the Middle East is highly complex, as it would be when there are millennia-old territorial disputes and ethnic tensions, and something I don’t really feel qualified to parse out. Just like Christians, you can find many Muslims who abhor anti-semitism and many who have fallen to politicized racism that’s masked under a thin veneer of Islam.

I have great hopes that this century will see a lot of the old ways of thinking change. The colonial powers didn’t really leave the Middle East until after WW2 in many places, so there are still living people who grew up with legitimate reasons to distrust the West and see Israel as a Western proxy state. As that generation passes on, I feel like we’ll start to see a lot of changes in the way politics is conducted in the Arabic world.
 
It’s interesting to read you making a distinction between the socio-political and religious aspects of Islam. One of my professors in undergrad, a Muslim, was adamant that the two could not truly be distinguished because Islam comes with a degree of culture and order that, for examples, Christianity or Buddhism would be more-or-less ambivalent about. He would often muse that this was a great folly of the West: believe that multiple religions could co-inhabit a country simultaneously without infringing on others’ rights or, worse, making a god out of secularism.
 
Some schools of Islam do believe that religion and the state can’t be separate, but not all do. Ultraconservative elements tend to favor religious states, but they aren’t representative of the entire field of Islam and ultraconservatism is actually on the wane worldwide.
 
He was a pretty Left-leaning guy, both religiously and politically. But I don’t pretend to be an expert on the matter.

If one wanted to get better acquainted with a school of Islamic thought that does make that divide, who would one read?
 
I watched the video fragment on Egyptian television, where the interlocutor of the atheist was simply expelled from the door.
The leading body of the program to hear that the young guy is an atheist, considered him a madman.😊
and the Mullah advised him to go to a psychiatrist. They both, Mullah and presenter of the program encouraged the guy to go straight to a psychiatric hospital.
I wonder, Algerians like singing that Algeria belongs to them and not to anyone else, are they afraid of Zionist territorial expansionism? financially enslaved expansionism? or may be “secularism”? Or all of the mentioned risks?

 
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Gammal al-Banna would be a great place to start, but it might be tricky to find some of his writings in English. The Revolution of the Quran and The Refutation of Punishment for Apostasy are some of his better known.

Javed Ghamidi is not a modernist per se, but his exegesis and interpretation of Islamic law is parallel to many modernist interpretations. I think some of his Dunya News videos may still be around on the internet, but he’s also written several books.

Soheib Bencheikh is the Grand Mufti of Paris and has written quite extensively on modernist interpretations of Islamic law, but I think he mostly writes in French.

One of the more famous is an article called Open Letter to the Muslim World by Abdennour Bidar, and you can find that here: Freedom and democracy: Open Letter to the Muslim World | Reset DOC

So, there’s a lot out there, unfortunately it can be hard to find good English translations sometimes.
 
Atheism, as previously mentioned, is not well accepted in public life in the Middle East, although that’s improving. Atheism is seen as a sort of delusion by a many.

As for the Algerians, I don’t know enough about the situation in that region to really have the background to answer the question adequately so I don’t feel qualified to comment on it. I’m more familiar with the Levant and the Arabian peninsula. I’ve found that the experience and history of African Muslims is often quite different than Middle Eastern Muslims and the same is true for South Asian Muslims. There have been very different historical and cultural pressures in all of those areas.
 
In almost all cases, yes. The Koran specifically forbids infanticide, even and especially due to fear of poverty. This is interpreted by most Muslims as including abortion except in the case of the mother’s life being in danger and then it is a personal decision for the woman and her family to make.
 
shazirah said:
In almost all cases, yes. The Koran specifically forbids infanticide, even and especially due to fear of poverty. This is interpreted by most Muslims as including abortion except in the case of the mother’s life being in danger and then it is a personal decision for the woman and her family to make.
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The Catholic view is that all life is Sacred cause God made it. And that the life of a human being which God made apart from all other creatures, made for Himself, was not made for death, but for life. Thus, why at all stages and circumstances it is never moral to kill.
 
Likely the guy is educated in other areas, and he was invited to share his experience with youth,
but when he was talking about the denial of God, the unanimous decision was to send him to a mad house. 😂
 
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