Gavin Ashenden and Sharia Law
According to his latest piece in the JEP, Gavin Ashenden writes that:
“Not many people know what Sharia law entails or commands in practice. Here are some of its requirements:”
“Theft is punishable by amputation of the hands, criticizing or denying any part of the Koran is punishable by death, as is criticizing Mohammed, or leaving Islam, or being found guilty of adultery if you are a woman. Homosexuality is punished by death. Muslim men have sexual rights to any woman/girl not wearing a hijab.”
“A man can marry a girl and consummate a marriage from aged 9 and above. Girls' should be genitally cut; a man can beat his wife for insubordination; a man can unilaterally divorce his wife; a woman's testimony in court carries ½ the weight of a man's; meat to eat must come from animals that have had their throats cut un-stunned (halal).”
Apart from having an unhealthy obsession with sexuality and gender issues, Gavin’s other main obsession is Islam. But to state Sharia Law in such terms is like saying the Christianity believes that the world was created in seven days, and there was a great flood which wiped out all life on earth apart from Noah and those he rescued in his ark.
In other words, what he has done is to paint Sharia law by its most extreme manifestation, some of which are almost certainly cultural rather than part of Islam or Sharia, such as female circumcision.
As Asifa Quraishi-Landes notes:
“In the same way that the Ku Klux Klan's tactics are a poor representation of Christian practice (despite its claims to be a Christian organization), the Islamic State is the worst place to look to understand what Sharia says about punishment and the treatment of innocents and prisoners.”
In Bill Warner’s book, Sharia Law for Non-Muslims, he notes that regarding Female genital mutilation:
“In Egypt, about 91 percent of women have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM). Presently, FGM has been officially banned there since 2008]. In 2015 an Egyptian doctor was convicted of manslaughter after a 13-year-old girl died after an FGM procedure”
Now it is true that some of the punishments in Sharia are harsh, but they must be viewed as a whole, so that even if we criticise them, we can understand why they are not implemented.
As Omar Sacirbey, writing for Huffington Post, notes, “many of these punishments have been taken out of context, abrogated, or require a near-impossible level of evidence to be carried out.” And he cites as examples, these cases:
“For someone to be convicted of adultery, for example, there must be four witnesses to the act, which is rare. The Quran also prescribes amputating the hands of thieves, but (and this is often forgotten or unmentioned) not if the thief has repented.”
Sharia is an Arabic word that means a path to be followed, and it also should not be forgotten that much of what is prescribed by Sharia Law for Muslims is religious in nature, and not imposed on outsiders to the faith. For example, it encompasses the requirement to praying five times daily, and to abstain from pork and alcohol, to live a righteous life, and to show compassion to those in need.
The scholar Qasim Rashid, notes that taking any religious text out of its historical and spiritual context will not result in what he terms an “honest legal interpretation.”
In the Old Testament, for example, Deuteronomy 21:18-21 calls for stoning disobedient children.
CFR’s Steven A. Cook notes that: “"There are so many varying interpretations of what Sharia actually means that in some places, it can be incorporated into political systems relatively easily”.
So for a start before we begin looking at Sharia law, it is worth looking at its variations. Toni Johnson and Mohammed Aly Sergie note that:
“The Hanbali school, Islam’s most orthodox, which spawned the Wahhabi and Salafi branches, is embraced in Saudi Arabia and by the Taliban. The Hanafi school, known for being the most liberal and the most focused on reason and analogy, is dominant among Sunnis in Central Asia, Egypt, Pakistan, India, China, Turkey, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. The Maliki school is dominant in North Africa and the Shafi’i school in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei Darussalam, and Yemen. Shia Muslims follow the Ja’fari school, most notably in Shia-dominant Iran.”
They also note that while extreme forms of punishment do technically belong to Sharia law, jurisprudence in practice often works out differently.
“Punishments for had offenses—flogging, stoning, amputation, exile, or execution—get a significant amount of media attention when they occur. These sentences are not often prescribed, however. ‘In reality, most Muslim countries do not use traditional classical Islamic punishments,’ says Ali Mazrui of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies in a Voice of America interview. These punishments remain on the books in some countries, but lesser penalties are often considered sufficient.”
By not being used, laws can fall into disuse, and this can happen to laws without them ever being taken off the statute books. The custom laws against sorcery, for instance, in Jersey law, have never been repealed, but when I spoke to a senior law officer about it, he informed me that they would be treated as falling into disuse and would never be implemented. Clearly something similar can happen and has happened with Sharia law.
In fact, many cases of Sharia law which do not make the headlines come from small scale domestic issues:
“Many majority Muslim countries have a dual system in which the government is secular but Muslims can choose to bring familial and financial disputes to Sharia courts. The exact jurisdiction of these courts varies from country to country, but usually includes marriage, divorce, inheritance, and guardianship.”
The reason for this is that Sharia law can judge fairly on domestic disputes, especially when marriages break down, in a way that expensive Western style adversarial conflict cannot. It also says that a woman's property, held exclusively in her name, cannot be appropriated by her husband, brother or father. This is in marked contrast to many Western systems of law where separate assets are often “considered joint assets after marriage”.
Aaron Hughes also shows how cultural factors can cause regional variations. In “Why is Islam so different in different countries?”, he comments that Islam “ is a rich and variegated religion. And this variation must be taken into account when dealing with it. Most importantly, the variation cannot be papered over with simplistic slogans or stereotypes. That women are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia but are in places like Malaysia tells you something about this variation.”
Asifa Quraishi-Landes notes that:
“[Sharia] can also be interpreted as pro-choice, with certain scholars positing that although abortion is forbidden, first-trimester abortions are not punishable.”
The one area which Gavin does not even mention, which is perhaps significant in how the countries apply Sharia law, is the case of apostasy which is punishable by death . 13 countries have these laws in place on their statue books. Louis Doré, writing in “The Independent” notes that:
“Afghanistan, Iran, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates and Yemen are the relevant countries. All of these countries, except Pakistan, allow for capital punishment against apostasy, while Pakistan imposes the death penalty for blasphemy - including a disbelief in God. “
But even here, a note of caution must be sounded.
According to his latest piece in the JEP, Gavin Ashenden writes that:
“Not many people know what Sharia law entails or commands in practice. Here are some of its requirements:”
“Theft is punishable by amputation of the hands, criticizing or denying any part of the Koran is punishable by death, as is criticizing Mohammed, or leaving Islam, or being found guilty of adultery if you are a woman. Homosexuality is punished by death. Muslim men have sexual rights to any woman/girl not wearing a hijab.”
“A man can marry a girl and consummate a marriage from aged 9 and above. Girls' should be genitally cut; a man can beat his wife for insubordination; a man can unilaterally divorce his wife; a woman's testimony in court carries ½ the weight of a man's; meat to eat must come from animals that have had their throats cut un-stunned (halal).”
Apart from having an unhealthy obsession with sexuality and gender issues, Gavin’s other main obsession is Islam. But to state Sharia Law in such terms is like saying the Christianity believes that the world was created in seven days, and there was a great flood which wiped out all life on earth apart from Noah and those he rescued in his ark.
In other words, what he has done is to paint Sharia law by its most extreme manifestation, some of which are almost certainly cultural rather than part of Islam or Sharia, such as female circumcision.
As Asifa Quraishi-Landes notes:
“In the same way that the Ku Klux Klan's tactics are a poor representation of Christian practice (despite its claims to be a Christian organization), the Islamic State is the worst place to look to understand what Sharia says about punishment and the treatment of innocents and prisoners.”
In Bill Warner’s book, Sharia Law for Non-Muslims, he notes that regarding Female genital mutilation:
“In Egypt, about 91 percent of women have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM). Presently, FGM has been officially banned there since 2008]. In 2015 an Egyptian doctor was convicted of manslaughter after a 13-year-old girl died after an FGM procedure”
Now it is true that some of the punishments in Sharia are harsh, but they must be viewed as a whole, so that even if we criticise them, we can understand why they are not implemented.
As Omar Sacirbey, writing for Huffington Post, notes, “many of these punishments have been taken out of context, abrogated, or require a near-impossible level of evidence to be carried out.” And he cites as examples, these cases:
“For someone to be convicted of adultery, for example, there must be four witnesses to the act, which is rare. The Quran also prescribes amputating the hands of thieves, but (and this is often forgotten or unmentioned) not if the thief has repented.”
Sharia is an Arabic word that means a path to be followed, and it also should not be forgotten that much of what is prescribed by Sharia Law for Muslims is religious in nature, and not imposed on outsiders to the faith. For example, it encompasses the requirement to praying five times daily, and to abstain from pork and alcohol, to live a righteous life, and to show compassion to those in need.
The scholar Qasim Rashid, notes that taking any religious text out of its historical and spiritual context will not result in what he terms an “honest legal interpretation.”
In the Old Testament, for example, Deuteronomy 21:18-21 calls for stoning disobedient children.
CFR’s Steven A. Cook notes that: “"There are so many varying interpretations of what Sharia actually means that in some places, it can be incorporated into political systems relatively easily”.
So for a start before we begin looking at Sharia law, it is worth looking at its variations. Toni Johnson and Mohammed Aly Sergie note that:
“The Hanbali school, Islam’s most orthodox, which spawned the Wahhabi and Salafi branches, is embraced in Saudi Arabia and by the Taliban. The Hanafi school, known for being the most liberal and the most focused on reason and analogy, is dominant among Sunnis in Central Asia, Egypt, Pakistan, India, China, Turkey, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. The Maliki school is dominant in North Africa and the Shafi’i school in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei Darussalam, and Yemen. Shia Muslims follow the Ja’fari school, most notably in Shia-dominant Iran.”
They also note that while extreme forms of punishment do technically belong to Sharia law, jurisprudence in practice often works out differently.
“Punishments for had offenses—flogging, stoning, amputation, exile, or execution—get a significant amount of media attention when they occur. These sentences are not often prescribed, however. ‘In reality, most Muslim countries do not use traditional classical Islamic punishments,’ says Ali Mazrui of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies in a Voice of America interview. These punishments remain on the books in some countries, but lesser penalties are often considered sufficient.”
By not being used, laws can fall into disuse, and this can happen to laws without them ever being taken off the statute books. The custom laws against sorcery, for instance, in Jersey law, have never been repealed, but when I spoke to a senior law officer about it, he informed me that they would be treated as falling into disuse and would never be implemented. Clearly something similar can happen and has happened with Sharia law.
In fact, many cases of Sharia law which do not make the headlines come from small scale domestic issues:
“Many majority Muslim countries have a dual system in which the government is secular but Muslims can choose to bring familial and financial disputes to Sharia courts. The exact jurisdiction of these courts varies from country to country, but usually includes marriage, divorce, inheritance, and guardianship.”
The reason for this is that Sharia law can judge fairly on domestic disputes, especially when marriages break down, in a way that expensive Western style adversarial conflict cannot. It also says that a woman's property, held exclusively in her name, cannot be appropriated by her husband, brother or father. This is in marked contrast to many Western systems of law where separate assets are often “considered joint assets after marriage”.
Aaron Hughes also shows how cultural factors can cause regional variations. In “Why is Islam so different in different countries?”, he comments that Islam “ is a rich and variegated religion. And this variation must be taken into account when dealing with it. Most importantly, the variation cannot be papered over with simplistic slogans or stereotypes. That women are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia but are in places like Malaysia tells you something about this variation.”
Asifa Quraishi-Landes notes that:
“[Sharia] can also be interpreted as pro-choice, with certain scholars positing that although abortion is forbidden, first-trimester abortions are not punishable.”
The one area which Gavin does not even mention, which is perhaps significant in how the countries apply Sharia law, is the case of apostasy which is punishable by death . 13 countries have these laws in place on their statue books. Louis Doré, writing in “The Independent” notes that:
“Afghanistan, Iran, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates and Yemen are the relevant countries. All of these countries, except Pakistan, allow for capital punishment against apostasy, while Pakistan imposes the death penalty for blasphemy - including a disbelief in God. “
But even here, a note of caution must be sounded.
The Library of Congress guide to “Laws Criminalizing Apostasy” notes that:
“The countries surveyed that expressly make apostasy a capital offense are Afghanistan, Brunei, Mauritania, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. However, only a small number of cases showing the application of these capital punishment laws were identified. Only two cases were identified that resulted in conviction for religious conversion—one in Iran in 1994 and another in Sudan in 2014. “
“The country surveys also indicate that apostasy laws are frequently used to charge persons for acts other than conversion. For example, in Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Yemen, individuals were charged with apostasy for their writings or comments made on social media. Of the countries researched, it appears that Iran is the only one that has executed a person convicted of apostasy to date.”
Nevertheless, the instances where laws are applied often allow them only to be abrogated on apostasy if the person repents and returns to Islam. According to Abdul Rashied Omar, the majority of modern Islamic jurists continue to regard apostasy as a crime deserving the death penalty
The death penalty for apostasy relies at the core of it on an authentically verified Hadith from Prophet Muhammad who said, "Whoever changes his religion kill him."
But as Ibrahim B. Sye of the Islamic Research Foundation International points out:
“The Hadith is so generally worded that it would require the death penalty for a Christian or Jew who converted to Islam. This is obviously not the prophet's intent.”
Clearly where apostasy rulings apply, they are as much a part of the cultural and historical traditions of a country (or its ruling elite) than a simplistic rendering would suggest. For example, in 2015, twenty-five Muslim men, including three teenagers, are facing the death penalty in Sudan after being charged with apostasy for following the wrong version of Islam. They belonged to the minority Hausa ethnicity, many of whom follow a different interpretation of Islam to the one sanctioned by Omar al-Bashir’s government.
The same occurrence can be seen in the swift action taken when ISIS murdered Muslims who did not follow their own severe brand of Sunni Islam. This is not just apostasy from within Islam, but apostasy from within Islam from different long standing diversions in tribal traditions.
So there is cause for concern about laws concerning the death penalty for apostasy, but we should understand the right reasons behind those concerns on the importance of freedom of belief rather than just simplistically blaming Sharia law.
References https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/29/sharia-law-usa-states-ban_n_3660813.html
https://www.cspii.org/en/blog/sharia-law-in-europe
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/islam-governing-under-sharia
https://theconversation.com/why-is-islam-so-different-in-different-countries-51804
https://www.loc.gov/law/help/apostasy/index.php
https://www.indy100.com/article/the-countries-where-apostasy-is-punishable-by-death--Z110j2Uwxb
https://islamqa.info/en/20327
http://www.irfi.org/articles/articles_251_300/is_killing_an_apostate_in_the_is.htm
“The countries surveyed that expressly make apostasy a capital offense are Afghanistan, Brunei, Mauritania, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. However, only a small number of cases showing the application of these capital punishment laws were identified. Only two cases were identified that resulted in conviction for religious conversion—one in Iran in 1994 and another in Sudan in 2014. “
“The country surveys also indicate that apostasy laws are frequently used to charge persons for acts other than conversion. For example, in Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Yemen, individuals were charged with apostasy for their writings or comments made on social media. Of the countries researched, it appears that Iran is the only one that has executed a person convicted of apostasy to date.”
Nevertheless, the instances where laws are applied often allow them only to be abrogated on apostasy if the person repents and returns to Islam. According to Abdul Rashied Omar, the majority of modern Islamic jurists continue to regard apostasy as a crime deserving the death penalty
The death penalty for apostasy relies at the core of it on an authentically verified Hadith from Prophet Muhammad who said, "Whoever changes his religion kill him."
But as Ibrahim B. Sye of the Islamic Research Foundation International points out:
“The Hadith is so generally worded that it would require the death penalty for a Christian or Jew who converted to Islam. This is obviously not the prophet's intent.”
Clearly where apostasy rulings apply, they are as much a part of the cultural and historical traditions of a country (or its ruling elite) than a simplistic rendering would suggest. For example, in 2015, twenty-five Muslim men, including three teenagers, are facing the death penalty in Sudan after being charged with apostasy for following the wrong version of Islam. They belonged to the minority Hausa ethnicity, many of whom follow a different interpretation of Islam to the one sanctioned by Omar al-Bashir’s government.
The same occurrence can be seen in the swift action taken when ISIS murdered Muslims who did not follow their own severe brand of Sunni Islam. This is not just apostasy from within Islam, but apostasy from within Islam from different long standing diversions in tribal traditions.
So there is cause for concern about laws concerning the death penalty for apostasy, but we should understand the right reasons behind those concerns on the importance of freedom of belief rather than just simplistically blaming Sharia law.
References https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/29/sharia-law-usa-states-ban_n_3660813.html
https://www.cspii.org/en/blog/sharia-law-in-europe
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/islam-governing-under-sharia
https://theconversation.com/why-is-islam-so-different-in-different-countries-51804
https://www.loc.gov/law/help/apostasy/index.php
https://www.indy100.com/article/the-countries-where-apostasy-is-punishable-by-death--Z110j2Uwxb
https://islamqa.info/en/20327
http://www.irfi.org/articles/articles_251_300/is_killing_an_apostate_in_the_is.htm
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