Good news for automatons
Finally, people who can’t think for themselves have an easy way to get instructions.
A telephone help-line offering advice about the true teaching of Islam is being launched in the UK today. Callers to the Islamic Hotline will get answers to their questions within 48 hours, from scholars trained at one of the world’s principal Islamic universities…The Islamic Hotline believes it has good news for British Muslims – keeping the laws of Islam is not as difficult as you thought.
How nice – submitting to the authority of reactionary outdated self-serving androcentric laws dating from fourteen centuries ago is not as difficult as you thought. It’s still a ridiculous pathetic slavish way to live and to make others live, but it’s not as difficult as you thought.
Prof Aboshady provides callers with a sense of the varying interpretations of Islamic law and then recommends one in their particular case. “We are not sticking to one view, or one school of law,” he says. “What we present is what we believe is suitable to people in different times and places and let them choose which is suitable to them. This gives Islamic law some flexibility, so we are not changing the religion or creating new religion, but simply give people the chance to choose which is suitable to them.”
So there’s a kind of gloss of flexibility, an appearance of being sensible and reasonable, but in an eviscerated form. You get a choice of a few views or schools of law, but all of them are imprisoned within the one religion, so there is ‘some flexibility,’ but no actual freedom. It’s like a bigger, airier prison with more privileges and better facilities – but it’s still a prison. It’s nothing to boast of.
Hanaa Ismail called the line about what she calls “issues in the family, about the relations between a man and his wife, what a wife’s duties are…She might be abused by a man for a long while and yet she could get embarrassed to talk about it. This has been… an Arab tradition. With this helpline she can ask for help without any embarrassment, and [the scholar] won’t know who she is, and she can ask about all the details.”
Right – but what she can’t do is say ‘the hell with this, I’m leaving.’ She can’t decide for herself that she has no duty to be beaten by her husband and no desire to tie her life to someone who wants to beat her – she has to ask a ‘scholar’ what the rules are. If he says the rules are that she has to stay with the guy who beats her, that’s that.
She should look elsewhere for advice.
“Hanaa Ismail says she values the anonymity the hotline offers”
Yet there is an all smiling photo of her in the paper. She also calls the line about relationships between a man and his wife and about the fact that a woman might be abused by a man for a very long time, etc There is nothing to smile about that indeed?!
She strikes me as being just a cover-girl, probably, for this advert.
Incidentally, I saw a person in Grafton St today and she had her head covered like Hanaa Ismael – but she was also wearing very high-heels and heavy make-up. Her veil was obviously just a fashion statement.
I would be very wary the help-line – they
Thanks, OB. That’s not a bad link.
“The Islamic scholars behind the helpline hope it will combat radicalism in Britain and help ordinary Muslims answer difficult questions about their faith…”
Combating Islamic radicalism: nothing wrong with that. And the last bit can be read to mean that tricky questions are being asked, with local luminaries not always able to supply convincing answers.
“The hotline’s backers have singled out Britain as the country most urgently in need of the service.
“El Hatef, as the hotline is known in Arabic, was set up in Egypt eight years ago to counter radicalism by bringing the minds of the nation’s best Islamic scholars to bear on people’s doubts and questions about their religion.
“Since then, two million questions from Egyptians have been answered, mostly from women, and many about sex…
“One of the Al Azhar scholars who answers hotline questions, Professor Anas Aboshady, says only 10% of rulings within Islam are generally agreed. In 90% of cases there is disagreement…”
This comes from having no Islamic pope.
Arguably, Christianity went through much the same process. People started asking questions of those with a monopoly on the right to read scripture. Bibles started appearing in the vernacular, and were all put on the first Index of 1559, allowing only the Latin Vulgate: which only scholars, and not all priests, were capable of reading. The right to read (and thus interpret) the Bible for oneself was both a demand on Catholicism and a Protestant weapon against it. But thinking for oneself, and asking questions means that answers will not necessarily be found in the Bible, leading to the situation in the West today: collapse of both Catholic and Protestant authority and to a marked decline in support for religion of any kind.
“Rizwan types in his own question – about whether the traditional Islamic rule that women should travel only with their husband’s permission applies in modern Britain.
“In Cairo, Prof Aboshady gives his judgement.
“He says the rule was designed to protect women at a time when travel was dangerous. In Britain that no longer applies.
“Prof Aboshady says true Islamic teaching was designed to make life easier for Muslims and for the non-Muslims with whom they live.
“The backers of the Islamic hotline believe it is an idea that can help defeat the radicals and their austere vision of Islam.”
My guess is that Prof Aboshady will not get too many cheers from the Islamic authorities most concerned with preserving male social domination. Solo travel by women in places like Saudi Arabia is indeed dangerous, but mainly because it is forbidden by Saudi Islam. This circular self-reinforcing system is starting to break apart.
Perhaps this service will offer more sensible advice than the South African Mufti Ebrahim Desai.
If you have the patience to read it and you enjoy getting annoyed there’s a (large) piece of advice at
http://www.askimam.org/fatwa/fatwa.php?askid=941d7af722d51b1dd5c17c008df8e918
A man writes: “Before marriage I asked my wife to do another marriage but he (sic) refused to marry me, then I made her agree saying that I would not do second marriage. Now after marriage am I still bound for taking permission from her?”
Is the answer: “No. You promised her not to.”?
Oh hell no…instead we get a panegyric on the “natural need for polygyny”; quotes from religions (naturally); false demographic stats; snippets from Dr. Le Bon, Annie Besant, Reverend Canon Isaac Taylor, and an exposition on the pitfalls of polyandry.
And anyway – is wot’s good for goose good for gander? Well no – you see – because “men and women, constitute completely dissimilar species”. And just in case you don’t believe that lots of neurological research are cited to prove it.
How naive is the journalist who wrote that article?
The example question/answer was obviously pre-arranged. He should have done some actual research by asking his own questions.
I’m feeling this dreadfully mischievous tempation… I’m picturing setting up this simple touchtone-navigated service… y’know: ‘If the woman you are living with is reading books contrary to the teachings of the prophet, press one… If she is refusing you sex, press two…’
… and whatever you press, the cheerful telephone voice sez: ‘Stone her… Press star to end this call, 9 to return to the main menu…”
Good one, AJ!
And thanks for that, Mags. I’ll have to read this guy…
That’s an excellent suggestion AJ. Maybe the Landover Baptist could also come aboard on this.
http://www.landoverbaptist.org/