For the thoughtful reader, who would like to formulate Islamic responses by using his or her intellectual and moral capacities for ijtihad, or independent and creative reasoning, and who would also like to try to solve problems of real life as a Muslim in the world of today, I postulate below sample situations in which both an Islamic response to a particular problem and a feasible solution to it are required in the given situation.  The situations are not wholly imagined either.  Some of us might even have been presented at some stage of our life with a problem such as one of the following, or he or she may have heard or read about it.  At any rate, the purpose is to exercise and apply one’s creative thought, religious-moral resourcefulness in handling, resolving, a sense of realism with a bit of wisdom, in coming to intellectual and moral grips to and solving real problems in Muslim life.  The reader may put himself or herself in the position of a parent (that’s how I am visualizing these situations, i.e., as problems presented especially before a kind, compassionate, loving, and caring Muslim father or mother), older brother or older sister, concerned friend or well wisher, teacher, counselor, imam (the Muslim counterpart of a Christian minister or Jewish rabbi), faqih (Islamic law jurist, legist, or lawyer), alim (learned in the teaching of the Quran and Sunnah), Sunni muft or Shia mujtahid (deliverer of a fatwa, or legal verdict, ex cathedra—the famous or infamous case being that of  Imam Khomenie delivering a fatawa in 1989 of death sentence on Salmon Rushdie on the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses, 1989, which he, Khomenie, viewed as his, Rushdie’s, apostasy from Islam), qadi (Shariah, or Islamic law, court judge), hakim (literally ruler, but including any government official with the authority to make and enforce his or her decisions), or the proverbial Muslim lay man or woman in the bazaar.  In other words, these situations can be visualized both as being those that one may face in private life, but also may be seen as those that the Muslim society may face in public life.  Put alternatively, these and similar problems and situations are objects of not only Muslim personal ethics but also of Muslim social ethics.  However, thought and learning are not all that they call for, they also call for compassion, caring, and the willingness, courage, and  decision to adopt a certain course of action—personally, socially, and culturally in the midst of a difficult situation that might try one’s soul or the soul of the family, community, and society in which one finds oneself placed.  The question in ethics always is: what shall the individual do, what social norms shall the family, community, and society espouse and consider right, good, kind, compassionate, wise?  As we know, in the fixation of social norms, personal and social ethics and public theology must all intersect and reach a general equilibrium in society.  At the same time, or, better yet, before we come upon a problem in a situation of the sorts postulated below, what are we to think creatively as individuals and as society as to how we shall handle, resolve, and, hopefully, solve it, as conscientious Muslims in real Muslim life.  Again, the question each of the following situations presents is: what would one, approached or charged with the personal and social responsibility to formulate a response to the problem, say or do in the face of the problem at hand?  Anyway, postulated below are sample situations to be thought and reflected about, discussed, and deliberated upon as cases in point,  which I submit for a start.

Your daughter tells you that her husband often beats her and, what is more, he even tells her that the Holy Quran gives the husband the right to beat his wife in order to discipline her and correct her.  She has the definite feeling that, at times, he beats her only to take out frustrations he experiences on the job that have nothing to do with her.

Note: The assertion by the husband in the above case is based upon verse 34 in chapter 4 of the Quran that says: "As to those women, on whose part you fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them, refuse to share their beds (i.e., deny them sexual gratification), and beat them."

Your daughter holds a university degree (BA in Psychology), is an exceptionally bright young woman, has been married for over ten years, and has three children, 9, 8, and 6 years of age.  Now she wants to go to the graduate school and earn her MA, maybe even a Ph.D., in her field and work as a child psychologist.  She has not only been accepted for graduate work at her old school, but has also been offered a tuition scholarship: thanks to two of her former teachers who still remember her as an outstanding undergraduate student with a pleasing personality and as an unforgettable character, who was always so very sharply and charmingly dressed in her colorful Pakistani suit of shalwar qamis with a dupatta wrapped around her neck with both its ends hanging over her breasts for modesty’s sake.  As one of them once put it, "Safia is a delight to look at and talk to."  For her scholastic achievement and personal charm and perhaps not the least she was the only Muslim student in the Department of Psychology, she had indeed left a lasting impression upon her teachers and classmates.  Those who still remembered her were delighted to have her return for her graduate work.

Your daughter is excited on the prospect of returning to school.  You are truly happy for her, too.  But she tells you that her husband has refused her permission to do so and seems to have left no room for changing his mind.  He has told her that he absolutely forbids her to go back to school and does not want her to work either.  According to him, she has more than enough education as it is and her work is at home, as his wife and the mother of his children.  He has made it clear that he wants to hear no more about her going to school or work.

Note: The husband is entitled to demand obedience from his wife or wives.  This assertion is based on the first part of verse 34 in chapter 4 of the Quran (quoted above) which says: "Men are controllers and maintainers of women, because God has given the one (men) more (physical strength) than the other (women), and because they support them from their means.  Therefore the righteous women are devoutly obedient, and guard in (the husband’s) absence what (i.e., their chastity) God would have them guard."

Your daughter, who has been married for fourteen years and has five children, tells you that her husband has decided to get a second, younger, wife, because, as he says, she is too old. Your daughter is 32 and her husband 39.  Her husband has given her two options, viz., either accept his second marriage and stay married to him or, if she wants, he would give her a divorce but, on condition, that she would forfeit her mahr (dower) of $50,000 that has remained unpaid by the husband so far and, since all the children are above the age of seven, he will have the sole custody of them.  If she agrees to those conditions of divorce, that is if she chooses to be divorced, he will let her go with full dignity and that she will have no further claim against him, his house and possessions, or income, and he against her.

Note:  The man has the right, according to the Shariah, or Islamic law, to marry more than one woman and have up to four wives at the same time.  This right is granted to him by verse 3 in chapter 4 of the Quran that says: "Marry women of your choice , two, or three, or four."

Your daughter has been married for fifteen years and, for perfectly justifiable reasons in her and your judgment, too, has decided to divorce her husband.  She has filed formal papers for a khul or khula, meaning dissolution of marriage (divorce in the ordinary language) at the initiative of the wife, in the Shraiah, Islamic law, court, seeking the grant of a divorce from her husband.  She had been married for a mahr (dower) of $60,000, of which $15,000 was paid to her by her husband before the consummation of the marriage and $35,000 was deferred to be paid either at a later but unspecified date or in the event of talaq, or a divorce by the repudiation of the wife by the husband.  Because the wife has initiated the divorce and has petitioned the court for a khula, the court has ruled that the wife must return to the husband the $15,000 (portion of the mahr paid to her by the husband) and forfeit the balance of the mahr (unpaid portion of the mahr), $35,000, for the court to grant her petition to end the marriage.  (Your daughter has been, in the usual Muslim lifestyle, a full time wife and mother, who devoted herself to domesticity, raised seven children that were born of her union with her husband, and cared for her husband’s parents who lived with the family.  She has no money of her own and, therefore, cannot pay back $15,000, the portion of the mahr that her husband had paid her, which she spent for her children’s and other household needs over the past fifteen years.)

Your daughter has been married for four years during which she has not conceived a child. She and her husband live in his parents’ house and, on account of this, her husband is quite disappointed in her and she has become a persona non-greta in her husband’s house. Under the insinuations of his mother especially, your daughter’s husband has been talking about divorcing your daughter, because she cannot conceive.  He has told her in no uncertain terms that, if she fails to conceive within the year, he will divorce her.

Note: The provision of polygamy (plurality of wives) in Islam is based, among other factors, on the desire of the man to have children and his present wife (or wives) is unable to have children.  If and when his wife (or wives) objects or he does not want to have more than one wife, he has the right, according to the Shariah, or Islamic law, to divorce her (or them if he has more than one wife).

Your daughter, fifty-one years of age, has been married for thirty-seven years to an upper middle class lawyer with a lucrative practice, who practices law in the highest Shariah, or Islamic law, court of the country.  The couple has several children, all grown adults with wives and children of their own.  Quite unexpectedly, one day she shows up at your door, visibly disturbed, looking terrible, and weeping.  On inquiring, you learn that her husband has divorced her and married a much younger woman.  With no place to go, your daughter has obviously come to your house.  She had long ago forgiven her mahr (dower or bride price for which a man marries a Muslim woman and must pay it to her either before or at the time of the consummation of the marriage, but, with the wife’s agreement, he may postpone the payment to an undetermined future date, but it must be paid in full if and when he divorces her, unless she has forgiven it, in which case the husband is no longer under obligation to pay), hence she received no payment for it.  Neither will she receive any property share in the family house or possessions, or any support for her maintenance from her former husband.  She has no marketable skill to look for a job, except as a domestic worker; actually, in the proper sense of the word, she is not fit for any kind of paid employment outside the home.

Note: In the Islamic tradition, a man has the obligation, according to the Shariah, or Islamic law, to support his wife only so long as she is his wife.  After divorce, he has no obligation to provide for her.  Neither does the Shariah recognize what in American law is called "community property."  Hence, on being divorced by the husband, the wife has no property rights in the family home and possessions—they are the husband’s property.  Under the circumstances, the obligation to support, protect, and care for the divorced woman is placed upon other males—father, brother, son, and near or distant kinsmen.  If no such support is available, she becomes the responsibility of the ummah, or Muslim community, or the state.

One day, in one of the father-daughter talks, that are a delight of your life, your daughter tells you that, though she is happy and certainly well-provided for—her husband’s business has been doing very well and she is the envy of her less fortunate friends—she considers herself less fortunate than they, because her husband has a londi (slave girl, concubine, or mistress in English language) and has rented an apartment for her in another part of the town.  She goes on to say that "when I heard about it from my saheli (best friend) whose husband had told her in strict confidence—but because, she said, she cared for me "she could not keep it from me"—I didn’t believe it.  I told my husband what I had heard," and he said that what she had heard was true, but it had nothing to do with her.  "He said with the fullest assurance that having a londi is no different in Islam from having a wife, or a second, third or fourth wife, and that even our beloved Prophet Muhammad had, beside his wives, a londi, or slave girl, named Maria Qibtiya, the mother of his son Ibrahim.  Abba (Daddy), I know no more of Islam than what you and Ammi (Mother) told me.  But it hurts me deeply and makes me very, very sad and angry, too.  I cannot stand the thought of his being with another woman while I am alive.  He has been good to our children and me, and I have no complaint against him.  How can a good man do what he is doing?  Doesn’t he realize it hurts and humiliates the children and me too?  What am I to do?"

Note: The right of the man to own slave girls and keep concubines is granted by the Sahriah, or Islamic law.  The Prophet and his Companions had slave girls and/or concubines, too, and had sexual relations and fathered children with them.  The last country to legally abolish the practice was Saudi Arabia that did so in the 1960s.

Your daughter is married to a muttaqi (God-fearing and pious Muslim) highly respected both in the community and the mosque.  He is a wealthy man.  He is known to be generous and charitable, and gives large donations to the mosque—he is always in demand as a highly resourceful fund raiser for the mosque and for scholarships for the education of children from poor families—and contributes to all sorts of other religious, community, and humanitarian causes, too.  He has performed hajj (pilgrimage to Makkah) twice, and is addressed with great respect by one and all as Haji Sahib.  As his wife, your daughter has a high position in society and is received with great respect in all social gatherings, often as the chief guest of honor in ladies functions.  To see your only daughter comfortably married off and so well received, respected, and honored in society has given you the greatest happiness in your old age.

One day your daughter, 31 years of age and mother of six, brings up in a conversation with you something known to everyone but which she now tells you, has always oppressed her intensely, though about which, in keeping with the ideal of a dutiful Muslim wife, she has always been forbearing.  Her forbearance, however, has not lessened her private suffering, and she cannot remain silent about it any longer. What it is is that your daughter’s husband, a man of thirty-nine, has an insatiable desire for young, virgin girls.  He is always on the lookout for them and spends a fortune on it, too.  Often he would pay an enormous amount to the father of a girl, not even a teenager yet or hardly in her teens, to contract a mutah (a temporary marriage solely for his pleasure) with her for a week to a couple of months or so.  Your daughter goes on to say to you that she naturally does not mind his spending large sums of money for contracting mutah frequently, because after all it is his money, but, on account of his temporary marriages, he does not even acknowledge her existence for months on end and it makes her unhappy in the extreme.  The truth be told, she tells you: "Abba (Daddy), I cannot really endure it any longer.  You have to do something to help me.  I know I am no teenager and can’t compete with one.  But I am still a young woman and have needs, too.  You know what I mean."
 

You raised your only daughter —whom you and her mother and older brothers, too, made every effort to protect and shelter from the world outside the home and from contact with men and women not immediately related to her, even screening her female friends and the television programs she watched before her marriage two years ago—in the finest Muslim tradition, giving her a loving, secure, neat and clean, and happy home to grow in and gave her a good upbringing, and traditional religious and moral instruction.  It had been your and your wife’s practice to take your daughter to the Islamic center and the mosque every Sunday and to other programs on special occasions even when you were not always successful in having your sons to accompany you.  You also sent your daughter to the Islamic school.  There she received education up to the 9th grade at the end of which she also turned 16.  Then she was removed from school for the reason that, in order to continue her schooling and graduate from high school, she would have had to go to a public school for her 10th, 11th, and 12th grades, which you decided against, given what you had heard and known about the goings on in American public schools.  Consequently, her formal education ended with her completion of the 9th grade.  At her Islamic school, she received a good education, including religious education, but no "sex education," so to speak, and none at the Islamic center and the mosque or at home either.  Even the mother-daughter talk on the eve of her marriage was a mere formality without informing her about anything of consequence concerning sex as such.  Be that as it may, Alhamdulillah, praise be to God, your daughter is indeed a most proper, loveable, and charming Muslim girl.  Nature has been good to her: she is a beautiful young woman, too.  Being your only daughter, you love her and care for her deeply, and are proud and fond of her as you are of no one else.

Removed from school, you decided to arrange her marriage.   After a long search, you chose a just graduated (with an MBA) handsome and likeable young man of 24 from a good and socially compatible family of your own religious, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural background for her to marry.  At the time of choosing him as your prospective son-in-law, it had come to your knowledge from reliable sources that he had a history of dating American girls, white as well as black, and had even lived with one "in sin" for several months.  But the facts that his parents had come as immigrants from the same country as you did and that the young man had a well-paid job with a reputed American company weighed heavily in your decision in favor of the match.   Her mahr (dower or bride price) was fixed at $100,000, of which $25,000 was to be paid to her by the husband before the consummation of marriage and the balance of $75,000 at a future but unspecified date or in the event if and when her husband divorced her by repudiation.  On the other hand if and when she wanted to end the marriage, i.e., sought a khula, or divorce from her husband at her own initiative, she was to return the paid portion of the mahr, viz., the $25,000 paid to her by the husband, and also forfeit the balance of the mahr, i.e., $75,000, for their marriage to be dissolved legally according to the Shariah, or Islamic law.  These conditions were written in the marriage contract and were agreed to by all parties concerned and signed by your daughter and her prospective husband before the nikah, or the Islamic marriage ceremony, and were witnessed by you as the father of the bride and by the father of the groom with the whole assembly of the guests watching the proceedings and preparations for the wedding.

You gave your daughter a traditional and, at the same time, a highly festive wedding and a grand reception in a large hall at a four-star hotel with some 500 invited guests, both Muslim and non-Muslim, who still remember its for its festiveness and the sumptuous dinner they ate.  Most important of all, you gave your daughter a substantial dowry that made her all the more welcome as a bride in her husband’s house.  The newlyweds also received gifts from the guests to last a lifetime.

All seems to have gone well in your daughter’s two-year marriage.  Her husband is attentive to her and the only time he is away from her is when he travels on business—which is frequent but which his job requires.  Her in-laws think a world of their daughter-in-law.  She has no problem with them. To all appearance, your daughter is happy, she certainly tells you she is except that sometimes you have a feeling, certainly a suspicion, that often she is moody, withdrawn, almost spaced out, while visiting at home.  It is as if her personality has changed radically and she has become quite unlike the girl she was before marriage.  Even her laugh is not the same old loveable laugh that was so pleasing to your ears.  This both puzzles and worries you and her mother, and her brothers too, greatly and constantly.

Both because she is herself worried but also because you have asked your wife to get her daughter to talk to her about what is going on in her life, she has tried repeatedly to get her daughter to talk to her, but has remained unsuccessful in getting her to tell her what preoccupies her, which is sometimes so very obviously visible on her face and so very painful to watch for her mother, father and brothers.  This has only made everyone all the more worried.  One of your sons suggested that she should be encouraged to see a psychiatrist, but you have rejected his suggestion as not a proper course to be taken.  Not even a Muslim psychiatrist, even a female one, is acceptable to you.   Then, quite unexpectedly, one afternoon when your wife was alone at home, to her utter shock and surprise, your daughter came alone—which was unusual for her to do (driving herself over nearly fifty miles to your house), because she in the past was driven and escorted either by her husband or a brother of hers—to see her mother, looking visibly upset and in tears.  The two had a heart to heart mother-daughter talk for the first time in their life.

The mother learned, amidst her daughter’s tears, that her husband comes upon her roughly, practically in a beastly fashion, sometimes totally unexpectedly, and insists on having his way, often forcing her to have sex when she does not want it and tells him so, actually begs him not to make her to submit physically to him by force and meet his demands.   Often, he does not leave her alone even when she is menstruating, knowing full well that her periods usually cause painful cramps for her, and insists on getting sexual gratification in some form or another.  Also, he demands things and puts her into positions that she does not like at all or finds painful.  When she tells him that he is hurting her, he says that, as his wife, it is her duty to satisfy him and let him have sex when and how he will.  Your wife tells you that at this point, she began to weep profusely and seemed totally exhausted physically and emotionally.

That night, your wife tells you all.  On being asked by you what specifically her husband demands from your daughter or does with or to her, your wife says that she herself wanted to know and asked her, but she only said: "Ammi (Mom), please don’t ask me for details, please Ammi, don’t."  Your wife tells you that their most painful mother-daughter talk ended with the anguished cry of her daughter: "As a wife, don’t I have any say in this sex thing?"

Note: The husband is given the right to have sex with his wife when and how he pleases by verse 223 of chapter 2 of the Quran that says: "Your wives are as your tilth unto you; so approach your tilth when or how you will."

Your wife has just informed you that the family is up against a problem, a huge problem with the youngest daughter, which she (the mother) alone cannot handle and has to tell you so that you would know and, maybe, you can find a solution for it.  Even though the understanding between you and your wife is that you do not want to know anything about what female problems your three daughters (all of marriageable age but none married yet, the two oldest in their early thirties) might be experiencing.  In spite of your indignant refusal to hear what your wife has to say about the problem that the youngest daughter might be having and your telling your wife that you do not want to know, your wife emphatically tells you that "If I know it, you have to know it with me."  Then she drops the bombshell on you: "Our youngest daughter is pregnant.  She is in the first week of the third month of her pregnancy.  To make matters worse, she is pregnant with the child of a man who is already married, whom we all know."

Note: The Shariah, or Islamic law, has a single term, zina, or unlawful sexual intercourse, for a number of sexual crimes that are grouped under it.  Zina includes 1) fornication, or sexual intercourse between unmarried persons, 2) adultery, or sexual intercourse involving a married person, 3) rape, or sexual intercourse by force, 4) sodomy, or sexual intercourse in the anus, 5) bestiality, or sexual intercourse with an animal, 6) incest, or sexual intercourse with a person with whom it is forbidden by virtue of a relationship of blood, kinship, or marriage, and 7) prostitution.  Inasmuch as, sexual intercourse in Islam always means the penetration of another with the penis, some Muslims would also regard insertion of the penis in the mouth of another, or fellatio, as falling in the category of zina, or unlawful sexual intercourse.  In the fundamental sense, sexual intercourse for a man with a woman is permitted only if she is either his wife (including a mutah, or temporary wife for pleasure, in Shia Islam) or slave girl or concubine.  Whereas male homosexuality is specifically mentioned as unlawful in the Quran, there is no mention of female homosexuality, or lesbian sex, in the Quran.  Hence, whether it is lawful or unlawful is open to interpretation.
 
The Shariah, or Islamic law, demands a very rigorous proof for the conviction of a man or woman of the  crime of zina, or unlawful sexual intercourse, in an Islamic court of law.  Only two types of proof are admissible.  Either the man or woman accused of zina confesses his or her crime under oath in the court, or four devout men (Muslim that is) testify that they all, each one of them, witnessed the man penetrating with his penis the vagina or the anus of the woman or the anus of his male partner.  No amount of witnessing the two in a compromising position is sufficient to convict them, even if and when they were both naked and one on top of the other.  If the person or persons bringing the charge of zina against a man or a woman cannot offer four reliable eye witnesses to the act of zina, or sexual intercourse, he or they become criminally responsible for making a false accusation of zina, and become liable, too, to be judged guilty of slander and punished for their crime by the court.  However, if and when a woman, who is not either a married woman or is a slave girl or a concubine of a man, is found to be pregnant, her pregnancy becomes the clear proof of her having committed the crime of zina, whether she does or does not name the man responsible for impregnating her.  If she does not name the man with whom she committed zina and he confesses to his participation in the crime, or he does not come forward of his own free will and confesses his crime, he goes free.

Once a man or woman has been judged guilty of zina in an Islamic court of law, the Quran prescribes the following punishments for the same:

"If any of your women are guilty of lewdness, take the evidence of four witnesses from amongst you against them; and if they testify, confine them (guilty women) to houses until death do claim them" (Quran, 4: 15).

"If two men among you are guilty of lewdness, punish them both" (Quran, 4: 16).

"The woman and the man guilty of adultery or fornication, flog each of them with a hundred stripes: Let not compassion move you in their case, in a matter prescribed by God, if you believe in God and the Last Day (of Judgment): and let a party of the Believers witness their punishment" (Quran: 24: 2).
 

You are engaged in the negotiations of matchmaking for your daughter with the father of an eligible bachelor.  Judged by any standards, the two to be matched for marriage are religiously, ethnically, linguistically, and culturally acceptable to the families of both parties.  They are also socially (i.e., in terms the socio-economic class of each family and the income of the prospective male candidate for marriage) compatible.  Because the negotiations are nearing completion, the father of the prospective husband-to-be has raised one last question, customarily asked in the course of such negotiations in the Muslim society.  This question was considered only a formality and harmless enough in the time and place when Muslim girls were usually married soon after their reaching the age of puberty or even before.  It was asked by the father of the boy without reflecting upon the dignity of the father of the girl or upon the character of the girl herself.  It was also answered in the same spirit in the affirmative and the answer was believed readily, and that was that.  But we live in a different time today.  On account of the fact that marriages today are delayed until the late twenties and even thirties—because both males and females are pursuing higher education and for all sorts of other reasons—asking the same question of the father of a prospective daughter-in-law, who, let us say, has gone to high school, university, and medical school, too, and is employed as a physician or has a successful medical practice of her own, and is 36 years of age, it might be quite out of place, probably even an affront.  Be that as it may, in our postulated case, the father of the young man has asked you that question, the usual question, concerning your daughter, who has never been married before, to wit: "Tell me, is your daughter a virgin?"

Note: The Quran lays down in verse 3 of chapter 24 of the Quran: "Let no man guilty of adultery or fornication marry any but a woman similarly guilty."
 

Your wife tells you that your first year college-going daughter, eighteen years of age, has been secretly dating a classmate of hers for several months and she says that she loves him and he loves her.  She goes on to say that she has told her in the strictest confidence—but I am telling you—that they often spend many an afternoon together at a friend’s apartment, sometimes even absent themselves from their classes, and have sexual intercourse, too.  However, they use contraception pills that our daughter got from the Student Health Center and, thank God, she is not pregnant.  When I asked her "Why are you telling me all this now?" she replied that she has decided not to pursue her college studies, because they want to get married and have children, while they are young."  She has made it plain that, if you do not give your permission for her to marry the man she loves and wants to marry and give her in marriage to him in an Islamic marriage as soon as possible, they would have no other alternative than to get married in a civil marriage.

One day a young man appears at your door and says that he has come to get his wife, and that—this you learn for the first time from him—he and the oldest one of your five daughters, a senior in college, were secretly married in a civil ceremony three months before.  A scene is created with everyone shouting at everyone else, but nothing can change the fact that the marriage had taken place and consummation of the marriage, too.   While all the commotion and a certain amount of pushing and shoving are going on and even real violence seems imminent, your daughter grabs her husband’s hand and says, "Let’s go, Honey."  They are gone.

Note: The religious, moral and ethical teaching and the civilizational strategy of Islam, rooted in the Quran and Sunnah and Islamic history, has been that, not only premarital courtship or anything approaching and/or resembling what is called dating in the West is haram, or forbidden, but also any contact, interaction, and socialization between persons of the opposite sexes, beginning from a couple of years before reaching the age of puberty is strictly forbidden.  The segregation of the sexes, veiling of females from age nine, prohibition of coeducation, denial of the physical and social opportunities to persons of the opposite sexes to be alone with one another, arranged marriages, denial of the right to the woman to give herself in marriage to any man without her father’s and, in his absence, her male guardian’s permission, and more are aimed at controlling the sexuality and marriage of women.

Your daughter, twenty-one years of age, tells you that she has consented to marry this man of means, whom she loves, who has two wives already, but, says she, she does not mind.  He is a good Muslim and has taken an oath on the Holy Quran in the presence of his two wives who believed the sincerity of his oath, and, therefore, they both have given their permission to him to marry her, too, insomuch as he will do equal justice to all his wives and will provide for each one of them equally, as the Shariah, or Islamic law, demands.   So nothing now stands in the way of your daughter’s marriage to him.  Anyway, your daughter and her husband to be have set the date for their wedding, to which now she has come to invite you, her mother, and her brothers and sisters.

Note: Islam gives man the right to marry more than one woman and have a plurality of wives up to four at a time.  The important condition is that he does equal justice to and treats all his wives equally.  This is stated in verse 3 of chapter 4 of the Quran: "Marry women of your choice, two, or three, or four; but if you fear that you shall not be able to deal justly (with them), then only one."  Later, the Quran in verse 129 of the same chapter also issues a forewarning to the man, who is intending to get a second, third, or fourth wife, that he won’t be able to do justice to all his wives: "You are never able to be fair and just as between women, even as it is your ardent desire."  However, it is up to the man himself whether he will or does equal justice to and treats all his wives equally.   It is a matter between him and God.

Your daughter is at the university and will complete her undergraduate studies in this final semester of hers and is due to graduate with her BS with an Accounting major at the end of spring.  So far you have financed her education with the mutual understanding that, on finishing college, she will either get married or get a job.  Now she tells you that she has changed her mind and made other plans.  In the main, she has consented to contract a mutah (temporary marriage) with a businessman in his fifties for the duration of the summer vacation, exactly 90 days, during which time she would also have the right to live for free in his, i.e., her temporary husband’s, town house with all her maintenance and other living expenses paid by him.  As her dower, for which he has agreed to pay her in advance, i.e., before their first sexual intercourse, she is to receive the agreed upon sum of so much, which, she says, would enable her to go to the graduate school and get her MBA.  Only after getting her MBA will she look for a job, for she has no plans to get married for some years.

Note:  During the time before the advent of Islam in Arabia, the custom of mutah, or temporary marriage for pleasure, was widely practiced by Arabs.  Prophet Muhammad allowed it during the time of the propagation of Islam.  According to some sources, he declared it unlawful in the year before his death.

This, however, raises the question: Why did the Prophet Muhammad permit its practice by his Companions and soldiers during his military missions and expeditions until the last year of his life?

 However, according to Shiah Islam, mutah is permanently permitted by verse 24 of chapter 4 of the Quran that says: "Seeing that you derive pleasure from them, give them their remuneration [Quran uses the Arabic word ujur, meaning wages of hire or dower], as prescribed; but if, after a dower is prescribed, you agree mutually [to vary the terms of mutah], there is no blame on you."  As to the Hadith, or Tradition, of the Prophet Muhammad that he declared mutah unlawful before his death, the Shiah do not regard its report as an authentic narrative.  Consequently, mutah is considered as the "glorious law of Islam," and practiced by  Shia Muslims all over the world, including by some in the United States.  By contrast, Sunni Islam considers it, i.e., mutah, or temporary marriage for pleasure, unlawful and some Muslims go so far as to call it "prostitution."

A clarification is in order here.  The original purpose of mutah, or temporary marriage for pleasure, is to keep muttaqi, or God-fearing, pious and devout Muslim men—who occasionally need and want to experience sexual intercourse with different women or young virgins, or when they are temporarily away from their permanent wife or wives, or slave girls or concubines—from temptation or commitment of zina, or unlawful sex, in one form or another, including going to a prostitute, so that, with their need gratified in a permissible and legitimate way, they can keep their faith and piety intact.  The permission of mutah is not intended to be a way for women to make money.

You have a situation in your family, because your son at the university has decided to move out of the house and live with a couple of friends of his near the campus.  Even when he lived at home, he was free to come and go as he pleased.  Often he did not come home until 2 or 3 in the morning.  You also know from reliable sources—one source being your own daughter who goes to the same university as your son and has often seen her brother on the campus in the company of his girl friends—that he dates girls on the campus.  Now your daughter says and is insistent that she should have the same freedom that her brother had, when living at home, to come and go as he pleased and to date, too, and, that if she wants to, she should also have the right to live away from home.

Note: Though Islam demands an equal observance of its moral and ethical precepts and laws pertaining to sexual conduct by men and women—to be sure, Islam permits far greater freedom, scope, and latitude to men than women for sexual fulfillment—Islamic society and culture have, throughout history to date, strictly restricted, constrained, and controlled women and female sexuality from very early girlhood, typically from nine years of age, which is popularly regarded as the age of womanhood.  A woman is not considered an independent moral agent and an autonomous member of society in her own right.  She always belongs to a man, who is qawwam over her, or "in charge of her"—as his daughter, step daughter, daughter-in-law (in the absence of her husband), sister, sister-in-law, (in the absence of her husband), wife, mother, aunt, niece, slave girl, concubine, or ward—whether she is unmarried, married, widowed, divorced, separated, or orphaned.  The age or education or wealth of the woman does not figure in this fundamental Islamic conception of woman either.  In the strict doctrinal sense, no Muslim woman is ever free, equal, and independent.  As a pre-or-unmarried woman, she is under the control of her father (or, in his absence, her brother or some other male guardian).   On the eve of her marriage, she is passed on to her husband and placed under his control.  On being divorced, abandoned, or widowed, she reverts to the control of her father, brother, son, or some other male guardian.

If the above  construction of womanhood in Islam is correct, no Muslim father can accept the idea of his daughter’s equal freedom to come and go, stay out of the home, and socialize with boys or men as he does in the case of his son, hence, the problematic situation such as the above.

You are decided that you want to arrange the marriages of your sons and daughters and you tell them that it is their duty to obey and accept your decision as final in the matter of a match for marriage.  Actually, you cannot emphasize enough that you would find and import eligible and suitable boys and girls for your children to marry in your country of origin, from which you have immigrated to America.

They all say they would accept your choice and decision, except one, a daughter, who says in no uncertain terms that she finds the whole idea of an arranged marriage repugnant and tells you: "My marriage is my concern and you need not concern yourself with it.  When I want to get married, I’ll find a person of my own choice to marry.  That’s that.  Indeed, I would not even rule out a person of a different race, religion, or ethnic group whom I might marry.  Anyway, my marriage is my own affair, no one else’s."

Note:  Clearly, according to Islamic teaching, a daughter’s marriage is every concern of her father, or some other appropriate male, such as brother, uncle, or grandfather.   She may find a man to marry, but she must obtain the approval of the man in charge of her, for neither is she legally competent to give herself in marriage to him, nor would her marriage to him without his permission or giving her in marriage to the man in question be considered legally valid.  Indeed, if she does marry the man on her own, the consummation of marriage would expose both of them to the charge of zina, or unlawful sexual intercourse, and would make them liable for the punishment prescribed for zina (in the form of fornication)  in the Sharah, or Islamic law.

You have received a paigham, proposal, for marriage for your daughter who is twelve years of age and, to your knowledge, has not yet had her first menses, or the first menstruous flow.  The proposal has been conveyed to you by a grandmotherly matron, known for rendering her services for matchmaking to interested parties in return for gifts in kind and payment in cash.  Indeed, that’s how she earns her precarious living.  She is well received in the community and is generally considered, as a go-between,  trustworthy, discrete, and truthful in matrimonial negotiations.  The proposal is from a man, whom you have known for years from the Islamic center and who comes regularly for prayers to the mosque.  He is known to be a good Muslim.  He has been a widower for a little over two years and lives alone.  He has three sons and two daughters, all adult, married, with families and households of their own.  From his looks the man must be in his mid forties.  He is in good health and seems strong and vigorous.  He is a successful businessman, owns his spacious home, and is financially very well off.

After hearing of his proposal for marriage to your daughter and after you had gotten over your shock and surprise at his nerve to propose marriage to your still prepubescent daughter, you wished if only he had proposed marriage to your sister, who is in her late thirties, was divorced a year ago with a six year old daughter in her custody—her older children remaining in the custody of her former husband who has since remarried—and who has lived in your house since her divorce and depends on you for her and her daughter’s maintenance.   So in response to his proposal for marriage to your daughter, you ask the conveyor of his original proposal to take your proposal to him for a marriage between your sister and him.  The old woman in the middle does so—you pay her well for her services—and gets back to you after two days and tells you that he is not interested in marrying your divorced sister, but would like very much to be married to your daughter and wants you to reconsider his proposal.  She adds that the man says that he is prepared to wait for another year, if you like, before marriage takes place.

Note:  According to the Shariah, or Islamic law, the marriage of a man of any age to a nine year old girl (or inter-generational marriage) is perfectly proper, moral, and lawful.  Both because the age of majority in the Shariah for a women is nine, but there also the precedent of the marriage of the fifty-one (51) year old Prophet Muhammad to the nine year old Aisha, the daughter of his most trusted friend and companion Abu Bakr, who also became his first successor-ruler on his death at Madianh.

You have an unmarried daughter, your oldest of three daughters and two sons, who is 29 years of age and who holds an MSW (Master of Social Work) and is employed as a social worker.  She is intelligent, smart, and highly thought of at the Department of Social Services of Los Angeles County.  Actually, her superiors are so pleased with her performance that they have encouraged her to return to the School of Social Work of the University of Southern California to earn her DSW (Doctor of Social Work) at the expense of the Department and with a reasonable amount of time-off from work to take the afternoon classes on two days during the week.  She is very pleased and has decided to do so.

You are justly proud of your daughter’s achievements and happy for her that she is not only well employed but also so well thought of by her superiors and co-workers.  The only thing that concerns you, indeed at times oppresses you, is that, at 29, she is still not married.  But given her education, status, the money she earns, and the prospects on the job she has, not one proposal of marriage has come for her so far from a man who could be considered socially compatible to her and/or economically her equal, much less superior, and, therefore, none has been acceptable to you.  You have looked far and wide for a suitable match for her, but in vain.  You have even taken ads in Muslim newspapers and magazines in the matrimonial columns in search for a husband for her, under the heading "Seeking Husband" and sent photos and videos of your daughter to a few selected and promising candidates, but to no avail.

Even though, strictly speaking and officially, your daughter is forbidden to date with a view to finding a spouse for herself, she, of course, meets all manners of men, in her professional work.  Without realizing that inevitable and harmless interaction and mixing between men and women at work and going out for lunch with co-workers are capable of developing into a pattern and even a social and emotional necessity to a degree, your daughter has formed something of a friendship, actually an attachment, with a Christian colleague.  His name is Charles Elliott. Your daughter has spoken of him, among others—persons in the office and sometimes her clients—whom she comes in contact with in the course of the day’s work, at the dinner table and in your daily after-dinner conversation with her.  You have never met Chuck, as your daughter refers him to.  But you have formed an impression about him from your talks with your daughter that he is a year younger than she and a tall, well-built, handsome, and likeable young man, and it is quite apparent to you that your daughter certainly likes him.  Chuck is what is popularly called in the United States a Caucasian; more exactly he is a WASP, i.e., white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant.   It might be that even as neither intended to bring it about, the situation is that your daughter and this colleague of hers have, after daily and close interaction over the last couple of years, actually fallen in love with each other, though, knowing your daughter as you do, probably no impropriety has taken place between the two—so you believe.  The two now readily admit that, for some time, they had really been dating each other, rather than simply hanging out with each other, as co-workers and friends from work, though certainly your daughter swears that she did not realize that that was what was happening, i.e., that what they were doing was precisely what is called dating, for they had even gone out to dinner and a movie or two together over weekends.

Be that as it may, now the reality of it is that they are in love with and want to marry each other.  This your daughter has told you in no uncertain terms.  You tell her that Islam does not allow a Muslim woman to marry a non-Muslim man.  It is haram, or unlawful, according to the Shariah, or Islamic law.  You tell your daughter in no uncertain terms: "Safia, I forbid you to marry this man and you must drop him as a friend at once."  You have discussed the matter with your wife, who had, as you now learn, known about the relationship of her daughter with Chuck from the beginning, but had told you nothing about it.  When you brought up the matter of your daughter’s marriage to Chuck, her only response was that your children, except Safia who was born in Pakistan but was only 3 when we came to America, were born in the United States, they have grown up and were educated in America, and that Safia is an independent woman of nearly 30 years of age.  She went on to say that her life even in the United States has been much like her life in Pakistan before your immigration to America—devoted to the welfare of her husband and children, taking care of the house, making sure that she does as a wife and mother what she can to make a happy home for her family in America, and that her only real worry is, has been, ever since you came to America that your sons and daughters will be married suitably and each one of them will have a happy married life, as we have had.  She did not say it in so many words but left no doubt as to her point of view that it might be wise to let Safia do what she wants, because, after all, unlike her (your wife) she is an educated and working woman and, then too, you have been quite unable to find a suitable husband for her.
 
Your daughter discusses the matter with her Mr. Right.  He tries to persuade her that it is not important what her father thinks or says.  The decision has to be theirs.  They can get married in a civil ceremony without your permission.  Or, they can go to Las Vegas and get married there, or they can simply live together.  It happens in America every day of the week without incurring the wrath of God.  No one would think any the less well of them for taking any of these courses.  But your daughter being a Muslim daughter will not do any of these things, and she tells him that in a categorical fashion.

Your daughter’s intended suggests that she arrange a meeting between him and her father.  When they meet, you lay down that, only if he would convert to Islam, you would give your permission to your daughter to marry him.  To your surprise, Chuck readily agrees to convert to Islam.  In your surprise, you ask him why he is so ready to convert to Islam?  He replies that all he is interested in is to marry your daughter, because he loves her and she loves him, and, if it takes converting to Islam, so be it.  You are still intrigued, so you interrogate him further.  He tells you: "Look, Sir, as far as religion is concerned, I really don’t care about it.  I was born and raised in a Protestant family, but we were never religious and I don’t even know what my parents believed, neither did I ever care to find out.  Of course, we celebrated Christmas, because it was great fun and all those gifts for me and my sister that Santa brought.  Anyway, I don’t think I would be any more religious as a Muslim than I am as a Christian.  So, converting to Islam is perfectly all right with me, so long as Safia and I can get married, with your permission, which is important for her."  Before you have a chance to say anything, he gets down on his knees before your daughter and asks her: "Safia darling, as soon as I convert to Islam, will you marry me?"  "Yes, yes, yes, I will marry you," replies your daughter, and puts her arms around him and plants a big kiss on his lips—in your presence.

Note:  Whereas Islam permits a Muslim man to marry a woman of the People of the Book, viz., a Jewish or Christian woman, it forbids a Muslim woman to marry a man of the People of the Book, viz., a Jewish or Christian man, and, of course, a man of any other religion or creed.

You are an imam in a major Southern California mosque.  You immigrated to America more than thirty years ago from the subcontinent and still have family members living in both India and Pakistan with whom you maintain regular contact by correspondence, telephone, and occasional visits.  Your children have done so and met your relatives and kinfolk in India and Pakistan, too.  Your children were born and raised in the United States.  Your oldest daughter and son are in their early to mid twenties.    Through your dawah (missionary) work for Islam in the United States, you have become collaborators and friends with the imam of an African-American mosque, and both he and you are deeply involved in the propagation of Islam in African-American communities throughout the nation.  In connection with your joint missionary work, you and your fellow imam and friend have maintained a relationship over many years, visited each other’s home, and even the children of the two of you have come to know one another and become friends.  You are highly respected for your Islamic learning and even more for your Islamic missionary spirit and, whenever you can find time and depending upon your schedule and convenience, your friend’s congregation is only too happy and honored to invite you as the imam for Friday prayer and to give the kutbah, or sermon, at their mosque.  You, too, are happy and feel honored to do so.

Your African-American fellow imam and friend has a son and daughter of the same ages as your son and daughter.  They are all at the university and even though they have different majors, they often get together, compare notes, jointly study, go to the campus cafeteria for coffee or lunch, and talk about Islam and all sorts of topics of mutual interest to them, as students would.

A situation has arisen.  The children of the two of you have formed not only friendships, after the manner of the friendship between you and your fellow imam—their fathers that is—but they have also become fond of one another to a degree that might be called a relationship, on the one hand, between your friend’s son and your daughter, and, on the other, between your son and his daughter.  According to their ages, interests, and aspirations, they all think they are nicely paired off and nothing would make them happier than to be married together.  As far as they are concerned they are all Muslim, and the differences of their race and national origin make no difference—definitely not to them.  They only want to marry the person of their own choice, and they have declared they have made their choice.

They are all good Muslim boys and girls and, obviously, come from good families and have had the best of Muslim upbringing and talim-o-tarbiya, or Islamic moral and ethical instruction and training.   But they do not want to act out of form or do anything to offend their respective parents.  So, in keeping with the tradition of arranged marriages in Islam, they have approached you (the fathers) to tell you what they want and have humbly and respectfully asked you to arrange their marriages—actually they all want to be married at the same time.

Note:  According to Islam, discrimination in the selection of a partner in marriage on the basis of race and ethnicity is categorically forbidden.  Only religious faith and piety in the Islamic sense are the sole criterion.  All other considerations are secondary.

You have been friends with an old classmate from your college days, first in Pakistan, then in the United States.  You both graduated at about the same time—you with a Ph.D. in Biology and your friend with a MD.  You both have since gotten married, built successful careers in your respective fields—you as a research biologist and he as a gynecologist.  You both have lived in Los Angeles, been family friends with the happiest of relations and trust between your families, and have raised your children together with them even sleeping over or staying for whole weekends at one another’s house.  Your older children are now adults with families of their own.  Indeed, one of your sons is married to one of the daughters of your friend.   Over this state of affairs, i.e., long term relations, trust, and mutual social and moral support between the two families, everyone in your family and in your friend’s family feels truly fortunate and thankful to God.  It is a blessing.

For the first time, a situation has risen on account of which a certain unhappiness has entered the human equation which, is not only disturbing, but might even destroy, the social and emotional equilibrium between the two families.  Your son and your friend’s daughter have been married for five years during which your daughter-in-law has not become pregnant, though they have passionately wanted to have a child, and others in the two families, too, have wanted very much for the young couple to have a child.  Actually, it was taken for granted that they would have, by now, two or three children.  Since their marriage, neither spouse has used a contraceptive device in any shape or form.  But their hopes for a baby have turned into hopelessness.   Their in-laws, too, despair of the situation.  This fact has become the cause of unhappiness and (private?) complaints all around, though the latter have not been voiced loudly enough by anyone in either family to be heard by the members of the other family.  Though you are a biologist and your friend a gynecologist, even you two have not collectively acknowledged or discussed the problem, much less gone about it in a rational or scientific way to try to find the reason or cause for the failure of the young couple to conceive a child.  The two mothers are only adding to the misery of the young couple by hinting or insinuating that the fault has to be that of the offspring of the other.  In this regard, you have the uneasiest feeling that your wife is more the guilty party, because, in her frequent conversations with you about the matter, she leaves you with the clear impression that the failure to conceive by your daughter-in-law means that there is something wrong with her.

As if the situation was not already a worrisome one, last night’s conversation between you and your son has added a whole new dimension to it, because it has created a sense of crisis in your mind that seems to you powerful enough to turn into a human tragedy and a social disaster.  Your son tells you that his mother has been sounding him for several weeks to think seriously about the inability of his wife to conceive and, maybe, think of a real solution to the problem.  She says that some women are, though perfectly healthy, infertile and cannot get pregnant, and that it is precisely for such special circumstances that Islam permits polygamy (more than one wife).  She goes on to say that, since polygamy is illegal in America, the only real solution is divorce.  Yesterday morning without mincing words, she said: "I am sorry but you have no other alternative.  You just have to divorce your wife, and no one would blame you for it.  I have known Shana for all her life and love her as my own daughter.  But you have a problem—she is barren—Allah be Merciful to her.  According to our religion she is not fit for a wife for you.  You have no other option but to divorce her."

As you and your son were having this conversation, his younger brother, a premed student, happened to come by and heard part of the conversation.  He, of course, knew already that the failure of his sister-in-law to conceive had become a serious matter.  So, even though he had heard only a bit of the conversation between you and his brother, he readily comprehended the whole situation.  Without either of you or his brother asking him for his opinion, he stuck his nose where it did not belong and said to his brother, almost impatiently: "Bhaijan (Dear Brother), why do have to divorce Bhabhijan (older brother’s wife)—just because she has failed to conceive?  It might not even be her fault.  Why don’t you adopt a child?  Or, if you don’t want to adopt a child, why don’t you and she go and get assistance in reproduction—all sorts of help in reproduction is available now?"

Note:  The Shariah, or Islamic law, has made adoption of children as one’s own unlawful.  Hence, a Muslim may not adopt someone else’s child legally.  Islamic law, while it allows the artificial insemination of the wife by the semen of the husband, makes it unlawful to involve a third person—man or woman—in the process of human reproduction unlawful.

As an unmarried man of 27 and a lecturer (assistant professor, appointed three years before) at a college in Karachi, unencumbered by any inescapable filial obligations, you went to the United States on a Fullbright scholarship for further studies at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).  Your family had migrated from India to Pakistan in the wake of the partition of India in 1947.  In your home and local community you received a thoroughly orthodox, traditional, and conservative upbringing, according to how the teaching of Sunni Islam was understood and lived in your home and community.  Yours was an Urdu speaking family.   In their own way, your parents were religious, educated (though neither had finished high school), and respectable people and your father made a comfortable living as a bazaari, or small trader.  In a manner of speaking, you were an exception in your family in that you were the first to go to college and graduate with a M.Sc. (Master of Science) from Karachi University.  Your parents, brothers and sisters, relatives, kinfolk and all took pride in your achievement and, even more, in your wholesome character as a Muslim young man who, in spite of his "Western and secular" education, still prayed and kept his fast in Ramadan.  You were their role model.  Everyone rejoiced when you got the Fullbright scholarship to go to America in 1960.

At UCLA, once you were over your jet lag, feelings of being away from home for the first time in your life in a strange place and, even more so, among strange people, and initial culture shocks especially at seeing women everywhere, you got down to your studies and felt, as it were, within a couple of months quite well adjusted into your new environment.  You have met on the campus a few Indian and Pakistani students and formed friendships with them.  They gave you many useful tips about many aspects of a foreign student’s life in the United States, but, above all, tips about how to ask American girls for a date and what dating entailed.  You had had some experience of picking up girls in Karachi—who were not exactly prostitutes, because prostitution was illegal there, but who were available for money—so you learned fast how to ask a woman for a date and became quite adept at it, too.  Unlike Karachi, Los Angeles provided ample opportunities and a free and open environment for socializing with women, so much so that, in time, you even became an advocate of the dating system yourself and marshaled the usual arguments in favor of it.  At any rate, you dated freely and openly.

At some point of your student life, you dated, fell in love with, and began cohabitation (living together without being married) with an American Caucasian woman.  After the end of your Fullbright scholarship, you decided not to return to Pakistan.  You and your girlfriend were married, which made not only your stay but also permanent settlement in the United States, too, legally possible.

For all these years, you and your wife have remained married to each other, your family has flourished, and you have, over the last thirty years or so, raised a family of several children, bought and paid for a home, and, all in all, yours has been a success story.  All your sons and daughters are successful, too, in whatever they are doing.  But for the last ten years, a war, usually cold but at times hot, has been going on in your home in which you find yourself on one side and your wife and children, now grown to the age of majority, on the other.  The conflict has been over dating, premarital sex, and marrying for love.  You swear not to permit any of these things to your children, because they are all haram, or sinful acts, in Islam and, as such, strictly forbidden.  In this not only your children but also even your wife refuses to share your views.  While your children do not come out in the open and say this to your face, they have learned from their mother that, when you came to America, you dated and engaged in premarital sex.   They also know about how and when you met their mother and that you and she even lived together for a long period before being married.   Your wife reminds you:  "Honey, don’t you remember how it was with us? You dated many women before you met me and I, too, dated many men before I met you. You did not go back to Pakistan and marry the woman your father had picked for you; you married me because you loved me.  Do you think it is fair that you insist on choosing the wives and husbands for your sons and daughters, and threaten them, too, with disowning any one of them if he or she marries anyone of their choice without your permission?"  Your only answer is that "it was different with us."  When she asks, "What was different with us?" all you can say is, "It just was."

Note:  The above situation presents the age-old problem of humanity.  Parents want their children to abide by moral codes which they themselves did or do not abide by.  This is notably true in respect of sexuality.

Your family immigrated to the United States from Egypt a generation ago.  Your son was married to an Egyptian woman (daughter of an Al-Azhar Shaikh) in Cairo before their immigration to America and the couple has teenage children of their own.  Like you and your wife, they are now citizens of the United States of America.  Your son has a Ph.D. in Physics and is a professor at an American university and your daughter-in-law has a Ph.D. in Psychology and is employed as a psychologist with the public school district.  They are both what would be characterized in the Muslim community as liberal in their outlook and opinions and, judged by orthodox and traditional standards, unorthodox, modern, and Westernized Muslims in their manner of living and dress—for instance your daughter-in-law does not wear hijab, instead presents herself in public without a head covering and is a modern and successful professional woman—though they say and argue that they have not compromised their Islam, only adapted it to the conditions of life and work in the United States under which they live and have to make a living in the secular professions in which they work.  Their teenage children—both boys and girls—are growing up as typical American teenagers.  Each one of them has visited their father’s home village in Egypt and Cairo where their mother was born and raised and did not like what they experienced and saw in their father’s village; indeed, they did not even like what they experienced and saw in Cairo.   They announced in so many words that they were glad that their parents had immigrated to America and that they were born in and were citizens of the United States.  Except to please their parents, they have no desire of their own to go to Egypt to visit their kinfolk.

Be that as it may, the lives of your son, his wife, and children are basically secular lives, as is usually the case with the millions of other Muslims in the United States.  As the family patriarch, you have also taught and exhorted every one in the family—your own children as well as the grandchildren—to take root in America, get a good university education, go into and pursue secular professions to make something of themselves, and achieve material success, but at the same time to hold on to their Islamic faith and identity, as best as possible.   You have always emphasized, too, to remain in good standing within the local Egyptian community of your co-religionists.  This is important both in and of itself because in a few years you would be looking among your own people for prospective husbands and wives for your children, but also because you want to maintain a link with your kinfolk back in your Egyptian village in particular and among your Cairo relatives and the Egyptian society at large in general.  By and large, every one in your family agrees with you and considers it wise to act according to your exhortations and admonitions.

But, to your sadness, your son is often more vocal, open, and frank about his views and opinions in general and those about Islam in particular, with which he succeeds only in alienating himself from his typical fellow Egyptians, which does not sit well with you.  He talks freely about his own reading, understanding, and interpretation of Islam and voices his liberal views openly.  He is often heard saying that he considers certain injunctions, precepts, doctrines, and legislation of the Quran and Sunnah to be historically contextual and specific to the primitive social milieu and environment of their time, place, and the culture of Madinah (Medina) in particular and Arabia in general of the time of the Prophet and his immediate successors at Madinah, when religion, morality, ethics, politics, economics, commerce, business, and finance were seen comprehensively—intellectually, ideologically, and practically—as falling within the scope of religion.  This he regards as being decidedly an anachronistic way of thinking and organizing society, even Muslim society, under the advanced conditions of life today.  In the main, he argues endlessly and advocates making religion a private affair of the individual on the personal level with the separation of religion from science, education, art, literature, medicine, law, politics, economics, business, finance, public and business administration, etc, on the societal level.  He has no hesitation in saying that, unlike Judaism and Islam, Christianity has the right idea when it demands that one should render unto God what is God’s and unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.  What is more, he has written and published an article in the American Scientist, which was picked up and reprinted in the Los Angeles Times too.  So his views have become widely known and have become, since the publication of his article, a topic of considerable controversy and condemnation in the American Muslim community.  The fact is that he has been thoroughly denounced by some influential leaders of the Islamic centers in the United States.

As if the situation was not already a scandalous one, it has been made more so by the fact that someone has sent the article your son wrote and published to his father-in-law at Al-Azhar.  He was already greatly annoyed at the opinions of his son-in-law that he had heard through the grapevine that stretches from Los Angeles to Cairo, but apparently the printed words have turned him into your son’s enemy.  He has used his influence at Al-Azhar and, under it, a committee of muftis of that institution, whose member he is, has pronounced a fatwa, legal verdict, of blasphemy and apostasy against your son and awarded him a death sentence, as the prescribed hadd (Shariah) punishment, for his apostasy and also ruled that, being a Muslimah, or Muslim woman, his wife may not remain married to him any longer, and the committee has gone on to declare unanimously that the marriage between your son and his wife is no longer lawful, according to the Shariah, or Islamic law.

For whatever it is worth, neither your son nor his wife accepts the fatwa of the Al-Azhar and they have jointly announced that they are lawfully, Islamically that is, married and have every intention to continue to live together as husband and wife.  Their children, too, are on their parents’ side.  This coming summer, your son, his wife, and their children were planning to go to Egypt for a visit but, fearing that your son might be arrested for apostasy and the penalty for it carried out, they have cancelled their trip.

Note:  Because a Muslim woman is forbidden to marry a non-Muslim, she is obliged to seek a divorce from her husband—no matter how long she has been married to him, how much she loves him and he her and wants to remain married to him, how many children she has with him, or how dependent she and the children are on him—if and when he abandons, compromises, or questions the articles of Islamic faith,  beliefs, and doctrines.

Your are a native of Sarhad (meaning frontier) and your family has lived in the NorthWest Frontier Province (NWFP) of what is now Pakistan, which borders on Afghanistan, for countless generations.  People of your tribe live on both sides of the border.  They all speak the same language, share a common way of life, subscribe to the same code of honor, and practice what in anthropological literature is called endogamy, which the dictionary defines as marriage within a specific group as required by custom or law and sexual reproduction between near relatives.  Especially the marriage of a woman of the tribe to an outsider is considered a threat to the integrity, reputation, and honor of the tribe as a whole. If and when a woman—married, unmarried, widowed, divorced, or even abandoned by her husband—is suspected, rumored, or believed to be guilty of sexual transgression, it becomes the duty of the family to punish her in order to rescue the honor of the family and the tribe.  To rescue or redeem the family honor, even the killing of women, who are suspected, rumored, or believed to be guilty of sexual transgression or so much as impropriety, by their father and/or brother(s), is not uncommon.  Those who carry out such killings usually go free, too, and even are admired as men of honor.   In your people’s tribal way of life, women’s life is that of the wife and mother, devoted and dedicated to the service of her husband, bringing children into this world and rearing them, and domesticity.   The purdah system—segregation of the sexes, veiling of women outside the home, prohibition of coeducation of boys and girls, or of employment of women working alongside of men, restrictions on the mixing and socialization between male and female, and the subordination and control of women from girlhood to old age—is strictly enforced by social custom and the power of men.  In this sense, the Pathan society (the natives of the Sarhad, or the North West Frontier Province are racially and ethnically identified as Pathan) is far more restrictive of the status, movement, activities, and behavior of women than in most other parts of the Pakistani society.

Your tribesmen in Pakistan have had a long history of serving in the army both during British rule in India and since the creation of Pakistan.   Beyond the education of boys in the local madrassas, or religious schools, there has been hardly any tradition of secular education in your tribe, though over the last hundred years there have been exceptional men who did acquire a high school and, beyond it, a college education, even graduating from Indian and Pakistani universities and a select few from universities in England.  Also, a few of those serving in the army received training at Sandhurst Military Academy in England and rose to high ranks in both the British Indian and Pakistani armies.  Since the 1960s, university education, especially a foreign university education, has become both a symbol of high social status and a means to get ahead in the Pakistani society, particularly in the government.  This has created a whole new tradition of young men from rich and well-connected families in your tribe pursuing university education both in Pakistan as well as abroad, mainly in the United States.  There have even been cases where young women—both married ones, escorted by their husband, and unmarried ones, too—of your tribe have gone to America for higher education.

Your exceptionally bright daughter of 21 is one such young woman who, upon graduation with an MA in Economics with a First Class (A grades) from Peshawar University, insisted to go to America for further education and whom, because you had the financial means to do so, you did send four years ago to study at an American university.  This was the first time anyone in your family had gone to the United States for higher education.  Hence, there was no prior first hand experience in your family about what a foreign student’s life at a large American university in a metropolitan city in the United States is like. Being unmarried, your daughter went to the United States alone.

At the end of her second academic year in the United States, you and your wife went to visit your daughter there and were happy to see and learn from talking to a couple of her graduate advisors that she was doing very well.  Also, she looked healthier, happier, sharper, and more self-assured than you had ever seen her before.  She had already learned how to drive an automobile, too, came to the airport—dressed in blue jeans and a white silken blouse with her hair cut short and done professionally at the beauty parlor—to pick and drive you and her mother, who could not believe what she her daughter was doing, i.e., driving an automobile, which to her knowledge and experience was a man’s job, to her apartment, and then drove you both all over and everywhere you went in the city and for sightseeing to such wondrous places as Disney in California and the Grand Canyon in Arizona with perfect ease and self-confidence.  She either knew the way to the places she took you to, or, if she did not, she looked it up in the map—never asking anyone for directions.   All this simply amazed you and more so her mother.  Whereas her mother could get lost easily in her own village, where she was hardly familiar with any places a few blocks away from her home, her daughter seemed to be at home and knew her way around, not only in the state in which went to school, but even in the few other states into which you went.  Also, she seemed perfectly at ease in talking to and dealing with sales persons of either sex and waiters and waitresses and whomsoever you came into contact with, and they all treated her with due respect.  As you are not fluent in English speech, though you can understand the meaning of what was said to you in English by the people with whom you came into contact and your wife understands no English at all, your daughter acted as your and her interpreter, whenever a need for it arose. You became convinced beyond the least doubt that your daughter had become the proverbial modern woman.  You had always been proud of your daughter, but on seeing her after two years and to see how capable, competent, and self-assured a girl, no, a woman, she had become in that short span of time made you all the prouder of her.  You could not contain your fatherly emotion and complimented her to no end; so you turned to your wife and said: "I believe we have another lady Prime Minister of Pakistan in the making here."  Your wife looked pleasedly and proudly at her daughter.  Your daughter said to her mother in seeming annoyance, but quite actually pleased at the compliment you had paid her: "Ammi, please tell Abba to stop making fun of me."

At the end of her third academic year, she took a summer off from her school and came home and spent her summer vacation with the family.  Her homecoming and stay for three months provided a very great deal of happiness and pride in her educational and personal achievements to every one and all in the family and made all your clansmen and women very, very envious of you.  Many prestigious and respectable families within your clan and in the extended tribe that had, or thought they had, an eligible bachelor in the family sent a paigham, or proposal of marriage to you, asking your daughter’s hand in marriage to their son.  After much thought and informal and secret inquiries into the prospects and characters of some of the more promising and suitable young men and formal negotiations with the father of one during the visit of your daughter for her summer vacation, you accepted and made a match for her marriage to the eldest son of a fellow tribesman of yours with considerable land holdings and inherited wealth.  Your entire clan and the majority of your tribesmen, even some of those who lived across the border in Afghanistan, took part in the engagement ceremony of your daughter and the feast to celebrate the occasion.   You, your wife, and sons and other daughters could not be prouder of her.

In the United States, both at her own university and other schools in the area there were several students from Sarhad—all male—who, though none of them was a close friend of hers, knew about your daughter.  She always kept somewhat aloof from them and they, too, left her alone.   This was understandable in that they all, even as students, observed in America, too, the tribal segregation of the sexes and the ban on the mixing, interaction and socialization between the male and female, to which they had been habituated from their growing up days, which had the force of a natural law in the Pathan society back home in which they were raised.  This, however, did not keep them from mixing, interacting, and socializing with the Americans or non-Muslims in general of the opposite sex.  Unbeknown to you or even suspected by you, when your daughter came home for her summer vacations, she was and had been "going steady" with an American Caucasian classmate of hers for several months.  Before him, she had dated others, too, though no one from the Pakistani or Afghanistani side of the Sarhad nor a Muslim from the Middle East. When she was planning to go home for summer vacation, her boyfriend suggested that he, too, would take the summer off and would travel with her and thus would get to see Pakistan and, maybe, Afghanistan, too, and they might even go together to India.  This, of course, she rejected out of hand.  In the States, as the Muslim culture would have it, there arose a suspicion, followed by a bit of gossip and rumor, about her within the Sarhaddi student community that she was dating Caucasian men secretly, though no one had any proof of it.  Little did they suspect, much less know that she actually had a steady boyfriend, which was her most guarded secret.  Anyway, ultimately, the rumor of it extended itself all the way to Sarhad in Pakistan and reached your ears—for whose ears alone it was meant.  The carrier of the rumor made a point of emphasizing that he was rendering a service to you in the best tribal tradition so as to enable you to safeguard the honor of your family, on the one hand, and to stave off a social disaster, on the other, in the event of your daughter’s marriage, on her returning home, to the man she was engaged to and, then, to be found not a virgin by her husband on their wedding night.  He also warned you that he himself had no proof of anything, but still thought it prudent to sound you of the suspicion concerning your daughter, who might after all be totally innocent of any sexual misconduct or impropriety in the United States.

That someone should have so much as whispered into your ear that your daughter is probably no longer whole, or virgin, came as the greatest "future shock" of your life.  It robbed you of your peace of mind and sleep and made you feel ashamed to the deepest depths of your being.  You regretted that you had sent her to America for education or even to the village primary school, nay, you regretted the day she was born.  You even had more than a passing thought that, if you could go back in time, you would bury your daughter alive on the day she was born only to save yourself and your family from the shame that she would bring, if the rumor were indeed true that she has dated in America and lost her virginity before marriage.  Be that as it may, the question before you now is: What is to be done?

You have thought over the matter for a week and decided to gather together your four sons, form age 17 to 31, the oldest two of whom being married persons with both sons and daughters of their own, to inform them of the rumor about their sister and to decide upon a course of action to rescue the honor and reputation of the family in the given situation.  After they were over their shock and surprise and done with cussing and cursing their sister and finally simmering down, which took nearly two hours, you and they eventually—it was already past midnight—got down to looking into the possible alternative strategies to resolve the situation in a practical and concrete way.  Obviously, a calculated action had inevitably to be taken and soon, for the coming summer your daughter is due to return home and get married, as planned.  The question is: What action is to be taken?

Every one, first of all, your youngest son, speaks his mind.  He says that, under the circumstances, they should simply tell her that it would be better, even safer, for her and good for the family for her to stay in the United States and do whatever she wants to do and live her life there as she deems fit, and give her decision to live in America after finishing school as an excuse to break off the engagement.  He goes on to say that, if the rumor of her dating and premarital sexuality is true, she would not protest and would readily agree to remain in the United States, but if it is untrue, she would protest and insist on coming back home to get married, as planned, and, in that case, she should be welcomed home, no matter what the rumor mongers say about her activities in America.  Of course, in the event she decides to remain in America, this would mean for their father losing his face in the tribe and humiliation for going back on his word, too, by not delivering his daughter in marriage to her prospective husband.  But it would be a lesser shame than the disgrace the whole family will have to face, if the rumor about her dating, etc. is true and she is given in marriage—with the rumor afloat that she is no longer a virgin—if she is found not to be a virgin and denounced by her husband on the morning after.  In that case and in all probability, she would be divorced by repudiation by her husband and thrown on the street as a fahisha, or fornicatress, by his family.  Your youngest son ends his passionate speech with the question: "What would we do then?"  With the end of his speech, a pin drop silence falls upon everyone.  Neither you nor your older three sons say a word.

When they regain their speech and start talking again, other ideas emerge, viz., 1) for someone to go to America and kill your daughter there, but this is considered too risky; 2) to wait for her return and kill her on arrival at Karachi airport or somewhere between Karachi and their hometown; 3) to inform the father of her fiancé of the situation as it is, but the idea is rejected because it would mean both the breaking off the engagement by him as well as your family’s disgrace for nothing; and, finally, 4) the solution that is applied reportedly by rich Arab parents—whose daughters are found to be in a similar predicament, i.e., losing their virginity during their years of study abroad in Europe or America—viz., having an artificial hymen implanted just before their returning home and being given in an arranged marriage to a cousin or someone else in the tribe, according to the custom of endogamy with the full assurance that she will be found a virgin on her wedding night .

It is now nearly dawn.  Besides every one is all talked out.   You hear the azan, or call for fajr, or pre-dawn, prayer.  So you tell your sons to give everything they talked about their further serious and urgent consideration and be ready to reach a decision and act upon it.  Then you say to them gravely: "Don’t any one of you speak a word about it to your mother, wives, or sisters?  It is a matter which we men alone have to take care of."  With this admonition, you tell your sons to get ready quickly for fajr prayer.

Note:  In the strict and ideal sense of the word, Muslims of the world are a single Ummah, or Community of  Believers.  A man or woman, guilty of transgressing the hudud Allah, or limits of human behavior set by God, may be punished, according to the Shariah, or Islamic law, by the Islamic state, but also, in its absence, by any Muslim.  (It was according to this philosophy of law and penology that Imam Khomenie of Iran awarded a death penalty to Salman Rushdie, a British citizen, as a punishment, for transgressing the hudud Allah, limits set by God, by his apostasy from Islam, when he published his book The Satanic Verses in 1989.  Later, Iranians also announced a reward of two million in American dollars to anyone who would kill Rushdie.  Obviously, under the Shariah, or Islamic law, according to Iranian Shia interpretation of it, the killer of Rushdie would not be considered a murderer.)  Accordingly, a father is well within the bounds of the Shariah, or Islamic law, interpreted and applied strictly, to punish his daughter for transgressing the hudud Allah by committing fornication, and so a brother his sister.

You find yourself in a seminar in which most of those present and of both sexes are between the ages of eighteen and thirty, but a number of others are as old as, seemingly, in their fifties and sixties.  The old timers are all university graduates and professional people, including physicians, psychologists, professors, high school teachers, civil servants, and corporation executives, and the rest are undergraduate and graduate students and those who have either just entered the workforce or have held jobs in industry, professions, or civil service for a few years.  As to their marital status, there are persons—both male and female—included in the group that are premarried, i.e, not married so far; single, or, though not married so far, are of twenty-five years of age or over; or are married, divorced, widowed, and a man and woman, each of whom, though married (not to each other) has been separated from his or her spouse—in the case of the man, for two years with his wife gone to Pakistan for a long stay there, and, in the case of the woman, for close to two years, her husband being away on his job in Saudi Arabia.   It is truly a mixed group.  Since it is an important conference, there are also present in the seminar two news reporters.  The seminar director has also invited two imams from the local mosques, one of whom is known for his view that, whereas no essential belief, precept, or doctrine of Islam, especially lived Islam, needs to be compromised, much less abandoned, in the United States, Islam nevertheless needs to and must adapt itself to the conditions of life under which Muslims must learn to survive and succeed and prosper in America particularly and the West generally, and the other imam whose vies are also well known and who preaches strictly orthodox and traditional Islam—he cannot talk about Islam for thirty seconds without citing a verse or two of the Quran and a tradition or two from the Hadith—and, more to the point, opposes passionately, even stridently, any relaxation of the demands made by the Quran and Sunnah concerning the place, status, movements, activities, and role of women.  The purpose with which the conference has been organized is to discuss the nature, evolution, and future of the growing community of immigrant Muslims in Southern California in particular and America in general.  The focus of this seminar is on the problems of Muslim youth in American society and culture with an emphasis on how shall Muslim male and female youth interact with one another, as members of the same community, among themselves, on the one hand, and how shall they interact with the male and female youth of other communities, with whom they come in contact at campus, in the workplace, and everywhere else in American society and culture in the ordinary conduct of life.  The conference has been organized by a local university with a sizeable number of Muslim students, both foreign and those born in America to and raised by immigrant Muslims in the United States, and an Islamic center in Los Angeles.

As one participant in the seminar, you can choose your own sex; age; mazhab or denomination, sect, or school of Islamic law; marital status; demographic composition of your family; profession; and whatever else you consider relevant or crucial to your personal and preferred orientation, persuasion, outlook, and understanding of and about Islam and the role and influence of Islamic teaching in the life and living of Muslims in the United States.

The director of the seminar is a university professor of nearly thirty years of teaching experience in the area of Islamic Studies and North African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Muslim Cultures and Communities. She is fluent in Arabic, Turkish, Persian and Urdu; has traveled frequently and widely to the countries of her specialization on research grants for filed studies and research and has published several books, and is known for her empathy and sympathy for Muslims as a people, notwithstanding her dedication to scholarship.  She was born and raised in the United States in a white and Protestant Christian family, though she is not a religious person, not even a believing person, in any proper sense of the word.  If she believes in anything, it is in secularism.

She welcomes those present to the seminar and addresses them briefly as follows:

"In this seminar we will bring out the problems that Muslim youth—male and female—face in America.  We cannot cover all areas.  While we may take notice of all sorts of problems—for example the problems encountered by Muslim university graduates, male or female, in the workplace on getting their first job—our main focus will be upon the problems that Muslim students, foreign as well as those born and raised in the United States, face during their undergraduate and graduate studies at American colleges and universities.  Depending upon whether one quits school after his or her BS degree or goes to graduate and/or professional school, such as the schools of medicine or law, the period that a student may spend on a university campus may be anywhere from four to ten years.  That is a long time indeed.  Remember, too, we are talking about those who have already attained adulthood.  In Western culture, unlike Islamic culture, all adults—male and female—are free, equal, and empowered and trained from their childhood to think, act, and behave as they deem fit and in their own individual interest and conduct themselves and live their life in ways that they think and determine would maximize and fulfil their own personal aspirations, purposes, and goals of life.  That at any rate is our public philosophy.  But you will see many a compromise, frustration, and failure of freedom and equality in America, especially in the case of the people of color and immigrants like yourselves, who are unfortunately victims of inexcusable discrimination, often persecution, too, in the United States.  America is, by no means a perfect society.  But, by and large,  Americans do hold the freedom of the individual as their most precious value and endorse wholeheartedly, certainly in principle, that every individual, male or female, is entitled to full and complete individual freedom.  I have no hesitation in saying that  most of them do make a good faith effort, too, to extend the constitutionally guaranteed freedom to and its exercise by people of any and every race, color, sex, religion, creed, ethnicity, national orientation, even sexual orientation.  This is as it should be in a society that prides itself on secularism, pluralism, multiculturalism, tolerance, and diversity.  Though the American Constitution guarantees the freedom of religion and religious worship to all Americans, it also considers religion and religious worship the private affair of the individual.  The state, government, courts, public schools, colleges, universities, and political and economic organizations of the United States of America have no religion.  That is the most fundamental principle of all the fundamental principles on which American society is founded, and is the basis of the separation of state and church in America.  But this approach to life in America—privatization of religion—also influences such spheres of life in America as philosophy and science, arts and literature, values and norms, morality and ethics, economics and commerce, banking and finance, male and female relations, courtship and marriage, sex and sexuality—you name it.  What it means is that, within the bounds of he criminal law, the individual—male or female—is free to act and behave as he or she will.
I have gone on for too long.  So let me put before you some of the topics to which you may address yourself during your discussions in this seminar.  In my experience and observation of Muslim students—both foreign and American—over the last thirty years, the certain problems have stood out in my mind, around which controversy and conflict have surrounded in my talks, consultations, and dealings with both students as well as their parents, guardians, and the Muslim clergy not only in the United States, but also in the Muslim countries and in countries like India with large Muslim populations.    In my view, three broad questions that require serious attention are:
 

•  What shall be the role of Muslim women in life—exclusively, fundamentally, or largely a domestic one, as the Islamic scriptures, viz., the Quran and the Sunnah, lay down, or whatever a woman chooses to do, including choosing any kind of work or career,  without any external restriction upon her choice, outside the home with or without marriage?  This, as you can easily see, is the question of women’s freedom, equality, and independence.

• Depending upon the answer to the above, the next question is whether and how much education shall Muslim girls and women receive?  And, what sort of education shall they receive—specifically one designed for them as being appropriate to women, or the same education that Muslim boys and men receive?  This question inevitably poses the question of coeducation.  We have learned from our long experience in America that separating the races and educating white and black students in separate schools not only frustrates and defeats the whole purpose of education, but also does a gross injustice to the blacks, whose schools are never sufficiently funded, plus the fact that "separate cannot be equal."  So the question is whether the attempt to educate girls and women separately from boys and men would frustrate and defeat the whole purpose of education and do a gross injustice to female students?

• Shall Muslim college and university going youth have the freedom to choose whether they would socialize with the members of the opposite sex and date and court one another with a view of choosing a person to marry?  And, whether, if they do choose to socialize with and date and court those of the opposite sex and marry someone of their own choice, will they be judged immoral and punished in one form or another for doing so?  This, as you can readily see, poses the basic question of the "arranged versus love marriage," and, even more disturbingly, the question of premarital sex within the context of dating and courtship between consenting adults.  As you all know, in America if there is any fundamental and obligatory sexual morality and ethics, it is that of consensual sex.

Of course, other questions may be posed but, I think, the ones I have called to your attention above—these are the same questions that our flyer for this seminar stated as the agenda of this seminar—should provide a wide enough scope for us for discussion today.  Once again, I welcome you to the seminar.

Our modus operandi would be as follows: We will have three presentations, the first presenting the orthodox view, the second the liberal view, and the third the rational view.  Then we shall break for lunch and for those, who choose to do so, to say their noon prayer.  When we reassemble, we will provide an opportunity to anyone from the audience, who is interested in addressing the assembly from the dais and offer his views in five to seven  minutes—no more because we do have to keep track of our time.  If you are interested in doing so, please talk to me during the break and give me your name.  I will try to accommodate all those who are interested in addressing the assembly, but I do want to have from two to two and half hours left for the Question-Answer session.  If all goes, as planed, we shall close the seminar at 5:30.   On the panel for answering questions will be sitting our three invited speakers and anyone of the other speakers who wants sit on it."

The first one to speak was the imam of a Southern California mosque, known for his orthodox, traditional, and conservative views, who had been invited by the seminar organizers.  His formal education has been both a traditional education of an imam in the religious seminaries and a secular education in comparative religion at an American university.  He presented views fundamentally that were based on a fundamentally a literal interpretation of the texts of the Quran and what is reported in the Hadith about the Sunnah, or practice, of the Prophet Muhammad in his life and Sunnah of the first four Khalifas, or caliphs, or successors, of the Prophet, plus the rulings of the jurists and codifiers of the Shariah, or Islamic law, going back to more than a thousand years ago.  As one present at the seminar, I understood him to say the following:

In Islam, it is not the question of the freedom, equality, and independence of women—nor for that matter of men—but of following the commands of Allah and the Rasul Allah (the Last Messenger of God Muhammad) and the rules of the Shariah, Islamic law.  Both men and women are required to follow what has been laid down for each.  The role of women is, if not exclusively, certainly fundamentally and largely, a domestic one, before marriage as well as after marriage.  Before marriage her father is in charge of her affairs and makes the basic decisions of her life.  She is required to obey him.  He is her qawwam, or in charge, guide, and controller.  If he decides that she should go to school and college, he makes the arrangements for her education.  Islam considers coeducation of boys and girls and men and women haram, or forbidden, but it will lead to the mixing, interaction, and socialization of the opposite sexes.  The requirements of hijab and the imperative of the chastity of both boys and girls and  men and women demands that they must never be allowed to be together alone in a private place.  Strictly speaking, it is haram (forbidden) to allow, for example, two college students or two Muslims—one male and the other female, unless they are husband and wife, father and daughter, mother and son, brother and sister, or related closely by blood or marriage—to be alone in the car, sitting side by side on the front seat, or standing in the same line to get food, or allowing them to sit together at the dinning table or in the dining hall, as is unfortunately the case at some of our Islamic centers.  Indeed, our Islamic respect for modesty requires that even the male and female members of the same family should not be allowed to sit at the same table, even in the same dining hall, on such occasions as the community and Eid dinners.  For the same reason, i.e., modesty, if they have a swimming pool in their backyard, as some Muslims do, the male and female member must not swim in the pool together or when the women of the family may be seen swimming by the men of the family and vice versa.  And, of course, swimming in the public swimming pools and going to the beach and swimming in the ocean is a total violation of Islamic modesty, as is the participation of women in sports with men or within the sight of men.  A Muslim girl or woman is simply forbidden to bare her legs and arms in public.  All this shows how strict the rules of modesty in Islam are.  There can be no doubt that coeducation is a violation gross violation of it.  It is simply immoral.  It is better not to send girls to schools than to send them to coed schools, because, under a system of coeducation, there would be an irresistible temptation to date.  The result would be what be see in Western culture—widespread use of contraception and birth control, premarital sex, cohabitation, promiscuity, pregnancy and children born out of wedlock, STDs (sexually transmitted diseases), AIDS, abortion, and even if they get married, there would be too many divorces, and so on and so forth.  We Muslims do not need all that.

Islam does not forbid women from getting and education.  Indeed, the seeking and acquisition of knowledge is equally the obligation for both men and women.  Nor does Islam forbid women to work outside the home, when there is a need.  But there are certain forms of education and work that are appropriate and suitable for women and their husbands should not forbid them from them.  But Islam looks disapprovingly on women working alongside strange men, or men who are not related to them by their parental family or marriage.  It violates the modesty of women and can potentially lead to immorality.  The Islamic state should provide separate schools and design a program of education which is suitable for women.  The should be given an education for types of work and professions that would be unsuitable for women.  Equality of man and woman does not mean that women should join the army, police force, fire department, drive public buses, and work in the factories.  Neither should they be allowed to become imams, or prayer leaders, in the mosque, as is the case in churches and synagogues.  It is against Allah’s Will.  It is also a great injustice against women to require them compete against men, who are physically stronger, intellectually superior, and emotionally more stable than women, to compete against men and hold a full time job and come home after a hard day’s work and cook, clean , and do all the housework.  That is why Allah has laid down in the Quran that the men is the provider of his wife and children and the woman has no obligation to earn a living and, even is she has money or property of her own, she is not required to spend it for her own support or the support of her family.  She can claim full and complete support and maintenance from her husband and he has the duty to do so.

Allah has made it the obligation of the father (or in his absence, of the grandfather, uncle, brother, or any other male guardian) to arrange the marriage of the daughter.  To choose carefully, prudently, and wisely a husband for her is an act of great piety on the part of the father and pleases Allah.  In Islam, premarital dating in order to find a person to marry is haram, or forbidden, both for boys and girls.  As a matter of fact, a woman cannot marry without the permission of her father (or her male guardian).  If she does, her marriage would be unlawful, because it is a transgression of hudud Allah, or limits of permissible behavior, according to the Shariah, and, therefore, the consummation of such a marriage would be zina, or unlawful sexual intercourse, and punishable as a crime.  That both parties freely and mutually agreed as adults to marry each other and to consummate their marriage is immaterial.  The law is that a woman is not legally entitled and empowered to give herself in marriage to any man.  Let me tell you, Why?

In Islam there is no concept of consensual sex, as there is in Western culture, where two consenting adults can engage in a sexual intercourse, even if and when they are not married to each other.  As you know, according to this principle, fornication, adultery, sodomy, lesbian sex, premarital pregnancy, out of wedlock birth, etc. are all permitted, so long as two adults freely and privately consent to it.  None of these things in the West are crimes.  Islam considers them haram, which is to say forbidden, unlawful, and punishable as crimes, according to the Shariah, or Islamic law.

All Muslims know that the West has deliberately misunderstood, misrepresented, and maligned Islam since the Crusades.  Even today it carries on its propaganda of hate against Islam and Islamic morality and our God-given Shariah, our sacred Islamic law.  Though the age of political colonialism and imperialism of the West has ended—of course, West’s political colonialism and imperialism are alive and well in the Middle East—Muslims find themselves today the targets and victims of Western cultural imperialism.  We know that the objective of the West is to mislead Muslims into hedonism, materialism, secularism, and an acceptance of the Western way of life, which is not only an un-Islamic way of life, but an immoral way of life.  The strategy it has adopted is to present coeducation, dating, premarital sex, extramarital sex, free sex, lesbian sex, oral sex, homosexuality, bisexuality, promiscuity, cohabitation, birth control, premarital pregnancy, abortion, childbirth outside wedlock, single families headed by women, work outside the home, easy divorce, serial monogamy, even drinking alcohol, drug addiction, and pornography as attractive things in the name of freedom, equality, and independence of women, beginning with the teen age years.   In a word, every Muslim knows that the West is out to destroy Islam, Islamic values, and the Islamic way of life, by making Muslim women as immoral as are Western women.  But, just because we live in America, we do not have to accept the social and moral values of the West that are no values at all.  Muslims—whether in the Wet or in Muslim countries—must remain faithful to their own values and morality and ethics that are given to in the Quran and Sunnah.  Family is the basic the foundation of the Islamic way of life.  We consider our women and children a sacred trust from Allah, and we must protect them.  As Muslims, we must always shun, depart from, and forbid what is immoral and evil and espouse, adhere to, and promote what is moral and good.  Allah has placed this obligation upon every Muslim in the Quran.  Allah has sent the Quran as a guidance to all humankind and Prophet Muhammad—peace be upon Him—as Rahmat-ul-Aalmin, or Mercy to the Worlds, i.e., all Creation, including all humanity, and has made it the duty of every Muslim to show those in the West, who are misguided, the error of their ways and show them the Straight Path of Islam in kindness and compassion, for they are like the Arabs in the Age of Jahiliya, or Ignorance, before the advent of Islam.  It is our duty that we communicate the message of Islam to our fellow Americans, so that they, too, can live righteously in order to merit salvation in the Akhira, or Hereafter—according to the law of God—by first repenting and begging God’s forgiveness for their sinful ways and becoming reconciled with Him and obedient to His Commandments.
 
Westerners always criticize Islam for polygamy, or the permission to men to marry and have up to four wives at a time.  But we Muslims have no cause to feel ashamed over it.  Polygamy in Islam is a far better than the so-called monogamy in the West, no one in the West, however, object for a man to have girl friends or mistresses, besides the one wife, and commit adultery, even if he does so with the consent of his girlfriend or mistress.  I ask you: Which is better, to allow a man to have more than one wife or to commit adultery?  No, consensual sex is as immoral as prostitution.  Islam rejects the whole idea of consensual sex.  It clearly lays down when sexual intercourse is halal (permitted, lawful) and when haram (forbidden, unlawful).  In Islam the presence of consent does not make haram (forbidden) halal (permitted), and the absence of consent does not make halal (permitted) haram (forbidden).  It is Allah Who has laid down what is halal and what is haram.  We accept it and do not want to make haram (forbidden) halal (permitted) or halal (permitted) haram (forbidden), according to our own convenience.

What I have said I understand to be the teaching of Allah in the Quran and the teaching of the Prophet in his Sunnah.  If I have made a mistake in communicating the same, I seek forgiveness from Allah and I hope and would appreciate if some one will point my error to me, so that I can correct it.  I thank you for listening to me attentively.
 

As pointed out at the outset that the organizers had invited an imam of a Southern California mosque, who was known for his liberal (liberal in the Muslim opinion) views on the subject of women.  His formal education was in medicine, but he later studied Islam and gained a considerable amount of learning and developed something of a scientific outlook, too.  Islam has no conception of an ordained and professional  clergy and the distinction of clergy and layity, hence any Muslim is qualified to lead congregational prayer and perform the usual functions of clergy.  He was the next to speak and said the following, or so I understood him to say:

Surely the views expressed by my friend and the former speaker are the views concerning women that have been held by Muslims throughout Islamic history.  They are the views of the majority of Muslims even today, perhaps even in the United States, though necessity forces them to do things and act in ways that are not in conformity with the orthodox, traditional, and conservative views.  For instance, the way the rules of hijab, or the woman’s veil, were applied in the past, as for example the veiling of the woman’s face in public; segregation of the sexes and the seclusion of women; compulsory confinement of women in the home and their dedication to domesticity; prohibition of women coming to the mosque; forbidding girls and women to go to school for getting an education and, especially, to go to coeducational institutions; and a total ban on women working outside the home, cannot and is not done today, neither is it feasible and desirable today.   This is not to say that these things might not have served the Muslim community well in the past.  But they would be out of place today.  There is no denying the fact that the world today is very different from the world of the past.  We live today in a Global Village.  Problems and challenges facing Muslims in the Untied States and in the rest of the Western world—today there are tens of millions of immigrant Muslims living outside the old Muslim world and many more would jump to the opportunity of immigrating to the West from any and every Muslim country—are obviously different.  Indeed, the problems and challenges of the same kind that Muslims in America face, maybe to in a less urgent way and to a lesser extent, are facing Muslims living in Muslim countries, too.  So, the question is: Can we understand, interpret, and live Islam today in the same way in which it was lived in the centuries past in the Muslim majority countries or even in the Muslim minority countries, like Spain five hundred years ago or India, where, until two hundred years ago, Muslims had ruled for many centuries?  It is one thing to go to another country as rulers than to go and settle there as ordinary immigrants.  For example, the French objected strongly when a Muslim girl wore hijab to school and all Western nations deny Muslims the right to practice polygamy that Islam gives them permission to practice.  But if Muslims were the ruling community in these countries, they could make hijab and polygamy both permissible and legal.  The inevitable conclusion is that, depending upon the existing conditions of life, power or powerlessness, and affluence or impoverishment of Muslims or a group of Muslims, Islam has to be understood, interpreted, and lived differently in different times and places.  A rich country like Saudi Arabia can reject coeducation of boys and girls and men and women within Saudi Arabia, because they can afford to establish separate schools for them or make class room instructions and lectures available to girls and women in a separate classroom by close circuit television; prohibit women to drive an automobile, because their families can hire foreign male workers as chauffeurs, and ban public movie houses because the majority of Saudi Arabs can afford television sets and VCR in the home and watch movies in the  privacy of their living or bedrooms.  For them, a strictly orthodox, traditional, and conservative understanding, interpretation, and application of Islam is a practical proposition.  You may say that what Saudi Arabs do is pointless inasmuch as they do watch Hollywood movies and that, when outside Saudi Arabia, their women do drive an automobile and go to coeducational institutions.  Indeed!  But the more important point is that it is not important whether Saudi Arabs are right or wrong, but that how they understand, interpret, and live Islam is not and cannot be an intelligent and realistic way for Muslims who lack the resources and purchasing power of Saudi Arabs.  My view is that, unless we, both as individuals and groups, adapt Islam to today’s conditions, Islam, or as Muslims have understood, interpreted, and applied the teaching of Islam in the past, will only become increasing irrelevant to real Muslim life—individual as well as communal.  The time for a singular and universal understanding, interpretation, and application of Islam is gone forever.  If this means Islamic Pluralism, so be it.

There already exists a certain amount of mixing, interaction, and socialization between the members of the opposite sexes in the Muslim community, not only the campuses of schools and colleges, and universities, but even at the Islamic centers.  This is inevitable, because our young people do go to coeducational institutions and centers.  Indeed, every Islamic center has some sort of a youth group to which belong both teenage boys and girls.  In due course, they find their future spouses, too.  This we all know.  It is, however, true that we do not condone of premarital dating and courtship, as such, and the idea of a boyfriend or girlfriend.  And we definitely consider premarital sex haram, or forbidden.  But we do not object to the meeting and interaction of boys and girls, even those of marriageable ages, under family and chaperoned situations.  And, if they indicate to us their liking for someone and would like to be married to the person in question and if we approve the match, we make initiate the proposal of marriage, carry out negotiations, and, providing all goes as planned, make the necessary arrangements for their marriage.  There is no harm in taking into account the wishes and desires of your children in the matter of marriage.  However, if the question is put in form of "love marriage versus arranged marriage," I will have to say that I am  on the side of the arranged marriage.

Within this conceptual framework, I think there has to be a greater scope today than in the past for women’s freedom, equality, and independence.  Equality of male and female has to be at the core of Islam today.  Spiritual equality before Allah and on the Judgment Day is not enough.  There has to be a social, political, and economic equality as well. The Quran provides a basis for male and female equality in such verses of the Quran as 33:35 and 9:71.  We should discourage as much as possible for example polygamy and the popular belief among Muslims that men are superior to women.  To believe or say so is to derive the wrong message from the Quran and Sunnah.  What is emphasized in Islam is the mutuality, inter-dependence, and complimentary roles of men and women, not the lordship of men and subservience of women.  Islam also does not deny women the permission to get an education, or as much education as a woman wants, nor the permission to work outside the home. And if it means going to a coeducational institution or working alongside men, an exception should be made. But it should be done with mutual consultation between the husband and wife.

Muslim female physicians and nurses should also be allowed to treat male patients and so male Muslim physicians and nurses, including those whose specialty is obstetrics and gynecology, should be allowed to treat female patients.  We cannot enforce the Islamic rules of modesty literally today.  In the United States, to insist upon the enforcement of these rules literally would mean that Muslims ought not to go in medicine and nursing. Women are also allowed to come for prayers to the mosque, though they are not permitted to act as the imam, or prayer leader, give the Friday khutaba, or sermon, and perform the other duties of an imam.  But a woman imam can lead other women in Friday prayer and give a khutaba, or sermon, too.

Islamic values are compatible with the highest human culture and civilization.  But that is the case only if we understand, interpret, and apply Islam as a dynamic religion and way of life.  Neither is there any incompatibility between Islam and science and technology, Islam and democracy, and Islam and capitalism and free enterprise.  Human rights and dignity, freedom and equality, social justice, peace and harmony, tolerance and compassion, protection of non-Muslim minorities and their way of life, and respect for other nations are all basic values of Islam.  Islam has the right solution to all of humanity’s problems.

The person, who presented what he called a rational approach to the subject of women in present day Islam, was not an imam or a philosopher, philosophical theologian, or a philosopher of science, but one who had received his formal education at the business school and the department of economics.  He brought and read his paper that he had written especially for the seminar.  At the end of his presentation, he also handed out copies to the seminar participants.  What is presented below is his paper.

What I am going to submit for your consideration is neither an orthodox nor a liberal view concerning women, but a very personal one.  I have called it a "rational approach," but you will have to decide for yourself whether it is rational or irrational, even probably insane.  All I ask is that in doing so you will be honest, not as much with me, but with yourself.  At the core of my view is the concept of fairness, or justice, if you will.  Indeed, I think of justice as fairness, so the two, viz., fairness and justice, are one.  I am not bright enough to have arrived at that conception of justice, its origin, to my limited reading on the subject of justice, lies with John Rawls, a Harvard University professor of philosophy.  His book, A Theory of Justice (published by Harvard University Press in 1971), is, to my knowledge, the greatest contemporary classic on the subject.  Whether it has had any positive influence in the United Sates I don’t know.  But that is no matter.  Before I address the questions for consideration in this seminar, please allow me to refer to a concept or two in Rawls’s book.

Rawls starts out by saying: "Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought" (p. 3).  What I take it mean is that the social institutions themselves have to be just, before social and individual justice can be possible in society.  This seems perfectly rational to me, for in a society in which such institutions as family, schools, religious organizations, state, laws, courts, economic system, etc. are based on racist, sexist, and exploitative ideology, neither justice nor a sense of justice can exist, and, therefore some individuals and groups must be treated unjustly.  But how do we know when the institutions are just?  According to Rawls: "Institutions are just when no arbitrary distinctions are made between persons in the assigning of basic rights and duties and when the rules determine a proper balance between competing claims the advantages of social life" (p. 5).  In this sense, his concept of justice as fairness "is more than a conception of justice; it is a social ideal.  The principles of justice are but a part, although perhaps the most important part, of such a conception.  A social ideal in turn is connected with a conception of society, a vision of the way in which the aims and purposes of social cooperation are to be understood" (p. 9).  We, as Muslims, can readily identify with this way of thinking about justice and society, because Islam, too, looks at social life comprehensively.  In other words, for justice to obtain and to be sustained, the fundamental structure of society has to be based on justice as fairness.

But what is justice as fairness?  According to Rawls:
 

[T]he guiding idea is that the principles of justice for the basic structure of society are the object of the original agreement.  They are the principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality as defining the fundamental terms of their association.  These principles are to regulate all further agreements; they specify the kinds of social cooperation that can be entered into and the forms of government that can be established.  This way of regarding the principles of justice I shall call justice as fairness" (p. 11).
Plainly, justice as fairness demands, to start with, that just and fair principles of social life be agreed to and established and sustained and, beyond it, everyone is required to abide by those principles, in other words, make rational decisions and choices, with reference to those principles, in his or her own best interest.  This connects the theory of justice with the theory of rational choice, as social science generally and economic science particularly understands it.  Rawls postulates two principles of justice: "the first requires equality in the assignment of basic rights and duties, while the second holds that social and economic inequalities, for example of wealth and authority, are just only if they result in compensating benefits for everyone, and in particular for the lest advantaged members of society" (pp. 14-15).

The question is: How do we arrive at an agreement over the basic principles of human association and social cooperation?  If I understand Rawls meaning correctly, we do so rationally, which is to say by keeping individual arbitrariness, prejudices, biases, and interests out of our concerns, reflection, and deliberations.  This is a very crucial point.  We know only too well that, though rationality and the assumption of man as a rational animal is at the core of all social sciences, we can hardly name a social scientist whose prejudices, biases, and interest, or the class interest with which he identifies have not influenced and shaped his theorizing.  And, if you listen to the feminists, they will tell you that there has not been social science great or a great man of philosophy, art, or literature who was not a male sexist and chauvinist, and they may be right.  Nevertheless, in rationality of human beings lies their social salvation.

Rawls suggestion is that—providing those talking, discoursing, and deliberating with a view to choose and agree upon a set of general principles of justice for society are, hypothetically, seated behind a veil of ignorance—it is wholly possible for them to arrive at such at a consensus as to such principles, which shall  be used to build the social structure and institutions of society rationally and with good will toward all the members of the society, based upon a conception of justice as fairness.  Behind the veil of ignorance, "no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does any one know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and liabilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like.  I shall assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities.  The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance" (p. 12).

I will only add to the above that those talking and reflecting about and choosing the principles of justice do not know whether they are male or female.  Why Rawls ignored gender—certainly the most prejudicial personal attribute when men discuss the place, status, and rights of women and the questions of equality of male and female and the construction of gender and sexuality is quite puzzling to me.  Anyway, I will quote no more from his A Theory of Justice, but I strongly recommend that you read it.

What it means in the ordinary sense is that in the selection of the general principles of social justice, all individual, tribal, provincial, and class biases, prejudices, and interests have to be kept out of the discussion, debate, and deliberations and the selection of those principles on which the basic social structure, social institutions, and social rules and laws are to be based.  The only crucial consideration is to be justice and fairness, or justice as fairness.  It is not surprising that justice if often represented symbolically by a woman with a blindfold on her eyes holding up a scale in perfect balance.  The idea, I am sure, is that if she were to see the victim and the victimizer, it is quite possible that she might tip the balance in one’s or another’s favor.  In Islamic terms, we can say that, if a man did not know whether his own daughter, when grown to womanhood or when she is as young as nine years of age, will be a respectively married only wife of a wealthy man, or one of his four wives, or a woman divorced by repudiation and put out in the street by her husband, or a woman taken in mutah as a temporary wife (contracted for her sexual services for an agreed upon hire for a specified period at the end of which the mutah marriage stands automatically dissolved), or a female slave of someone whom he can auction in the bazaar to the highest bidder, or whom he can simply give away as a gift to a friend of his or to bribe an official, or a woman captured in war by the enemy soldiers and put to sexual use, in other words if he were operating behind a veil of ignorance, there is a good chance that he might be motivated to choose, suggest, and plead for the acceptance of those general principles for adoption by society that seem to him to be most fair and just to all women and respectful of their dignity as a class of people.  Indeed, we can even put him behind so thick a veil of ignorance that he does not even know whether he himself would be a man or woman.  Don’t you think that under those circumstances, he may think and reflect hard and long and might come out forthrightly in favor of male and female equality as well.  In other words, he might think and say that the social order, social institutions, and social rules ought to be based on justice, fairness, and compassion for women men alike.  If he reaches that conclusion, he might even say that such institutions as polygamy, divorce by the repudiation of the wife, mutah (temporary marriage), harem (concubinage), and capture of unmarried girls and married women in war and their sexual use or abuse are inherently not only unjust, unfair, and disrespectful of the fundamental dignity of women as human and moral beings, but destructive of the humanity of men, too.  There is a story that when Ali ibn Talib, the favorite son-in-law (married to the favorite daughter Fatima of the Prophet) of  Prophet Muhammad, made it known that he was going to take a second wife, he objected strongly and forbade Ali to do so, because it would make his daughter unhappy.  This shows that the practice of  polygamy by even pious and respectable men, such as Ali, would hurt and inflict indignity upon so pious a wife as Fatima.  In another story, it is narrated that, when Islamic rules of the proper treatment of wives were being instituted by the Prophet, it was alleged by Makkan Muslims that it was emboldening them (wives) and some of them were going to the Prophet and complaining about the beating their husbands were giving them.  Muhammad did not like the practice of men beating their wives (not even slave girls) and had often spoken against it.  As was to be expected, men in general paid little heed.  Indeed, even Umar, a most prominent Companion of the Prophet, who became the second caliph at Madinah and a great one, too, protested to him to the effect that he (Muhammad) was giving women too high a status and too much latitude in marriage—his point being that in the former times we could beat our wives and no one thought anything of it, but now one had to answer for it—which disturbed Umar, because the social  rules were being changed.  In response to women’s complaints and by way of a definitive ruling, Allah sent a revelation to the Prophet which is the verse 4:34 in the Quran.  This verse, as we know gave the husband the right to beat his wife or wives, if and when he thought it called for in order to correct and discipline her.  In explaining the verse, the Prophet said that he had wanted the matter to be settled one way, but Allah’s commandment went the other way.  If the story is correct, we can say that the Prophet himself, though he accepted it as a divine commandment, questioned the wisdom and fairness of the ruling to women.

I am sorry I was long in coming to the questions that are the agenda of the seminar.  But the above was necessary as a background.  That Muslim women are denied freedom, equality, and many a choice in life in practice is only too well and painfully known to all of us.  Even our orthodox, traditionalist, and conservative imams and ulama, or men who are learned in the texts of the sacred scriptures of Islam, viz., the Quran and the Hadith, and fiqh, or jurisprudence of Islam, acknowledge and lament the fact that even the rights that women have been granted by Allah and His Messenger are not allowed to be availed of and exercised by them.  But I am sorry to say that, when I reflect about them rationally within the conceptual framework or paradigm of justice as fairness, as set forth by Rawls in his A Theory of Justice, I find that some of the principles of gender justice in Islam do not seem to me to be quite fair to women.  It might well be that, apart from the perversity—male sexism, chauvinism, and men’s desire to control women—of Muslims as a people with certain psychological propensities or as imperfect followers of Islam, these principles leave much to be desired as the ordering and organizational principles of the social structure and institutions of Muslim society and were, therefore, partly, if not wholly, responsible for the domination, subordination, and oppression of women both in past history and are so in the present day Muslim societies.  That is my fundamental thesis.  On rational grounds, I think that the general principles of the absolute and relative conceptions of gender, sexuality, statuses, rights, duties, and the roles of men and women in Muslim family, society, state, polity, economy, culture, and public life, including religious life, as contained in many a verse of the Quran—notably 2:223, 2:228, 4:3, and 4:34 for example—provide sufficient bases and empowerment to orthodox, traditionalistic, and conservative men and women, often called "Fundamentalists," by their opponents to establish and sustain a social order, social institutions, legislation , and a judicial system in which discrimination, exploitation, and oppression of women can be institutionalized and perpetuated, as is amply evident from Islamic history and contemporary reality.  Add to this the natural (?), certainly the psychological propensities of men and the sociological pressure in Muslim societies to dominate, subordinate, and control women and we find a situation facing us that seems to quite hopeless, as far as any real improvement in the condition of the Muslim woman is concerned in our or probably even in the foreseeable time.  Both in conception and reality, Muslim society has been and remains a "Man’s World."

Be that as it may, I am decidedly of the opinion that, if the quality of life in Muslim society has to improve, it must move in the direction of freedom, equality, and dignity for all—male or female, Muslim and non-Muslim—within it.  More to the point, Muslims must suspend, transcend, or abandon the belief that men are inherently superior to women, that women were created for the sake of men, and that women must submit to and be obedient to men, that the two must live in separate worlds, and that the only proper career for women is that of the vulva and womb, rearing their children, and domesticity.  I see no reason—not when I think and reflect about it rationally—why women cannot and ought not to be as active in the world outside the home as men are.  Neither do I see any reason why they cannot and ought not to be as free, independent, and self-determined as are men.  Nor, indeed, do I see why women cannot and ought not to develop the capacity and competency to support and maintain themselves and share in the responsibility for the economic and social being of the family, and even be fully responsible, if and when the man of the house is temporarily and permanently incapacitated and cannot provide for the family.  After all, men and women are made of the same flesh and bones, and have the same hart and mind and the soul, and the same destiny, too.

If you have been listening attentively, you can see why I am in favor of full and complete equality of status, rights, and roles for women, as moral, free, independent, and responsible persons as we do in respect of men, with both enjoying equal opportunities for education, growth, and maturation.  I would open all educational institutions, including coed ones, and all forms of education and training to women without any restriction, constraint, or limitation, and make it socially and legally permissible and respectable for them to go into any line of work, vocation, or profession that their talent, aptitude, and aspiration induce them choose and prepare for, pursue, and succeed or fail in.  In this regard, I have no problem with, reservation about, and objection to coeducation of girls and boys and women and men and women working alongside men.  If a woman can function competently in her job, she is entitled to it—in other words, she may not be disqualified from it simply because she is a woman.  Such discrimination is as unjust and unfair as discrimination on the bases of race, color, ethnicity, religion, or national origin.

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