Reforming not Demolishing the Status Quo

This is attested to by several incidents wherein the Prophet ﷺ, far from changing everything, approved of practices that were prevalent in the time of Jahiliyya (Pre-Islamic times). An example of this is the law of Qasama. This was when a body of a murdered person is found on a land occupied by a tribe, fifty inhabitants of that land must each take an oath that they have neither taken part in the death of this person nor have any knowledge as to who the killer is. If there were less than fifty people, than those present must take oaths more than once until the quota of fifty oaths is reached. After this, they are free from any liability, in terms of punishment, but must still pay compensation to the family of the murdered. It is recorded in the Musnad of Imam Ahmad and in Sahih Muslim:

“The Prophet approved of the law of qasama which was prevalent during the time of jahiliyya.”  (Muslim and Musnad Ahmad)

This was not only in penal matters, but the Prophet also did the same with the prevalent forms of marriages during his time. Aisha, radi Allahu `anha (May God be pleased with her), narrates:

“There was the marriage which is that still practised by people today in which a man asked another man for his ward or daughter, paid her her dower and then married her. Another type was that a man would say to his wife after she was pure from menstruation, “Send for so-and-so and have intercourse with him.” Her husband would stay away from her and not have sex with her until she became pregnant by that man with whom she was sleeping. When it was clear that she was pregnant, then her husband would sleep with her if he wished. He did that out of the desire for a child of noble descent… Another type of marriage was that a group of less than ten men would go to the same woman and all have intercourse with her. If she became pregnant and gave birth, some days after the birth she would send for them, and none of them could refuse to come. When they were gathered together before her, she would say to them, “You know what you did. I have given birth. It is your son, so-and-so!” She would name whichever of them she wanted to name, and her child would be attributed to him and the man could not deny that. The fourth type of marriage was that many men would go to a woman who would not refuse whoever came to her. They were prostitutes and they used to set up flags at the doors as signs. Whoever wanted could go to them. If one of them became pregnant, when she gave birth, they would be brought together and they would call the physiognomists who would then attach the child to the one they thought was the father. He would be ascribed to him and called his son. None of them could reject that. When Muhammad, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, was sent with the truth, he abolished all of the marriages of the Jahiliyya except the marriage practised by people today.” (Bukhari)

Moreover, custom or `urf, is something that is considered in Islamic law. This is evident in contractual law. For example, if in the sale of a car, it is known that it is the seller who usually delivers the product, then even though this may not be verbally stipulated, the sharia (Islamic ruling) will consider it as such. Thus the legal maxim, “That which is known by custom, is treated as if it has been stipulated verbally.” Another example is the obligation of the husband to financially support his wife (nafaqa)—the actual amount is not stipulated. It is referred to the custom of the people to decide how much is fair. Thus far from doing without custom altogether, many aspects and rulings of the sharia are dependent on the customs of a people, in order for them to be actionable.

Of course, if the customs of a people contradict a clear textual evidence of the Qur’an and sunna, then that is discarded, as the Prophet ﷺ exemplified. 

The Attitude of (predominantly young) Religious People

The point of mentioning all this is to highlight the fact that Islam is not supposed to be practiced in a vacuum, where anything, by virtue of it being foreign, is rejected and seen to be something that the sharia despises. This is more so when it seems almost fashionable for young practicing people to boast how some practice is “just” traditional, and hence they want to rid themselves of it.

Weddings as an Example

For example, during weddings, different cultures have different ways of doing things. All of this is fine, unless something contradicts the sharia. So having a pre-wedding function is completely fine. Thus it does not make sense, at least from a purely shari point of view, for people who start to practice newly or are practising to want to go against such functions in the name of religion, and upset a huge number of relatives. This breaks up unity and gives Islam a bad name and makes religious people seem like they are against having fun.

Reason for Rejection: Un-Islamic

The common argument is that because there is no precedent for such functions in the sunnah, it is by default un-Islamic. However, this attitude itself is Un-Islamic and rejected, since when it comes to social practices and events, “everything is permissible until proven impermissible.”

Reason for Rejection: Finance

Of course, sometimes halal (permissible) customs can place undue hardship on people, especially those that are not financially well off. In such situations, should a person not want to hold a customary function, it is completely justified and praiseworthy, since spending out of one’s means is discouraged. Yet the reason for breaking from one’s cultural practices would be finance, and not because something was intrinsically wrong with the function.

Reason for Rejection: Personal Choice

If someone wants to break from their cultural practices and tradition due to personal preferences, then it is only fair that they make this known and not mask this using religious justifications. This would be an unfair abuse of religious texts. Of course the motivation for appealing to religion at such times comes from the fact that breaking from traditions attracts the censure of one’s family and peers, and in an attempt to deflect such criticism religion is used as a shield.

Moreover, people should be wise when making such choices by taking into account the possible harms that may result. One needs to balance one’s individualism with the wider concerns of one’s family. After all it was the Prophet himself ﷺ who said to Aisha (ra) when she took a woman on her wedding night to a man from among the Ansar:

“O ‘Aisha, was there any entertainment (in the gathering)? For the Ansar love entertainment.” (Bukhari)

He ﷺ knew the custom of the Ansar and respected it.

We must not forget that our religion is a universal one, and our Prophet ﷺ is a universal prophet. Thus, we, who claim to follow the Prophet ﷺ must also adopt this in our attitude and practice. In the words of the Qur’an:

“And We have not sent you except comprehensively to mankind as a bringer of good tidings and a warner. But most of the people do not know.” (Qur’an, 34:28)

This universality implicitly accepts the cultures and traditions of all people with the condition that they do not contradict the Qur’an and sunna. This difference is an aspect of life that is to be embraced, not an imperfection to be erased.

By Sunna Syed

In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, there’s been a lot of talk about assimilation, in particular about the suspected perpetrators’ religiosity and prayer habits and in general about foreign immigration. I’d thus like to take a moment to clear something up.

Muslimness does not make you a terrorist.

I get it. It’s human nature to crave safety for oneself and one’s surroundings. That’s why we install alarm systems and pay for identity theft prevention and buy insurance – we want protection. To protect, we must predict by fitting people into our preexisting schemas: Burglars will usually burgle at night or when the house is empty, so we turn on our alarms before we go to sleep or leave for the grocery store. Identity thieves prowl on the internet, so we limit our online credit card use and sign up for email alerts in case of a breach. Disasters could strike out of the blue, but at least we can breathe a little easier if we know we’re covered.

But terrorism, by definition, is a psychological strategy. Instead of targeting your possessions, terrorism uses fear to target your peace of mind and ability to predict. Indeed, it is effective because the only true goal – terror – is also the inevitable emotional outcome.

You feel, you lose.

You can ask, “Why?” all you want, but the explanation doesn’t exist; indiscriminate violence is not a rational tactic, and terrorists rarely achieve their proclaimed political goals. If terrorism is beyond the reach of rationality, it follows that it can happen anywhere, at anytime, to anyone. To our precaution-seeking brains, that is unacceptable; it makes me uneasy just to type it. To cope and compensate, then, we grasp at straws, searching for the nearest possible explanation that will separate them from us and make predictability and protection possible –

It’s the Arabs, we say, and devise all sorts of litmus tests to smoke them out. A CNN reporter recently characterized one of the suspects arrested in Watertown (when everything was still hazy and no one really knew who anyone was) as being “Middle Eastern in complexion.”

Would you like some non sequitur with that burger? Don’t worry, it’s okay if you have no idea what qualifies as a Middle Eastern complexion – you can ask the group of Hispanic guys who beat up a Bengali gentleman in the Bronx because they thought he was Arab.

It’s the Muslims, we proclaim, and proceed to verbally accost hijab-clad female doctors out on a stroll with their kids and analyze the fact that the suspects in the Boston bombings “prayed five times a day.”

FYI, we all pray five times a day. Or at least we try, because there is no such thing as being “very” or “not very” Muslim – you’re either Muslim, or you’re not. You either commit to prayer and to peace, or you don’t; there is no in-between. The fact is that the so-called Moderate Muslims are actually The Muslims, and I hereby move to reclassify Extremist/Radical/Violent Muslims with Anders Breivik, McVeigh, and the other far more numerous non-Muslim murderers, ideological extremists, and terrorists as The Putrid Scum of the Earth.

Do I hear a second?

It’s them, then, whoever they are, and in order to stop terrorism, they must assimilate. Patriotic, blue-blooded Americans come in only one shape and size, and those who wish to be seen as such must ditch their hummus and weird prayer hats and conform. To what extent, you ask? Until that arbitrary and unclear point in time and space when they stop being “weird,” of course.

And that is where I draw the line.

Because see, my Muslimness does not make me a terrorist, and neither does my supposed difficulty assimilating. Unless you enter this world on Day 1 as a middle-aged Protestant Caucasian male or Ann Coulter, who decided to offer up a solution for the whole grievous situation by proclaiming that a woman “ought to be jailed for wearing the hijab,” you are guaranteed to have trouble assimilating at some point in your life. Ever been to high school? It’s a roiling cauldron of pubescent, flustered boys and girls of all shapes and colors who haven’t the foggiest idea how to assimilate. It’s even harder for people of religious or racial minorities and for immigrants – remember reading In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson in elementary school? And it’s not just immigrants to the US; ask anyone who’s immigrated abroad whether it’s easy to assimilate into British culture (I tried once, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it meant to be “queuing around”), or Asian culture (four words: Take. Your. Shoes. Off.) or Latin American culture (admittedly the food makes this easier).

Assimilation is no picnic. But even so, the Tsarnaev brothers were remarkably good at it – Tamerlan married an American convert named Katherine, and Dzhokhar was a regular at dorm parties. (I was born here and I’ve never even seen the inside of a dorm because I hold the suspicion that it’s a place of drunken revelry and Facebook poking come to life where propriety goes to die; so I refuse to go, for fear of having my drink spiked and inspiring a tragic episode of Law & Order.)

In fact, the two were assimilated to the point of actually neglecting their religion. Islam forbids premarital relationships and dating, but Tamerlan’s wife was his girlfriend first. Partner violence is condemned in Islam, but he was arrested for battery against a different girlfriend in 2009. Muslims don’t drink alcohol or use intoxicating drugs like marijuana – Tamerlan and Dzhokhar

did, respectively. In fact, Tamerlan was infamous for rudely interrupting mainstream imams at his mosque even after he gave up drinking on the grounds of becoming more religious. He was also a boxer; I’d like to see you try to convince any set of Muslim parents that boxing is an actual career – you will lose and exit the conversation defeated and wondering why you wasted your life becoming anything other than a doctor or engineer.

A lack of compassion and active disregard for the rights of others made the Tsarnaev brothers terrorists – not their Muslimness, because Muslimness does not make you a terrorist. Please stop saying that it does, because once upon a time, there was a man who grossly mischaracterized a group of people and in so doing, single-handedly precipitated what is perhaps the ugliest stain to date on the fabric of civilization – also known as the Holocaust. Accusation holds immense power, and blame misplaced is the gunpowder of crimes against humanity; heard of the ongoing mass genocide of the Rohingya Muslims in Burma?

I will not change my Muslimness. If you would have me prove myself patriotic by wearing shorts and drinking alcohol and dating guys and tweaking the color of my skin and frying bacon every Saturday morning – I’m sorry. I can’t do that, because I believe in something different. As my sister said quite aptly, that’s not assimilation – it’s “ethnic cleansing but without the whole violence thing.” But I’ll tell you what I will do, and not because I fear retaliation:

I will pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. I will condemn with every fiber of my being the taking of innocent lives by anyone – whether they call themselves Muslims or followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster – as a crime against humanity and a personal offense against me as a human being. I will love my neighbor and treat others as I would like to be treated. I will make friends with people different from myself (kind of a no-brainer, because I’ve taken inventory, and my circle contains a disproportionate number of atheist and agnostic friends and people who tell me to calm down). I will even show you my birth certificate from a Southern US town in the middle of nowhere, my collection of all-American pinch pots and macaroni art from elementary school, and my fabulous apple pie recipe (the key is Granny Smith apples; I don’t believe in cooking secrets). I will pray next to you, with you, for you to the God I believe in – the God of Abraham, the Creator of the Heavens and the Earth, the Gracious and Merciful, the End and the Beginning of our existence Who created us with love in His image and will call us back to Him come Judgment Day. I will accept your peaceful beliefs, and learn about them when I’m not drowning in textbooks. I will use my talents and skills for good, and I will try to leave this world a better place than I found it. I will wholeheartedly embrace my right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of pepper spray. I will bear witness against injustice, discrimination, and the culturally ubiquitous glass ceiling. I will, finally, refuse to lose hope in humanity’s capacity for love and solidarity. And I hope you’ll join me, because after all, there’s nothing more un-American than eating an apple pie alone.

By Lena Khan

On the day that I write this, I received an email from a sister giving me advice (nasiha). I can (maybe) make documentaries, she told me—but certainly not fictional films. I should refrain from imitating the kuffar (disbelievers) in making movies. And for certain, I should be careful of engaging too much in the dangerous American culture. Lest I forget, our Prophet ﷺ told us, “Islam began strange, and it will become strange again…”

To be sincere, as a practicing (in sha’ Allah, God willing) Muslim in the film industry, I try my best to navigate my career while conforming to the principles and guidelines set down by my religion. Am I certain that I am making every correct decision in doing so? No, and I hope scholars will continue to guide me and start discussions to help others. Do I feel that Islam asks us to be foreigners, staying away from the arts, language and culture of the communities in which we reside? Absolutely not.

Instead of eschewing culture, Islam has always recognized the importance of it to the vibrancy and identity of the people. When the “sons of Arfida” (a reference to Ethiopians) beat drums and danced with spears in the Prophet’s mosque, Umar ibn al-Khattaab radi allahu `anhu (may God be pleased with him) wanted to stop them. The Prophetﷺ  stopped him instead, mentioning that the performers were the “Sons of Arfida”—that is, they were not of his people, his culture. “Play your games, sons of Arfida,” the Prophet ﷺ mentions in one narration, “so the Jews and Christians know there is latitude in our religion.”

Such was the sunna (tradition) of the Prophet ﷺ: accepting pre-Islamic Arab cultural norms, except that which violated the religion. Be it language, names, or practices, the Prophet ﷺ generally left the people to their culture. In recognition of this truth, the respected jurist Abu Yusuf “understood the recognition of good, local cultural norms as falling under the rubric of the sunna.” ((Abd-Allah, Umar Faruq. “Islam and the Cultural Imperative.” 4))

Most interesting, however, are the actions of Angel Jibril. In a famous tradition, Jibril comes to the Prophet ﷺ in the form of a man and questions him about his religion. Since angels can only act upon the orders of Allah subhanahu wa ta`ala (exalted is He), one aspect is telling: Allah ordered Jibril to dress in the clothes of the people with whom he was speaking. ((Lecture: Imam Suhaib Webb, Alim Winter Conference. 1/19/12. Paraphrasing is my own, and may fall victim to my errors of interpretation)) The affirmation of the culture of a people, it seems, has strong precedence in our faith.

In accord with this attitude of the Prophet ﷺ and the religion, Islamic cultures of history followed suit. In China, instead of replacing the indigenous culture, Chinese Muslims created one of their own. The Chinese of centuries ago up until the modern artist Hajji Noor Deen cultivated Chinese calligraphy, and also (but not always) incorporated Arabic. When one looked upon a Chinese mosque, he or she might find the ideograms kai tian gu jiao: “the primordial religion from the world’s beginning.” ((Abd-Allah 8.)) Chinese Muslims, it seemed, consciously made their faith intelligible and organic to those around them. In these acts, Chinese Muslims affirmed that their faith was not foreign, but part and parcel of their indigenous culture.

In this way, the Prophetic and Islamic civilizations of old embraced the culture of the land in which they lived. This, however, was always done in accord with the divine Law. The Prophetﷺ  purified cultural practices that went against the religion and its values. He left people and even converts to their own names, except when they had ill or blasphemous meanings. He encouraged poetry, but not all poetry. The Prophet, in his wisdom and guidance, did not come to erase culture. He took what was good of it, and created a new one. And thus the Muslim identity stayed strong for centuries.

Nowadays, however, our youth do not feel the same comfort. While Chinese Islam feels Chinese, and Indian Islam is distinctly Indian… American Islam is asked to be Arab (or maybe South Asian). As Dr. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah writes in his article, “Islam and the Cultural Imperative,” “In history, Islam showed itself to be culturally friendly and, in that regard, has been likened to a crystal clear river. Its waters (Islam) are pure, sweet, and life-giving but—having no color of their own—reflect the bedrock (indigenous culture) over which they flow.” If this analogy has any truth, American Islamic culture is in danger of being a murky and shallow pond, reflecting nothing, and providing no refreshing life force to those who drink of it.

Just as Islamic civilizations have done for centuries, it is incumbent upon Islam in America to create its own cultural authority—not through losing ourselves to the culture without regard for our religion, but by developing it from the culture. In this way, we—and especially our youth—will feel like we truly belong.

Islam has always been a practical religion, dealing with the realities of the world. We, too, must also deal with reality: we can either define and develop our own strengthened cultural authority, or we can lose ourselves and our youth to another. Culture allows us to define ourselves, and have strength in who we are. “Identities that are rooted in deep cultural contradictions,” writes Dr. Umar, “are easily thrown into states of confusion and doubt.”

We have then, a choice. Culture, especially the arts, will always be part of the human experience. Whether it is through Muslims who have made it into the mainstream—such as Yusuf Islam, Lupe Fiasco, Khaled Hosseini, G. Willow Wilson, Hakeem Olajuwon, or the Abdullah Brothers, or filmmakers and artists who are on their way to mainstream recognition—like I hope myself and others, in sha’ Allah, our youth are starting to have examples for how to embrace our indigenous culture and from it create our own.

Knowing many of these figures, I know that our work itself is a struggle. We strive to become excellent in our fields, while maintaining what we believe our religion asks of us. It is likely that some may disagree with our choices. Music, or no music? Is a bad word in a novel that more or less requires it worth the good that comes, or is it even allowed? The solution is not topush away culture and the arts, but to have the discussions that will guide us through them and emerge with a halal (permissible) alternative and guidelines in the arts and our cultural authority. This is what we find in the Prophetic example, as well as in Islamic civilizations for centuries.

Perhaps some may disagree with those figures most powerfully developing this cultural authority. If that is the case, we should understand that we are in a new era where we have Muslim artists who are not operating outside of Islam, but trying their best to apply it—practicing their craft without sacrificing Islamic principles as they understand them. Let us have the critical discussions to guide them all. As Oscar Wilde famously said, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” Our society, and youth, will continue to find identity and strength in cultural icons and artists. Do we worry about what figures, and what art, is currently defining them? Then let us support those who may give them a more acceptable alternative, and help create an Islamic and indigenous cultural redefinition that will strengthen us all.

Lena Khan is a writer and director, working on a full-length feature film, “The Tiger Hunter” and currently running an online crowd-sourcing campaign to help fund it.  Information about her film, and how to support, can be found at http://kck.st/13tcFx8.