How Much of Islamic Tradition, As It Was At Its Genesis, Is Meant To Be Preserved

By Mustafa Akyol

May 14, 2018

This year, the Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins on Tuesday. That means a big portion of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, my coreligionists, will be fasting for 30 days, which is really no easy task. Every day, from dawn till dusk, they will neither eat any food nor drink a drop of water. They will be hungry and thirsty but will wait patiently between the pre-dawn Sahur meal and the Iftar dinner at night — just for the sake of God. It is a great experience of self-discipline, devotion and piety. It is also a good opportunity, Islamic scholars often say, for reflecting about and developing empathy with those who starve because they are destitute.

For some of the world’s most far-flung Muslims, Ramadan will be even more difficult. These are the Muslims who live in the high latitudes, where “dawn till dusk” can equal almost the entire 24-hour day. In Reykjavik, Iceland, for example, which is now home to nearly 1,000 Muslims, the sun will set at midnight, only to come back in about two hours. That means the fasting time will be as long as 22 hours, allowing for only one meal a day.

No wonder this challenge has become a major point of discussion among Muslim scholars in the past few decades, particularly as increasing numbers of Muslims have migrated to northern countries like Norway and Sweden. Were the believers among these migrants supposed to follow the traditional Quranic timetable? Or could there be some gracious adjustment?

Answers varied. Saudi scholars, who typically represent the most literal and strict interpretation of Sunni Islam, ruled that no adjustment should be made. In a fatwa, or religious ruling, they declared that Islamic law is “universal and applies to all people in all countries.” Perhaps they could not empathize enough with their northern co-religionists, accustomed as the Saudis are to the mild fasting times in the Arabian Peninsula, where days are pretty standard in length throughout the year and fasting never exceeds 15 hours. Muslims nearer to the North Pole, accordingly, would just have to deal with their bad luck.

Fortunately, other Sunni jurists, such as those at Al-Azhar University in Egypt, have been a bit more amenable. Two compromises have been offered: Muslims in extremely high latitudes could ignore the natural day in their location and follow the timetables in Mecca or the nearest Muslim-majority country. This has allowed some Icelandic Muslims, for example, to follow the time in Turkey and fast for 18 hours instead of 22, allowing for a breakfast and a dinner during the waxing and waning hours of daylight.

This practical solution to a problem of jurisprudence must be welcome in the high latitudes. But it also raises a more complex, two-part theoretical question that is often ignored by Islam’s jurists but that deserves to be probed because it’s at the tip of a theological iceberg: How historical is the Quran’s language? And how literally should it be interpreted today?

This is a question raised by modern Muslim theologians like Fazlur Rahman Malik, who died in 1988; his reformist ideas led to his exile from his home country, Pakistan, and then to a safe haven at the University of Chicago. Like every Muslim worthy of the name, Dr. Rahman believed that the Quran is the word of God revealed to the Prophet Muhammad.

Yet, in Dr. Rahman’s opinion, God had not spoken in a vacuum. He had instead spoken to a specific community, the Arabs, and at a specific time, the early seventh century. This context, Dr. Rahman argued, played a role in the composition of the Quran’s text. And when new contexts arose, the injunctions of the Quran had to be reinterpreted in the light of the moral intentions behind the text.

The discussion over fasting is, in fact, a minor case of the need for such reinterpretations. Some more important issues include corporal punishments, which create some of the most controversial perceptions of Islam in the modern world. The Quran, in fact, is free of some of the harsh corporal punishments commonly associated with Islamic law — such as stoning of adulterers — but it does include others. “As for the thieves,” it decrees, “amputate their hands in recompense for what they committed.”

The Saudis take that Quranic injunction literally and carry it out without any doubt. So do the Iranians and the Sudanese. They see it is a commandment from God that must be obeyed as is.

Yet there is also a contextual way of understanding God’s commandments. As explained by another proponent of reform within Islam, the Moroccan scholar Mohammed Abed al-Jabri, who died in 2010, there were simply no prisons in early-seventh-century Arabia, where the Quran was revealed. There was no state bureaucracy to run jails in a society that lived in tents and huts, so detaining and feeding someone within strong walls were neither possible nor feasible. As a result, all punishments had to be immediate, and corporal.

No wonder pre-Islamic Arabs also punished theft with the amputation of hands, as we learn from Islamic literature itself; the Quran simply affirmed this tradition. Therefore, in Dr. Jabri’s view, the Quran’s verdict on theft was that it is a crime that should be punished by available means.

Today, these means can be fines or prison sentences — a step forward that the Ottoman Empire, the very seat of the caliphate, had already taken in its Penal Code of 1858, which was influenced by French legal norms.

Conservative Muslims may find this interpretive take on the Quran too permissive. But even they do not take literally the Quran’s call to build self-defence by raising “war horses.” Instead, the call is interpreted to mean that the mounts are a reference to vehicles.

And while the Saudi clerics may insist on taking the Quran literally on fasting for 22 hours from dawn till dusk, a future Muslim colony right at the North Pole, which gets only darkness at the winter solstice and only daylight at the arrival of summer — or, more radically, on Mars — would force even them to change their minds.

The heart of the matter is that Islam is facing a challenge that Jews and Christians have also faced in the past few centuries: There are new realities in the world, and we should figure out how much of our religious tradition is meant to be preserved as it was at its genesis. It is easy to say that God has already given us all the answers. But it may be more prudent to say that he also gave us the reason to think, rethink and reinterpret the meaning of his words.

Mustafa Akyol, a contributing opinion writer, is the author, most recently, of “The Islamic Jesus.”

Source: nytimes.com/2018/05/14/opinion/muslims-iceland-ramadan-fasting.html

URL: https://newageislam.com/ijtihad-rethinking-islam/how-islamic-tradition,-its-genesis,/d/115252