Forced Marriage Victims Offered Legal Protection

The BBC has a great audio report on forced marriage victims in Pakistan:

Some are taken to Pakistan by their parents, ostensibly on holiday, and are then forced to marry a man they've never met.

Usually he will be a relative, and by marrying a British citizen, he wins a visa and the prospects of a better life.

For the girls, though, forced marriage can be a misery. Now the British government is giving them legal protection.

This special legal protection amounts to the British High Command in Islamabad often traveling to very rural towns in Pakistan and sneaking a one-on-one, secret meeting with the women who are either asking for help, or who have come under the radar of the BHC via a family member's plea for assistance. They offer protection from family reprisal, attempting to convince her to sneak out with her belongings, often clandestinely out the back door, ducking into the British vehicles. This can happen quickly for the woman who is in dire situation and has been waiting for saving grace, or through different channels, sometimes bringing in the families, in almost an intervention-style setting, attempting to press on the young women that the choice is ultimately theirs to make, not their families'.

But what is most interesting to me is that a family's culture will sometimes override the culture of the young woman who has been forced into that marriage. Often these woman are British, through and through, with Western educations and very British lifestyles. One girl tries to compare the feeling of loneliness she had at that moment in her life with the happiness from her British lifestyle, surrounded by friends at school, and seems baffled at how she got to the current state of emptiness, alone, married to a young boy, expecting a child. Yet when push comes to shove, and the BHC offers these young, often educated girls, a life back in Britain, they cannot fathom going outside of their families' wishes. It isn't even the threat of their husbands that seem to hold the most sway, particularly as the BHC is offering protection from domestic violence, but their fathers and grandmothers. So I don't think they are sticking with 'their' culture by staying perhaps, but remaining under the authority of the generation before them.

Often I try to keep myself from objecting too strongly to such traditional practices that in the West we are not familiar with, nor can understand the grammar of. But this is not a Western imperial injection of our ethical code into a rural, Islamic ethical code that is untouched by our secularist traditions. While these young British citizens have grown up in British society, whether she shares an embodied sense of Pakistani marriage tradition or not, we must assume, even if she lives in the most conservative Pakistani home in Birmingham, England, through exposure outside of the home she also shares an embodied sense of Western tradition. Therefore options have been presented, which include educational and, perhaps, career success and independence, as British female citizens are afforded. The BHC is not going into small villages and breaking up forced marriages between two Pakistani citizens who may have no concept of an ethical code outside of their rural tradition.

It must be made clear that women in the West certainly still have their struggle for equality, and life is not perfect for the Western woman. Especially for immigrant citizens in Britain. And Pakistan is not overtly and completely patriarchal outside of family norms. After all, Pakistan itself has had a woman at the highest position in government like in Britain, and almost did again before she was assassinated almost one year ago. But these situations that the BHC intercedes in are situations that even the young girls, who again have also embodied a Western ethical structure (like Benazir Bhuto for instance), see as abusive and utterly senseless, serving only the interests of the elders in the family who made the arrangements.

I applaud this effort by the BHC, but we'll see how local shari'a courts handle the legality of this, especially when rural conservative judges not only see this as against their skewed versions of Islam, but also make the case for state (therefore even village) sovereignty in legal matters. I imagine the BHC has Pakistan's permission, but we'll see.

Excommunication

It seems that Muslim community leaders in Mumbai are refusing to bury the militants killed by the security services in Muslim cemeteries. Showing that Islamic traditions do not allow for murder and unlawful fighting (qital). Ibrahim Tai, president of the Indian Muslim Council, which looks after the social and religious affairs of the Muslim community in India, said it best:

"If the government does not respect our demands we will take up extreme steps. We do not want the bodies of people who have committed an act of terrorism to be buried in our cemeteries.... These terrorists are a black spot on our religion, we will very sternly protest the burial of these terrorists in our cemetery."

There is no place in Islam for this type of violence. Technically this type of casting out of the Muslim men who perpetrated the attack has no precedence in Islamic Law either. Usually this quasi-excommunication (although there is no church in Islam so it may be slightly misleading) is demanded by maximalist Islamist groups upon fellow Muslims who don't fight against apostates, called takfir. This philosophy has its genealogy not in Islamic Law, but from ideologues such as Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966) and the violent preaching of Egyptian working-class Islamist 'Abd al-Salam Faraj (d. 1982), whose group al-Jihad orchestrated the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat in 1982. But I'm on the same page as Juan Cole here when he says that such "egregious departure" from legitimate Sunni jurisprudence almost demands such a response from community leaders. And remember, India has the second largest Muslim population in the world.

Forbidding Wrong?

So I want to open this blog with a discussion beyond the recent headlines. Islamic ethics has been on my mind because of news reports of the little Afghani girls, who were covered (muhajiba-s), that were terrorized by having acid thrown on their faces, not for purposes of demanding modesty it seems, but for the fact that they were coming from a school...

In fact, this practice can be found in many states in this region, especially in Pakistan. Apparently Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times has been thinking about this too and has published an op-ed article on this today.

But my way of thinking goes beyond just the inhumanity of it. My investigation was based more on the ethical conception behind this attack, and how it can be related to this twisted form of coercion. I was wondering to myself, where in Islamic Law (shari'a) would such action taken by a random individual be construed as legitimate. I thought, the people who perpetrate these types of attacks would, if pushed, make some kind of religious justificaiton for it. I thought, 'Where in Islam could they extract legitimacy for this?'.

It brought me to the concept of hisba. As you may or may not know it's an 'Islamic' term, primarily coined by Mawardi and al-Ghazzali (two of the most important thinkers in Islamic history) to refer to the Qur'anic idea of 'forbidding wrong', an entrenched positive concept in the Qur'an to correct wrongdoing in the name of God. Al-Ghazzali then developed terminology from this Arabic root (h-s-b), therefore there is the one who performs hisba (al-muhtasib) and the one to whom hisba is done (al-muhtasab 'alayhi), etc.

The starting-point is the injunction of Qur'an 3:104 (and several other locations too actually) of 'commanding right and forbidding wrong', or simply forbidding wrong for short. So I decided to explore what this can mean en toto?:

Why?: Because it is essentially God's will. God is imposing a duty upon Muslims. Additionally, besides in Qur'an, the hadith from the al-Sahih Muslim is that "Whoever sees a wrong, and is able to put it right with his hand, let him do so; if he can't, then with his tongue; if he can't, then in his heart, and that is the bare minimum of faith"

Who?: There are many arguments within the different schools of jurisprudence (madhahab, singular madhab), and without them, on who is inclined, but generally any believer is commanded to do this, whether man or woman (although there are considered to be social stipulations, etc.).

To Whom?: Any Muslim, although it could be argued any human. Here too, there are social constraints on whether a child to his/her parents or student to teacher should rebuke the other, but generally speaking anyone committing a wrong (al-muhtasab 'alayhi).

Over What?: One may say one must forbid all that God and His Prophet has forbidden, all the shari'a encompasses. This is contentious as many Muslims throughout the world listen to different madhahab and even different jurists within each madhab. Therefore I believe the norm would be to not challenge people in other madhahab. An example from al-Ghazzali would be if a Shafi'ite (a particular legal school of though) is eating a lizard and a Hanafi (another particular school of thought) wants to join in, (even though it is regarded with disapproval, although not outright banned, by Hanafi law) the Shafi'ite should say nothing to rebuke the Hanafi Muslim.

When surveying this to try to come up with Islamic justification for the acid throwing, it seems that hisba is really so ambiguous still… One can claim hisba as defense for defacing young girls if one thinks that the shari'a strictly commands woman to stay at home (rather than get an education), or to cover their faces entirely.

So what can the argument be against this, besides bringing it to a Qur'anic translation and perception argument, in regards to the Prophetic traditions (ahadith) that bolster these claims for the shari'a-defense of acid throwing through demanding the submission of women? Is there more Islamic justification against this idea of using hisba to cause harm or even death?

For that answer one must hear argument that the Qur'anic thrust does not include harming people so brutally. Qur’an 2:85 states how dangerous it is for a Muslim to ‘believe in part of the Book and disbelieve in part’. The whole thrust of the message must be adhered to. The Qur'an is not the sum of all of its parts; it needs to be taken as a whole, where one must decide which message truly encompasses the Qur'anic thrust: forbidding wrong by violently forcing girls away from education and towards maximalist modesty, or forbidding wrong by promoting peace and non-violence to fellow brethren. One must demonstrate that the true thrust of the Qur'an (in simplified terms of course as one could write volumes about the Qur'an's 'true' thrust), regards peace, education, and human well-being over such things as causing harm as some grotesque form of hisba.

Hisba is not a concept obeyed to violently deface the defenseless, and I believe Qur'an backs that up explicitly. That, as the Prophet supposedly said, putting 'things right with his hand' here does not mean harming another person's health and life. Moses once commanded of a sage by his side who killed an innocent young man, "Have you killed an innocent person without justice? You have truly come with something awful!" (Q, 18:74). The language of morality here, what is 'right', can never be justified through lethal harm.

Therefore, is there any ethical justification here? No there is not, in fact even though the Muslim world has fractured jurisprudence methodology guiding different traditions in different ways, there is no categorical imperative here within the Muslim world that could ever justify this behavior. The Qur'an guides all schools of thought within Islam, and the Qur'an is extremely clear on this. God encourages Muslims in the Qur'an to speak gently and argue magnanimously (Q, 16:126) and explicitly forbids coercion (Q, 2:256). In fact, as with Kantian moral theory (which is the major influence for our modern, post-enlightenment, 'secular' ethical code), only a universal law can be the crux of a requirement that has the reason-giving thrust of moral actions, such as a moral act of hisba. "I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law" (Kant, The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:402) can easily come from the mouth of any individual that makes up part of the umma, whether a Hanafite Sunni, or Twelver Shi'i, and anything in between or beyond.

When it all comes down to it these individuals may not have hisba in mind. As a friend said to me, "their logic most likely had its source in more localized codes of behavior or in complex, emotional/psychological patterns of thought, the same patterns of thought that have made men oppressors of women since as far back as we can remember". As is often the case, Islam is just used as an excuse. Any thoughts?

(Hat tip: Sara for her reflection)