---

Chapter Eight
The Summing Up

---

Introduction

    In the preceding chapters, I have provided an expression of my thoughts on some of the major themes in the culture of Islam.  This I have done by setting forth my understandings of and reasonably detailed descriptions of the cultural constructions of gender and genderization, sex and sexuality, and marriage and cohabitation in Islam; a discussion of family planning and related issues; and, finally, my thoughts as to the solution of the sexuality of premarrieds especially and of singles generally.  In this chapter, I propose to present the recapitulation of the major themes, discussed topically before with evaluations of the same, offer some comments on each of them, and try to interface or confront the Islamic positions with the mainstream of life in the world of today in which we live, especially that part of it which is described as the modern and/or postmodern world, and, finally, venture a few recommendations as to making contemporary Muslim life and living more conducive and/or compatible to our conditions of life.  While at it, I will also raise some questions of human and social justice, equity, fairness, flourishing, and fulfillment of the sexes, or persons of male and female genders, under the cultural constructions of gender and genderization, sex and sexuality, and marriage and cohabitation in Islam and examine briefly the realism, contemporaniety, and practicality of Islamic paradigms of genderization, sexuality, and marriage today.

    Islam is not only a religion in the Western sense of the word—a system of the private beliefs of the individual and one’s mode of worship—it is that but it is more, much more, too.  What that means is that Islam is also a way of life, which prescribes, exhorts, admonishes, and tells its adherents how to live their individual and collective lives.  Hence, it is at once a religion, system of laws, social order, ethics, politics, economics and more, much more.  In a word, it is everything—all the guidance—that a Muslim needs to live his or her life in this world.  Because this guidance is from Allah, or God, and Rasul Allah, or the Prophet and Messenger of God, Muhammad that is, the Muslim believes it is universal (irrespective of time and place) and eternal and valid (until the Day of Judgment) and, therefore, right and proper, binding and inviolable in the life and living of the Muslim man, woman, and child, and in the collective life of the community.

    Islam is usually thought to consist of Aqeedah, or Creed, and Shariah, or Law.  The former admits of no change or adjustment over time and space, whereas the latter does admit of change or adjustment over time and space, in that no human society stands still, and therefore, given historical change, the Shariah allows, must allow under necessity, change and adjustment in the codification and application of the laws, as the society moves or evolves from stage to stage.  For illustrative purposes, as the society evolves from hunting and gathering to subsistence to agricultural to industrial to technological stages, admittedly it would demand adjustments in the detailed laws and rulings of the Shariah that bear upon Muslim life and living.  This is inevitable, because every developmental stage presents problems, questions, and dilemmas of its own, which demand timely, suitable, and practical answers.  Let me give a rather dramatic example.   Islam teaches and the Shariah lays down the law that the woman who gives birth to the child is his or her natural or real mother.  Today in the age of assisted reproduction, this has become questionable.  For example, recently I heard a news report that Woman A (a black woman) has brought a suit against Woman B (a white woman) stating that A is the real mother of the child in question, because it was her embryo, which was mistakenly planted in the womb of B who carried it to the full term and gave birth to the child.  (Actually, this white woman had been taking fertility enhancement treatment and, as it turned out at the time of delivery, two embryos had been implanted in her womb—one white and the other black—as a result of which she gave birth to two babies, one white and another black.)

Woman A’s petition is that she, i.e., the black woman A (the provider of the embryo), is the real mother of the child and not the white woman B (the provider of the womb) who gave birth to the child.  If you go by the fact that the child looks obviously an African-American, of course the black woman is the real mother.  But it is wholly possible that the two women involved both, claiming to be the real mother of the child, might just as easily have been both of the same racial and ethnic extraction.  My point is only to illustrate in a telling way how and why Shariah law in this regard may need adjustment in the light of what developments in human reproduction have been made possible by biomedical technology.  In our time, procreation need not be sexual; it can be achieved wholly asexually and may involve more than two persons. We all have some idea of the extraordinary development in medicine and the technology of reproduction.  Consequently, there have been presented before us not only entirely new questions, but also new questions of an entirely new type.  But this has taken place not only in the reproductive area; it has taken place in virtually all areas of human life and living.  The case for new approaches to thinking about Islam and reinterpreting its teaching is obvious.  Also obvious is the need for a new codification of the Shariah.  I think Islam as a religion and way of life has to be rethought wholesale, even as our Aqeedah, or Creed, remains essentially the same.

    Islam has an inherent tendency toward what in our time has come to be called "Islamic Fundamentalism."  As I understand it, one meaning of fundamentalism is the literal reading, interpretation, and construction of the sacred religious texts.  When this is done, what is said in the scriptures is taken literally and its meaning embodied in the letter of the law, which, in the case of Islam, means the Shariah, or Islamic law, which, in turn, gives rise to Shariaism, from which arises the demand for the faithful implementation of the letter of the law in the strictest sense, without any consideration given and/or concession made for historical and geographic changes in the conditions of life.  Perhaps if Islam had never spread beyond the boundaries of Arabia and if conditions of life had not changed in that country either, life under Islam could be lived today exactly as it was lived during the seventh century.  But, as history would have it and for good or ill, Islam did spread beyond the boundaries of Arabia and is today the religion of people in virtually all parts of the globe, with hugely different conditions of life in the various parts of it.  The question, therefore, is: How can Islamic scriptures be so read and interpreted and their meanings so understood, constructed, and applied by Muslims, living under hugely different conditions of life, that they, Muslims in different parts of the modern world, may say in good faith that they live their lives in accordance with the fundamental spirit of the teachings of the Qur'an and Sunnah?  Unless Muslims find a way to do so, they cannot claim justifiably that Islam is a universal religion.  That Islam was a practicable religion for Arabs in Madinah in the time of the Prophet is not doubted. It even brought uplifting and beneficial change in Arab society.  What is doubtful today is whether Islam is an equally practicable religion for a variety of people in various parts of the world today, for it remains to be proven.  An oft-asked question in Islamic conferences in the United States is: In which country do the way of life of the people and the social, political, and economic systems of the country come closest to the teaching of Islam?  I have heard the learned and widely traveled men of Islam name a few countries in the West—Sweden, England, America—but never a Muslim country in response to that question.  They didn’t appear to be joking either.

    The debate over how to interpret/reinterpret and construct/reconstruct the message of Islam in the modern world goes on.  In many a case, it leads to bloodletting, too.  If we were to observe the protocol of the Aristotelian logic of the excluded middle, we could say that Muslims divide themselves into two groups, viz., orthodox/fundamentalists and liberals/modernists, on the issue of how to think about and apply the message of Islam in the modern world.  The former group wants to remake the modern world in the image of Islam and as its teaching was codified in the Shariah, or Islamic law, a thousand years ago.  They demand the implementation of the Shariah, as inherited from the past.  The latter group wants to remake the Shariah in the image of the modern world, recodify it by adjusting it to the modern world, and even leave out some of its provisions and laws, because they regard them disturbingly out of step with the modern world.  I, for one, place myself in the second group of Muslims.  I am convinced that only a liberally understood, interpreted, and constructed and constantly modernizing Islam has any real chance of being relevant to Muslim life and living in the world of today.

    Socially, politically, economically, psychologically, and culturally, orthodox, traditionalist, and/or fundamentalist Islam consider sexual and/or gender inequality fundamental to its way of life.  This, I am certain, is untenable, unjustifiable, and unacceptable in the world of today and the foreseeable future.  Maybe the inequality of status, rights, and opportunities of men and women for personal development, growth, and functioning in society, economy, polity, and cultural domain might continue to be the foremost and the most outstanding feature of the old Muslim societies around the world, but insistence upon the same in the Muslim communities in the West would be, it seems to me, totally out of step with the mainstream of life in the Western society and culture in which millions of Muslims have settled permanently.  As we know, Western society, culture, and law provide men and women equal freedom and the right of self-determination, hence it would be untenable for the Muslim community, say in the United States, to maintain that whereas Muslim women are equal to men in the American society at large, they should be inferior to Muslim men in their own community.  There is no reason why American Muslim women should be legally empowered to compete with men in all areas of professional and public life in the American society, but not be empowered to do so in the Muslim community in the United States.  I do not think that Muslim women should be doctrinally and categorically disqualified and denied the opportunity to train for and function as Muslim clergy, including as imams, or prayer leaders, givers of the Friday khutabah, or sermon, to mixed congregations, and officiate at religious and/or civil ceremonies, including weddings.  What does the shape of the genitalia have to do with the discharge of any of these functions?  If a woman can train herself and develop the requisite abilities and expertise to perform as clergy, why should she be restrained from doing so?  To say that women have been historically forbidden to become imams is not a good reason by itself for disqualifying them from becoming imams in the present day world.

    I trained for the job and career of college and/or university teacher, professor if you will.  I acquired the requisite education and I did become, first, a college professor and, then, a university professor in Pakistan.  But after a few years of college teaching I was fired from my job.  Subsequently, I taught at the university level, but was fired from my university position as well.  Thereupon, I learned that I was not cut out to be a university professor.  After a ten years’ try in the teaching profession, I reached the conclusion that I had better do something else, if I was going to have steady employment.  Even so, I would not have liked to be disqualified to train for the job and career of a college and/or university professor.  But even when I took the arduous road of getting the requisite education for my chosen career, I knew that there were no guarantees that I would succeed in my chosen profession.  If I had to do it all over again, I would still get the same education and try to make it as a college and/or university professor.  Likewise, I do not think there is a good case for denying Muslim women the opportunity to train for and try to become practicing clergy, i.e., an imam, or prayer leader.  Why deny them the equal opportunity to compete for imamat, or religious ministry?  If they can do the job, more power to them.  If some of them cannot make it as an imam, they would soon be fired from their job and learn the lesson I learned and would, of necessity, do something else, or content themselves with a career of vagina and womb, if they simply cannot cut it in the work-a-day world.  But no Muslim man, because he is a man, or Muslim government, because it is in power, should have the right to lay down what she a woman can or cannot do, because she is a woman.  Let her try herself out, take the necessary risk, and find out what she can or cannot do.  Just as no one hands a man a success in what he chooses to do, so no one is going to hand a woman a success in what she chooses to do.  But, for God’s sake, let her have the same opportunity to compete, which a man has.  Why not?

    The reason that is often given by orthodox Muslims that women cannot be imams is that a Muslim clergy, the imam that is, both stands in front of the congregation, facing it, when he gives the khutabah, or the sermon, and stands with his back turned toward the congregation, when he leads the Muslim prayers.  Hence, if it were a female imam, she would excite the men in the congregation, whether she is facing the congregation as well as when she has her back turned toward the congregation.  Men’s sexual imagination would only be heightened, because Muslim worship demands bending on the knees and prostrating on the floor.  So, when and while leading the prayers, the female imam would bend on her knees and prostrate herself on the floor and her hips would be up in the air—a position and posture which the woman may assume (so-called doggie position) in love-making and this would make it impossible for men to keep their mind and focus on the prayer.  The Muslim always has to keep his eyes fixed on the prize, which is Allah, and the presence of the woman, the proverbial temptress an seductress, for which Islam has the word fitna, or the instigator of chaos and disorder, would only add fuel to the fire.  Muslim men’s obsession

with sexuality, which is never away from his mind and psyche, would, in the presence of a woman imam and other women in the congregation especially and in the mosque generally, even disrupt their prayer.  That is the reason why women in the subcontinent were never allowed to get anywhere near the mosque for any activity, including the Friday congregational and the two festive Eid prayers during the year.  They are not, even today.  Islam must keep women out of sight and reach of men, if it has to have any chance of being practiced in the daily life and living of Muslims.  The belief is that only when women are out of sight can it be expected that, with some deliberate effort, they would be out of men’s minds for long enough a period for them to offer their prayers to Allah with the attention and concentration necessary for Islamic worship.  If this reasoning has merit, it is understandable why Islam insists on the segregation of the sexes and the seclusion, veiling, and keeping of women above the age of nine out of the sight of men and the categorical prohibition of khilwah, or private contact between men and women, in all walks of Muslim life and living, including even so sacred and sanctified a place as the House of Allah, i.e., the mosque, where Muslims meet for religious worship only.  This is important, because, unlike churches, mosques are not used for any other purpose, such as, weddings, either.  What is crucial is to realize that, just as the superiority of men over women is fundamental to Islam, certainly in orthodox Islam, so is keeping women out of the sight and reach of Muslim men.  When together, neither can be trusted not to engage in sexual intrigue and its aftermath.

    Of course, the above, i.e., the cultural construction of genders and/or the civilizational strategy of genderization in Islam, is based on the same kind of reasoning which is offered to forbid women to bare their neck, arms, or legs in public, because it would excite men, and it could conceivably and potentially lead to disturbance in the psyche of men, making it impossible to keep their sexual imagination and exploits in check, and it would also create sexual anarchy and disorder in society.  That is the reason why Muslim girls and women cannot be allowed to wear sleeveless blouses, skirts, and tightly fitted clothing, sweaters, jeans, much less swimming suits and/or bikinis, within the eye-sight of men.  For the same reason, they are forbidden to participate in sports.  Perhaps, the reader would remember that, when in the 1984 Olympics, held in Los Angeles, California, a Moroccan young woman—I believe Mutwakkil was her name—won the Gold Medal in the 400 meter race, she was not even so much as congratulated in the capitals of the nations of the Muslim world but criticized and castigated for wearing a short sleeve blouse and shorts in public which bared her arms and legs in front of the whole world watching.  Only a people, obsessed with female arms and legs, and genitalia and sexuality—and Muslim men are precisely that—would so react to so extraordinary a personal achievement of a Muslim girl as winning an Olympic Gold Medal.  It always amazes me to witness such behavior of Muslims whose proudest artistic achievement is also the belly dance.  What is more, it is the same people, too, who have rarely missed an opportunity to immigrate to and settle permanently in the countries of the West.  But perhaps girls and women of other religions and people are a fair game for Muslims.  After all, Muslim men watch women with bare necks, arms, and legs and girls and women dressed, or "undressed" as Muslims observe, in short skirts or shorts, tightly fitted clothing, and in swim suits and/or bikinis all the time in the West and, I am sure, they certainly go to school, work with, and socialize freely and even actively pursue especially white girls and women and, when and if an opportunity presents itself, do not hesitate to have sexual intercourse with them, too.

    At any rate, on seeing Western women, to use an Islamic favorite term, "naked", i.e., without hijab or purdah, or the veil, and dressed or undressed in sleeveless blouses and short skirts or jeans, revealing the contours of the female anatomy and shape and form, the great majority of Muslim men in the West do not go about all the time turned on.  Over the last nearly four decades what I have heard in the United States in informal conversations with Americans is that Muslim men are rarely, if ever restrained by anything in their religion or upbringing in approaching and pursuing American girls and women, especially white, for sex, but, at the same time, they are ready practically to kill if and when an American approaches a Muslim girl…for sex.  Whether they kill or want to kill the girl or the man or both is only a matter of detail.  How much truth there is in all this is difficult to tell.  What is certain is that Muslim men are rarely known to control, restrain, and/or repress their sexuality.  It is almost a matter of masculine pride for them.  After all, we do say it with religious and cultural pride that Prophet Muhammad was so potent that he could have and often used to have sexual intercourse with all his nine wives in a single night.  Apparently, it is generally believed, perceived, or rumored that the sexuality of the Muslim man is, more often than not, out of his control.  Carol L. Anyway (an American, Christian, Anglo-Saxon woman whose daughter converted to Islam, whereupon she studied

Islam in order to understand her daughter’s conversion and marriage to a Muslim), remarks: "Islamic men are so afraid of their sexuality that the women have the burden of helping them control it."¹⁵⁴   I wonder if this mother has made the above statement in criticism of Islam and Muslims in the sense that she thinks that if only Muslim men were trained to keep their sexuality in check, in control, themselves, as self-responsible sexual beings should and must, she would not have lost her daughter to Islam. But this is like saying that if and only if President Bill Clinton had been brought up by his mother as a Christian and trained to keep his sexuality in check, in control, a nice Jewish girl  (I mean Monica Lewinsky) would not have been drawn into oral sex with him.   I am only speculating or thinking out loud.  In the end, why men and women are drawn to a certain religion or a certain form of sexuality nobody really knows—I certainly do not.  So, whether Muslim men are any the less able to control their sexuality in comparison to other men or that they are so powerless to control their sexual impulses that Muslim women must help them control their propensity and readiness to fall for any opportunity to have sexual intercourse with any woman I cannot say.

Be that as it may, Muslims do seem to believe that the only way Islam can control Muslim men’s sexuality is not the reliance on men’s upbringing, moral instruction, moral conscience, and/or ability or sublimation, but the keeping of women out of men’s sight and reach.  Hence, the demand for strict segregation of the sexes, veiling and seclusion of women, and prohibition of the mixing, meeting, and interaction between boys and girls, beyond the ages of nine years of age, and of men and women, except in situations where the two are not marriageable to each other or sexual intercourse between them would be incest.  For this reason, khilwah, or privacy, i.e., being alone with a person of the opposite sex is strictly forbidden in Islam.  For example, a situation which arises only too very frequently in modern life and living, viz., a male or a female giving a ride to someone of the opposite sex, as between students or other adults in the normal conduct of life, is just as strictly forbidden in Islam as their being alone or sleeping in the same room.  Indeed, even a brother and a sister, each of whom is of nine years of age or older, are forbidden to do so, for, the popular belief is, that when two humans of the opposite sexes are alone together, the third who joins them invariably is Satan.  Hence, the consequence that his presence between and with them brought about when Adam and Eve were together will be the inevitable result even today, when and if a boy and a girl, and a man and a woman, are together alone.

    As to Muslim women having "the burden of helping them [Muslim men] control it [their sexuality]," as the Christian mother Mrs. Carol Anyway remarks above, there is some support for the idea in Islam, too.  Polygamy and concubinage are designed precisely, certainly in part, to help men gratify their curiosity and craving for a variety of sexual partners.  Call it a license for male promiscuity and you will certainly get no argument from me.  In the cultural construction of genders and the genderization scheme of Islam, they do have a purpose in part to provide a legal and legitimate setting for the so-called polygamous, meaning promiscuous, nature of male sexuality in Islam.  This does not mean a refutation of the proposition that polygamy and concubinage have other purposes, too.  Shia Islam goes even a step further.  One definite and avowed purpose of mutah or sighey, or temporary marriage, is to keep a religious, devout, and pious man, from committing a sin.  Like all men, a religious, devout, and a pious man, too, can develop a crush on and become infatuated by a young girl or woman and/or may otherwise desire and crave/or sexual intercourse with a different woman than his wife or wives.  The question is what is he to do?  The Shia answer is that, it is far better and in the interest of the community, that he have the lawful and legitimate opportunity to satisfy his sexual fancy than commit adultery, fornication, or an act of prostitution.  So, mutah or sighey, or a temporary marriage, for a night or a short or long period is the answer.  Hence a premarried Shia girl, even a virgin, or an otherwise single Shia woman, does something religiously meritorious by consenting to a mutah or sighey with the man in question, which saves this religious, devout, and pious man from committing the sin of adultery or fornication.  This is both pleasing to Allah and is beneficial to the community.  According to this logic, Muslim women indeed help Muslim men control their sexuality.  But this state of affairs can be created and maintained only within the context of an Islamic conceptualization of genders and genderization, in which women’s life-mission is defined as being the service of and usefulness to men which is both pleasing to God and is socially beneficial to Muslim society.  If this reasoning is accepted—which I, for one, do not find acceptable to me—the questions of freedom, equality, and probably even dignity of women become totally irrelevant.

    Without a doubt, the question of gender equality/inequality is the most important question in the area of the cultural construction of gender; relative statuses, positions, and rights of men and women; and the mutual relations of the opposite sexes in our time.  With the global influences of Westernization and the national policies of modernization and economic development of virtually all-Muslim countries, the question of gender equality has become an important question for Muslim societies as well.  The ubiquitous charge against Islam, Muslims, and the organized institutions of Islam is that within them there exists no real equality of men and women and that this state of affairs is legitimated by the teaching of Islam, as it is derived from the Qur'an, the Sunnah, and the Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad.  To the doctrinally mandated gender inequality is also added sexual and gender inequality in actual practice, which derives from a masculine or phallic view of the world and the all too universal patriarchal, hierarchical, undemocratic, sexist, chauvinist, and misogynist attitudes of Muslim men, and even many Muslim women.  With all these charges I find myself in agreement.  I think that the Qur'an, the Sunnah, and the Hadith, and Muslim attitudes in general do disadvantage women religiously, socially, politically, economically, culturally, psychologically, and educationally from the start to the end of life.  I have seen it in my own parental family, in the Muslim community of my village in Uttar Pradesh in India in which I grew up, at Aligarh Muslim University, in Karachi, Pakistan, and even in the United States in the Muslim community of Southern California in general and in the Islamic Centers and mosques and all sorts of other Muslim social, communal, and national organizations.  The Muslim double standard is only too famous or infamous, though it is regarded a natural way of life and living by Muslims—both by men and men.

    Gender inequality is reprehensible in itself.  It causes immense harm both to men and women, though, I am sure, more to women, because it holds them back as human beings and as members of society and as citizens.  But it also causes an incalculable harm to the society as a whole, because this within the setting and context of gender inequality that the attitudinal environment in which the inferiority of women to men in the family and the society at large is experienced, learned and internalized by the young as the most outstanding feature of the Muslim society and culture.   Every new generation of Muslims is raised by fathers and mothers and religious and community leaders, who, by their attitudes and conduct, pass on the same attitudes and conduct as a frame of reference to the next generation.  Finally, because the inequality of male-female statuses, rights, and relations becomes and is internalized as a norm of Muslim life and living, inequality in the social, economic, political, and cultural life of the society at large presents itself as the general or societal norm.  Hence, it becomes reasonable and acceptable that, if fathers and brothers can dominate, subordinate, and deal with women high-handedly, why can’t the rulers of the country do the same with the common people, who are looked at by the rulers, not as citizens, but as subjects.  On this basis arose and has been perpetuated to this day a whole political culture of obedience in Muslim countries, which has made it impossible so far to establish and sustain democratic institutions in any such country.  Supported and legitimated both by the doctrine of Allah’s Preordination and/or Predestination—of whatever exists, including despotism and tyranny, in a Muslim country—and the explicit teaching of the Qur'an, contained in the verse: "O ye who believe! Obey God, and obey the Apostle, and those charged with authority among you" (Qur'an, 4:59), a convenient formula was provided to the rulers to impose their will and justify it as the Will of Allah, to be endured by the people, for whom the only recourse remained to pray to Him for deliverance from the same, but not to resist, oppose, or rebel against even the worst form of despotic and tyrannical rule.  Not surprisingly, Muslims failed to develop any real sense of democratic equality, democratic government, and democratization as a principle of Muslim life.   Understandably, even today Islam and democracy remain the antitheses of each other in the Islamic worldview.

    What is crucial is that at the base of all forms of inequality in Muslim society is the inequality of man and woman.  The challenge to Muslims today is how to remove this most basic form of human inequality in that society in our time.  But this, of course, is no small order.  An advocate of gender equality in Muslim society comes up against the forces of orthodoxy, traditionalism, and the Muslim governments.  That is the conclusion of Riffat Hassan, an avowed Pakistani Muslim feminist theologian, who has dedicated her life to the cause of male-female equality.  She questions the authenticity of the Hadith that the woman was created from the rib of Adam as a derivative and, therefore, for the man as a mate.  This, she claims—rightly in

my opinion—is in direct negation to the teaching of the Qur'an.  Hassan writes: "The creation of woman is as clearly defined in the Qur'an as the creation of man, and the Qur'anic statements about human creation, diverse as they are, leave no doubt as to one point: both man and woman were made in the same manner, of the same substance, and at the same time."¹⁵⁵  Her conclusion is: "The fact that almost all Muslims believe that the first woman (Hawwa [or Eve]) was created from Adam’s rib shows that, in practice, the Hadith literature has displaced the teaching of the Qur'an at least insofar as the issue of woman’s creation is concerned."¹⁵⁶  I certainly agree with Dr. Riffat Hassan’s above observation.   Where I do not agree with her is in the following observation of hers:  "The more I saw the justice and compassion of God reflected in the Qur'anic teachings regarding women, the more anguished and angry I became, seeing the injustice and inhumanity to which Muslim women, in general, are subjected in actual life" .  What Dr. Riffat Hassan is missing, I think, is that notwithstanding what other factors are responsible for "the injustice and inhumanity to which Muslim women, in general, are subjected in actual life,"¹⁵⁷ one factor is precisely the doctrinal basis of the same that is provided by such verses of the Qur'an as 2: 223 and 228; 4: 3 and 34.  It simply amazes me that a woman who calls herself a "feminist theologian" and called herself as having been "the only Muslim woman in the country [Pakistan] who was attempting to interpret the Qur'an systematically from a nonpatriarchal perspective"¹⁵⁸  in 1984, when she gave her testimony before the Pakistan Commission on the Status of Women, can contend that the Qur'an did justice to women in those verses, which have shaped "the actual life" under the Muslim social order.   I think the Qur'an is patriarchal and the superiority of man to the woman is fundamental to Islam.  The Gospel and the Torah are patriarchal, too, which is why religion presents a problem in the area of gender and sexuality.  Hence, in certain respects, if human equality is to be achieved, like Christians and Jews before them, Muslims, too, may have to go beyond the Qur'an.

    Therefore what has to happen is that the Muslims of today would have to make, first, an intellectual decision, commitment too, that we shall accord a privileged status to those verses in the Qur'an that proclaim, assert, and promote woman-man equality, as against those that proclaim, assert, and promote woman-man inequality, on the one hand, and base, formulate, and implement a policy of social, economic, political, psychological, and cultural equality of woman and man, with equal opportunities for personal and individual growth, development, and achievement—backed by positive legislation and governmental action—on the other.  So long as the woman-man inequality verses remain the doctrinal basis of social policy, legislation, and governmental action, as they have been in the past centuries and are today, I see little hope for a real improvement in the status of women in Muslim societies.  No matter how humanely one interprets the propositions of the Qur'an that women are the tillage which men may plough or cultivate sexually when and how they will (2:223); men are a degree above women (2:228); and men are qawwamun, or rulers and managers and in charge of women’s affairs, and only obedient women are righteous, and, in case of disobedience, men have the right to counsel them, deny them sexual gratification, and, ultimately, beat them into submission, I see little real hope for the sort of even a minimum degree of liberation, freedom, equality, and dignity to which Muslim women today ought to be entitled even in Muslim society.  Unfortunately, even our best and brightest women are failing, certainly lacking, in this level of understanding.  I mean no slight, but the like of Dr. Riffat Hassan, too, need to have their consciousness raised, before Muslim men would take their sisters seriously.

    Everyone from the proverbial layman or laywoman, even children, to the most learned, experienced, and professional sexologists knows that human sexuality is a very, very complex phenomenon, but it is a powerful one and can overwhelm any human being at any stage in his or her life.  Human beings do things under its power, which they would not do otherwise.  I do not think anyone knows how to cope with the power that sex or sexuality exercises upon the individual and the society, but both must somehow cope with and contain its power.  In his essay, "Fiction and Reality: Sources for the Role of Sex in Medieval Muslim Society," in Afaf Lutfi Al-Sayyid-Marsot, ed., Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam (Malibu, California: Undena Publications, 1979), Franz Rosenthal describes the dilemmas which confront both the individual and society as follows:

One of them [dilemmas] is quite simply that human society and civilization require for their very existence a certain amount of regulation of sexual expression.  Whatever its degree, the individual will have to submit to it, and he may easily feel oppressed by it and tempted to circumvent it.  The individual as being of benefit to him does not always consider that the other dilemma results from the fact that what is seen as being of benefit to society.  Sociologists nowadays never tire of reminding us of the importance of this fact.  In very short order I have come across statements such as ‘Policy designed to maximize benefits to the individual may not maximize the welfare of the community,’ and ‘the central dilemma …is that the aggregate of reasonable individual desires is a societal nightmare.’  We may add that unreasonable desires, even if they seem tolerable in small numbers of individuals, are all the more likely in the end to cause such uneasiness to society.¹⁵⁹

 I have a great passion for my religion while I like pleasures.
 How can I have a passion for pleasures as well as Islam?

    In the Rosenthal quotation above, there is the mention of  "unreasonable desires" of the individual (male or female) as well.  Some of these are only too well known, that is, if we regard penile penetration by the man of the vagina of the woman as the natural and normal sexual intercourse between two human beings.  Add to this normative standard, necessary for procreation, the religious, moral and ethical normative standard, that sexual intercourse may lawfully take place between legally-wedded couples only, and we have a frame of reference by which we may judge and the society may declare certain desires of the individual as being "unreasonable."  At once, the question arises that, if sexual needs and their gratification ought to take place for the sake of procreation only, what, then, is the Islamic view of a number of sexual activities on which the Qur'an is silent but which are implicitly permissible (?) in Islam.  We need mention only such activities as azl, or coitus interruptus, with the wife and, in the language of the Qur'an, "what the right hand possesses," i.e., the concubine, slave girl, or a female captive of war; interfemoral intercourse and/or masturbation at the hand of the wife during menstruation; oral sex (both fellatio and cunnilingus); and, according to some, anal intercourse with the wife or the concubine, which though not encouraged, is not forbidden, according to some.  Again, though, by invoking the homosexuality of the people of Lot, the Qur'an condemns and disapproves sodomy between men, which condemnation and disapproval apply to pederasty, too, nowhere does the Qur'an explicitly condemn and disapproves heterosexual sodomy, or anal intercourse with the woman (wife or concubine, female slave and/or a female captive of war) or lesbianism, i.e., sexual intercourse and activity between women.  As we know only too well, in the world of today, heterosexuality and homosexuality have become a matter of sexual orientation, whereby the individual may claim a right to choose one or the other, as befits his taste.  Hence, the question has become whether the individual has the right to choose the form of sexuality that best satisfies him or her.  We may call this the model of consensual sex, whereby two adults may freely and voluntarily consent to engage in whatever form of sexual acts they find mutually agreeable and satisfying.  The traditional model of sexuality is for the society to provide and make lawful through the agency of its most organized institution, viz., the state, laying down a catalogue of specific sexual acts or activities from which alone the individual must choose.  To simplify, we can say that the consensual model is the Western model of sexuality and the traditional one the Islamic model.  In the Islamic model, even when two persons—whether of the opposite sex (but not husband and wife nor owner-master and concubine) or of the same sex freely, voluntarily, and consensually engage in a forbidden sexual intercourse or an unlawful sexual activity, they commit a crime and are, therefore, liable criminally and, if found guilty, are punishable under the Shariah, or Islamic law, to wit, by death, as in case of fornication, adultery, and sodomy, which are defined as hadd offences, i.e., as

crimes that transgress the boundaries of normative sexual behavior set by Allah in the Qur'an.  But even a whole variety of other sexual acts, such as mouthing the breasts of the woman, oral sex, masturbation, etc. may be judged criminal and punished as such at the discretion of the Shariah judge.  In other words, both legally and civilizationally, Islam does not place sexuality within the private sphere of the individual, but in the public sphere of the Muslim society, to be strictly regulated by the state on behalf of religion and society.  Whether in the conditions under which Muslim life is lived today, it is a feasible, practical, and wise thing to do is in itself a question.  I do not think it is.  Probably, every sexual vice that is known to man or woman is practiced by some Muslims as well, though certain vices not to the same extent as they might be in the Western society.  But this is an empirical matter and I have no comparative data to offer in support of my statement.  I am speaking purely on the basis of my own impressions, formed from my own experience and observation of Muslim life and Western life during my sixty-five years, of which I lived the first thirty years in the subcontinent and the last thirty-five in America.

In this regard I want to reflect at bit.  Muslims look upon the West with contempt that Western society, culture and morality consider premarital sex, within the context of social dating and courtship for marriage, permissible, so long as sexual activity and intercourse are consensual, i.e., meet the criteria of consent, maturity, and privacy, which is to say that what takes place between consenting adults is their and not the law’s and/or the state’s or the government’s business.  In other words, within the context of dating and social relationships and courtship for marriage, both males and females of the age of consent can do freely, voluntarily, and privately whatever they desire, with there being no legal restriction as to specific acts, such as premarital heterosexual sex, homosexual sex (including two men engaging in sodomy, a man and woman engaging in what is called heterosexual sodomy, and/or lesbian sex), oral sex (fellatio and/or cunnilingus), sex during menstruation, sadistic-masochistic sex, menge a trois (a sexual relationship involving three people of the same or opposite sex), group sex, and whatever else they can think of.  In other words, what consenting adults do is not the law’s, not the state’s, not the government’s business.  Only when and if any of the elements—viz., consent, age of consent, and privacy—of consensual sex are violated does the law come into play and the state and the courts must ascertain legally whether a crime in the form of rape, corruption of a minor, child abuse, unlawful carnal knowledge, obscenity, and indecency has taken place.  When so determined, the guilty party must then be punished. Is this a morally and ethically defensible position?  Within the parameters of consensual sex, I think it is.

    In my above judgment, I compare this with the alternative moral and ethical position in Islam in which, though, for instance, premarital sex between consenting adults is termed immoral and unethical, hence punishable by capital penalty, sexual intercourse is permitted between a girl of nine or over and a man old enough to be her father or grandfather under the guise of nikah, or marriage, or between a man and his female slave or a female captive of war, who may be married or unmarried, whether she consents or not.  Indeed, the latter violates my sense of the morality and ethicality of sexual relations more than does sexual intercourse between two consenting adults and any sexual act to which they both consent freely, voluntarily, and agreeably.  As to the sexual use or abuse of women captured in war, the phenomenon of it in the 1990s in which Serb Christians kidnapped and sexually used or abused Bosnian and Kosovar Muslim girls and married women outraged all Muslims and not a few Christians as well.  But if it is a crime against humanity when Christians do it, it has to be a crime against humanity when Muslim did it or should do it.  I certainly have no two opinions about it.  I would sooner condone consensual premarital sex between consenting adults than forcible sex between a man and a captured woman of the enemy.  To me such sexual intercourse under these conditions is no different from rape.  Isn’t that how we Muslims judged the sexual abuse by Serb Christians, both soldiers and civilians, when they forced themselves upon Muslim women, captured during the wars of "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia and Kosovo?

    Obviously, every society has to adopt a cultural ideology and/or civilizational strategy to cope with human sexuality.  Ideally, only that civilizational strategy can be considered fair, just, and beneficent which puts the sexuality of both men and women on the same footing.  Not to do so, I consider fundamentally and inherently an unfair and unjust strategy, because it gives more power, freedom, latitudes, and privileges usually to men than women.  I can only and do indeed regard it a double standard of

sexual morality and ethics.  Because the Muslim society has done so historically, it has created many an injustice and inhumanity in Muslim society, that have plagued it in the past and plague it today, not only sexual and gender relations in the Muslim family, but in virtually all its various institutions—religious, social, economic, political, and cultural—and it has distorted, demoralized, and oppressed the psyche of the Muslim individual, male or female, over the past centuries and does so today.  All in all, it has destroyed the essential basis of human freedom, equality, dignity, endeavor, and achievement in Islam and Muslim culture and does so today.  It has arrested the evolution of both the individual and the society in the past and does so today.

    The above reasoning leads me to the conclusion that Muslims, in our time in the world in which we live, should and must leave behind and place in the museum of history all such institutions and practices that, in their spirit, intent, and content, allow men to arrogate to themselves superior status, rights, privileges, and roles in comparison and in contrast to those of women.  In the modern day Muslim life and living, I see no place for many an old and familiar institution of Muslim society, such as polygamy, concubinage, sale and purchase of women for sex slavery, the husband’s right to divorce the wife by repudiation, inferior legal status of the woman, mandated subordination of the wife, required obedience of the wife and the right of the husband to beat her into submission, compulsory domesticity of women, and a career of the work of the vagina and the womb and the sole responsibility of wives to rear and care for children.  By contrast, I also do not see any justification for women, or the wives, not being held equally responsible for assuming the burdens of life with their husbands and being responsible, too, for the economic and financial support of the family and children, purchase and payment of the house mortgage, home appliances, cars, and other assets that are necessary for a decent standard of living, and, in the American context, the provision for children’s education beyond high school, plus the daily expenses of the household economy.  I am quite aware of the fact that Islam gives the qawam, or lordship, to the husband over the wife and children, whereby he is legally responsible to support and maintain both.  But, because he does so, he is given the right by the Shariah to call the family house and the possessions in the house his, because he pays for them; and, indeed, even call the children his, because, again, he supports them.  That is the reason why, I think, there is no concept of "community property" or alimony, as such, in the Shariah, or Islamic law. The economic factor becomes the decisive factor on whose basis in Islam marriage and family life are culturally constructed.    If this way of looking at Muslim family life and spousal relations is correct, equality in marriage will remain unattainable so long as the wife is entirely dependent and at the mercy of the husband.  The only viable solution, then, is for Muslim wives to become, at least, relatively, economically independent.  Once Muslim women begin to be self-supporting and supportive of the family economically and financially by becoming an earning and a paying member of the household economy and responsible, too, for the acquisition of the household assets and possessions, equality will be theirs.  But so long as they think that the work of the vagina and the womb is all they are there for, they will continue to be unequal of and inferior to men.   It does not matter whether a woman is a wife, or, for that matter, a mother, daughter, sister, divorcee, or widow, so long as she is dependent for her keep upon a man or menfolk in the household, she will be inferior, weak, and helpless before him or them.  This is what Muslim women have to understand.  Freedom, equality, and independence have to be earned, they are not given as gifts to anyone—man or woman.  Economic dependence never fails to invite domination, subordination, inferiority, inequality, powerlessness, and helplessness.  There might be a certain kind of noblesse oblige in the Islamic philosophy of life, whereby men—fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, and men in general—are made the life-long qawwamun, or protectors and supporters, of women under all circumstances, before marriage, after marriage, in sickness and in health, and during divorce and widowhood, but it also gives men that power and control over women, which is the permanent barrier to the sexual and gender equality, freedom, autonomy, and independence of Muslim women with Muslim men.

    But perhaps the most challenging problem in the area of sexuality is being created, certainly in the Muslim communities in the West, America for example, but also in the middle and upper classes of Muslim societies, by the delayed marriages of both young men and young women on account of the rush for higher and professional education and training to qualify for lucrative professional jobs and careers.  Higher education and professional training and employment outside the home now are coming to be recognized necessary even for Muslim girls and women.  No longer is early marriage of women and having and rearing children the norm in the Muslim communities and societies.  This, probably, is the most consequential and visible trend today,

whereas in the past, until barely a generation or two ago, early marriage was the universal rule in Islam.  There are Hadiths, Sayings, of the Prophet Muhammad in which he counseled, exhorted, and admonished Muslims, especially fathers, to marry off their sons at puberty or soon thereafter and their daughters even before puberty, and told his followers in no uncertain terms that, when and if this is not done, the sin of the son’s or daughter’s becoming involved in premarital sexuality falls upon the father.  The expectation or demand that girls, though not necessarily boys, will remain virgin and chaste until their first marriage was based precisely upon the normative standard that they would be married well before reaching their middle teens.  But the same expectation or demand under the conditions when marriages are being delayed until they are in their late twenties and/or thirties or later is, to say the least, totally misplaced.  Not surprisingly, the fact that Muslim fathers are still expected to give in marriage a virgin daughter, as a bride, on her first marriage, no matter what her age, to the bridegroom, has in our time produced a disturbing side effect, i.e., the practice of ensuring that her hymen is stitched or an artificial hymen is implanted just before marriage, especially if she has spent years, obtaining higher education in the West, that is no longer uncommon.  To be sure, of all the Muslim hypocrisies this is a new one, which is a direct consequence of Muslim women’s acquiring higher and professional education, lasting for years, often as long as ten or more, as a necessary preparation for employment or a career in the work-a-day world.  This is a social and cultural change of historic proportions.  In the Muslim communities in the West or the sections of Muslim societies in which this change is taking place, life and living are radically different from what they had been until as recently as the 1950s and mid-1960s.  How Islam and the Muslim family, society, and culture are going to adjust to the phenomenon of delayed marriages only time will reveal.  This much is certain that Islam and Muslim life and living will never be the same again.

    What is of immediate relevance is that it was the custom of early marriages, both for male and female Muslims, but certainly for the latter—for whereas the unmarried Muslim male has always had a great latitude in the sexual domain, the unmarried Muslim female has had none—which made the orthodox sexual moral code of Islam hold good for centuries.  But early marriage is fast becoming a thing of the past.  The new situation is that, like Muslim young men, even Muslim young women today might get away from the vigilant eyes of their parents and other members of the family within the proverbial chardewari, or the four walls of the home.  Today, they, too, spend most part of the day outside the home at school, college, university, or work, oftentimes in a different city or country where they live alone, independently, and anonymously, as Muslim young men have done in the past and do today.  Add to this the easy availability of reliable and safe contraception and, in the last analysis, the affordable and surgical restoration of "virginity" artificially, and we have a whole new situation on our hands.

    That there is a definite and serious problem is clear.  The only question is what are Muslims—individually, communally, or socially—going to do?  If marriage at puberty or a year or two before, so that they arrive at puberty with their sexual lives in place, is no longer a practical proposition, and delayed marriage is the only alternative open—if a daughter, too, like a son, is to become a doctor, engineer, lawyer, banker, accountant, administrator, professor, or what have you—the question is, what are they going to do about their sexuality?  Fathers are notorious for their short memories, which imposes a selective amnesia that makes it inconvenient or even impossible to remember how powerful and compelling their own sexual drive was and what their own premarital sexual pursuits, exploits, and habits were when they were young and unmarried.  I know many a Muslim classmate and contemporary of mine from thirty-five or more years ago at the University of Southern California, who tried their every hook and crook to get a date with an American woman in the early or mid 1960s—at that time hardly any Muslim women were available for dating at all at American university campuses—who did not allow, if they could help, a weekend to go by without dating, but who, now that they find their own sons and daughters of the same age and at the university as they were then, raise up a storm if anyone of the opposite sex so much as call a son or daughter of theirs at home.  These same men reject out of hand any idea of dating by their children, because they believe and know from their personal experience that dating inevitably leads to premarital sex.  Also, they—even those that are married to American women—deny flatly that they ever dated.

    A dilemma in the area of sexuality in Islam is created by the insistence in the Shariah, or Islamic law, on classifying sexual acts as haram (unlawful) and halal (lawful) in keeping with the fundamental legal or legalistic model of Islamic sexuality.  But such a list can never be exhaustive.  For example, the Shariah is silent on a number of specific sexual acts, such as oral sex (fellatio or cunnilingus).  This is like saying that, though one of the Ten Commandments lays down "You shall not commit adultery," it still leaves the question of sexual intercourse between two unmarried persons of the opposite sexes open.  That being the case, majorities of Jews and Christians have interpreted this commandment to permit premarital sex, or fornication, for the Bible does not directly forbid it.  I think, by the same logic, those sexual acts that are not directly forbidden by the Qur'an are, therefore, permitted.  Actually, the permissibility of a thing or act is taken for granted, unless directly and specifically forbidden in the Qur'an and Sunnah and the recorded Hadith, as a cardinal principle of tafsir, or exegesis, of the sacred scriptures of Islam.  To resolve such matters, then, either the Muslim community has to make up its collective mind as to whether to consider and declare permissible, i.e., lawful, such acts as fellatio and cunnilingus for Muslims today and/or leave them to be engaged in or abstained from according to their own personal taste and their own consent and that of their partner.  The question, then, becomes whether to accept the model of consensual sex—sexual activity between consenting adults—wholly or in part only.  Hence the dilemma, because the Islamic legal or legalistic model of sexuality and the Western consensual model of sexuality are, conceptually and legally, antitheses of each other.

    Human sexuality admits of no easy solutions.  As Islamic sexuality is problematic, so is the Western sexuality that confronts Muslims in the modern world.  All sexuality is full of many a danger.  Outside of war, it is in the area of sex that people—both men and women, boys and girls—get and are liable to get hurt most.  Insensitive, reckless, exploitative, and predatory sexuality—whether of men or women—hurts human beings most, which no moral code and/or amount of legislation can prevent.  British ethicists have often declared that sex has nothing to do with religion, ethics, or morality.  I remember reading as a young man more than forty years ago in one of Bertrand Russell’s books, I suppose it was his Marriage and Morals, that prostitution was not a moral but a medical problem.  Peter Singer has written:
 

Sex raises no special moral issues at all.  Decisions about sex may involve considerations of honesty, concern for others, prudence and so on, but there is nothing special about sex in this respect, for the same could be said of decisions about driving a car.  (In fact the moral issues raised by driving a car, both from an environmental and from a safety point of view, are much more serious than those raised by having sex.)  Accordingly this book contains no discussion of sexual morality.  There are more important ethical issues to be considered.¹⁶¹

    As people in the West know and acknowledge, consensual sex between consenting adults is not without problems.  People can and do get hurt in consensual sex, too.  Also, only a small, probably negligible minority in the West considers consensual sex between consenting adults in the form of incest (sexual intercourse and/or relations between the father and the adult daughter, between the mother and the adult son, or an adult brother and an adult sister) permissible, given the interest of the family or society, though some—for example consistent feminists, especially radical feminist women—do see no harm in it, so long as it is based on the free consent of the two.

    The Islamic ethical system of sex is not without problems either.  It is heavily biased in favor of men and is, both in principle and practice (more so in practice), based on the avowed double standard which appreciates male sexuality and depreciates female sexuality and grants men liberties, privileges, and opportunities for sexual fulfillment that cannot be justified on any civilized ground, except that the Qur'an and Sunnah sanction them.  But I certainly consider, for example, the permissibility in the Shariah, or Islamic law, of the marriage of pubescent girls to men old enough to be their father or grandfather, as being

sexually and morally objectionable, as I would consider objectionable if the Shariah had established the tradition of women marrying boys young enough to be their sons or grandsons.  Imagine your widowed mother of fifty-five marrying a teenager!  If you would find that embarrassing—though it would be entirely moral and lawful according to the Shariah—why should you not find equally embarrassing your father, even as he is married to your mother, or the wife of his youth, marrying a girl, who is probably not even pubescent?  We have all heard news reports that rich Arab men, in their fifties and sixties, from the Persian Gulf countries go to Karachi, Bombay, and Hyderabad to marry young Muslim girls, some as young as nine years of age, for a mahr, or bride price, of a few hundred or thousand dollars, paid to the impoverished father of the girl.  Is that any different from the sale and purchase of women as sex slaves?  I would regard all such practices, sanctioned by the Qur'an and Sunnah, as polygamy (plurality of wives up to four), divorcing by repudiation and sending away wives, concubinage, female sex slavery, and the sexual use or abuse of captured women of the enemy even forcibly, and the exclusively active role of men and the passive role of women in sexual acts, as is sanctioned in verse 2:223 in the Qur'an, which likens women to "tilth" and gives men the right to intercourse sexually with them "as and when and how" they (men) will, as sexual injustices against women.

    To its eternal credit, Islam was successful in eradicating the evil of infanticide of girl babies, which at the advent of Islam was considered a better fate for women than the ever present possibility of their being taken prisoner in war or captured even in peace time and pressed into sex slavery.  Unfortunately, the Qur'an did not abolish slavery, including the sex slavery of women, though Islam abolished categorically riba, or interest, as it was practiced in the seventh century Arabia and, by extension, as we know it in the capitalist practice today. I am certain that riba, or interest, would have done far less harm to the Islamic society of Arabia and the Islamic civilization as a whole than the institution of harem, or the practice of concubinage, sex slavery of women, and the sexual use and abuse of the female captives of war by Muslims, did to Islam and Muslim civilization.  All these practices remained a part of Islam and Muslim life and slave girls continued to be bought and sold in Islam until well into the twentieth century.  I do not take any cultural pride in any of these practices that have degraded Islam and Islamic civilization in the eyes of the world.

    In fundamental terms, Islamic sexuality has to move in our own time toward a greater autonomy, subjectivity, and self-determination.  Equally important is the equalization of the sexual status of the genders, and of sexuality and gender relations of man and woman, especially of husband and wife.  What must be transcended in our time is the sexual domination of one sex over the other.  The goal of Islamic sexuality has to be the maximum sexual equality of both sexes.  Certainly, the permissibility of sexuality between the owner-master and the concubine-slave girl, as doctrinally permitted and practiced for centuries of Islam is one that is based on the power of the former and the powerlessness of the latter and it is, therefore, totally unjust, hence does not belong in our time.  Even orthodox, traditionalist, and fundamentalist Muslims must realize that.  Allah’s assurance in the Qur'an that it is beyond the human power of any man to deal equally and justly with multiple wives should have caused Muslims—male and female—to avoid the practice of polygamy, but unfortunately it did not. And, consequently, the institution of polygamy became the mark of distinction, but it also brought disrepute, to Islam, Muslim society, and Muslims as a people.  To other religions, societies, and peoples, it simply meant/means that Muslim men were/are incurably given to sexual promiscuity.  This is neither a good commentary on Islam, or upon Muslims.  It is one thing to be sexually promiscuous when one is twenty-five, but something else when one is sexually promiscuous at fifty-five.  As it turned out, the permission to marry two, three, or four women in the Qur'an (verse 4:3) became a license for life-long male promiscuity in Islam and, as such, polygamy drastically and adversely affected the family, and social and sexual life in the Muslim society and culture.

    The contrast is usually made between an Islamic and a Christian marriage.  Doctrinally, a Christian marriage is a sacrament, meaning an act which, in one of its dictionary definitions, is a formal religious act, that is sacred as a sign or symbol of a spiritual reality, which is why Christianity does not permit divorce as a matter of doctrine.  That Christians have abandoned this doctrinal model of Christian marriage is beside the point.   By contrast, doctrinally, an Islamic marriage is a contract, like any secular, civil, or commercial contract, which, though worthy of religious veneration, is breakable, like any other secular, civil, or

commercial contract, which is why Islam permits divorce as a matter of doctrine.  This comparison of Islamic and Christian marriages is only meant to bring out clearly the doctrinal model of marriage in Islam.  Indeed, the terms—sacrament, social, secular, civil, and commercial—in relation to Islamic marriage have been used here only to define its model in familiar language.  In Islam, contracts are either Sharai’i (Islamically lawful) or ghair-Shari’i (Islamically un-lawful).  In this sense, only when certain conditions of an Islamically lawful contract have been met, is the contract a lawful one?  This applies to a marriage contract as well.  The question of its being a sacrament or secular, civil, or commercial simply does not arise.  The Islamic marriage contract is called nikah, for which, for instance, the foremost conditions are that there should be ijab-o-qubul, i.e., one party makes an offer (proposal of marriage) and the other accepts it—either the man or the woman may make the offer—and they should agree upon the mahr, popularly called the dower or bride-price, i.e., the consideration that the man must pay to have the right to sexual access to and intercourse with the woman and to procreate lawfully with her, because she becomes his wife by virtue of and after the legalization of the marriage contract in the nikah, or wedding, ceremony.  Though there are generalized expectations that define an Islamic marriage contract, the parties are free and entitled to negotiate and agree upon certain terms and conditions of the marriage contract between them.  Upon their mutually agreeing to these terms and conditions and the same being written down and signed by the parties to the contract, and the witnessing of the contract the nikah, or wedding ceremony, may take place publicly and the two be declared man and wife by the qadi, or the Shariah judge.  Even on the basis of this brief recapitulation, the reader can decide for him or herself as to what kind of contract Islamic marriage is.  Subsequent to entering into a marriage contract and the acceptance of the marital obligations by both, either party may seek the dissolution of the contract of marriage, if he or she so desires.  If the reader thinks that it is no different from an ordinary commercial transaction and that it need not have any religious significance as is the case in civil marriage under Western secular law, he or she will have no argument from me.

    Parental concern, even anxiety, over the marriage of their children is a natural thing.  Humanity has, since the beginnings of human family, tribe, community, culture, and civilization in its most rudimentary forms, tried to devise formulas and rules to predetermine who will marry whom.  According to the Islamic belief, all humanity descended from a single primeval couple, viz., Adam and Eve.  The Creator Himself matched them for marriage.  But for Adam and Eve, as parents, it was also a given that, among their children, the older boy will marry the younger girl and, thus, a set formula of human pairing was provided by nature.  Brother married sister.  Not surprisingly, even today, not only do Muslims believe that marriages are made in Heaven, but that the preferred Muslim marriage is between first cousins.  When and if that is not feasible for lack of a suitable candidate within the family on account of the absence of first cousins of the right sex and age, one may marry a couple or more degrees removed cousin or someone from amongst the eligible persons in one’s tribe, sect, ethnic group, caste, class, race, etc., so as to still remain close and connected to one’s roots.  We may call this system of human marriage endogamy (marriage and sexual reproduction between near relatives or a cohesive group), as distinguished from exogamy (marriage outside of a specific group and sexual reproduction among people not related by blood).  In terms of this broad classification, Islam accords priority to endogamous marriage and reproduction. This formula of human pairing for marriage and procreation, too, greatly reduces the anxiety of Muslim parents as to whom their children will marry.

    The custom and the legal permissibility, according to the Shariah, or Islamic law, of endogamous marriages (with certain persons related by blood, marriage, or fosterage being forbidden to marry one another) has been a time-honored tradition in Islam and Muslim societies both in doctrine and practice.  The great advantage of endogamy is that, more often than not, mate selection is automatic and has no need at all for what is called in the West premarital dating and courtship for marriage.  Cousins who are paired and/or matched from infancy, and are married together by their parents, more often than not, would have usually grown up together.  Unfortunately, in our own time many a Muslim young man and Muslim young woman show demonstrably a definite lack of enthusiasm for endogamy and some actually reject the idea of marrying a first cousin altogether.  Among other factors, this has made matchmaking for marriage and/or finding a spouse among today’s Muslims a problem to be reckoned with.  It is the source of the greatest worries for immigrant Muslim parents in America.

    Next to the automatic matching of first or a degree or two removed cousins for marriage is the custom of arranged marriage in Islam.  In case of such a marriage the parents make the decision as to which the son or daughter will marry.  Whether the final choice of a daughter-in-law or son-in-law is made by the father or the mother or both or by some other concerned individual varies from case to case.  The point is that the principals do not choose the person they will marry. The question of love between them does not arise.  Indeed, it would be a rank vulgarity to speak of it.  The maximum that is provided by the Islamic doctrine is that the man is permitted to see his prospective bride for a fleeting moment in the presence of the members of the woman’s family and, for formality’s sake, the daughter’s consent to her proposed marriage to the man selected by her parents is sought and her silence in response to the question is taken as her tacit consent to the match.   But in Northern India, where I grew up, even these formalities were rarely, if ever, observed.  There, for a man to ask the father of his intended to see her before marriage would have been considered the equivalent of asking to have sexual intercourse with her before marriage. The paradigmatic case of the arranged marriage in Islam is, of course, that of the marriage between Prophet Muhammad and Aisha—he fifty-one, she six, at the time of marriage.¹⁶²  Naturally, Muhammad made his proposal of marriage to Aisha to her father Abu Bakr, who accepted it on her behalf.  Since Abu Bakr was the Prophet’s closest friend and Companion, Aisha and Muhammad had seen each other virtually daily since her birth.  I am sure that Abu Bakr sought his daughter’s consent to the match, too, which she indicated by her silence.  This became and has remained the paradigm and/or model of the Islamic arranged marriage through the centuries and is prevalent even today in Muslim families, societies and, cultures throughout the world.  Even today, what is called a love marriage or a marriage of choice is a thing of scandal in Islam.  Often it is an occasion for the "honor killing" of a daughter or a sister, who openly or secretly marries a man of her own choice, without the express permission and/or approval of the father or brother or some other male guardian, in which case the murderer is always the father or brother(s) or both.   In some cases, the man who marries a girl or a woman without observing the cultural protocol and proper channels of communication of the Muslim arranged marriage is killed, too, by his bride’s male relatives, mainly father and/or brother(s) to rescue the honor of their family.  Nothing compromises and/or destroys instantaneously a Muslim family’s, especially its male members’, honor more decisively than sexual misconduct—even so much as a suspicion, rumor, and/or reputation of a romantic liaison of an unmarried daughter or sister with the boy next door or at school or work and—of course, Heaven help us—her fornication, elopement, and even marriage with him, without the father’s, or in his place the brother’s or some other male guardian’s, permission, because that would cause all hell to break loose.  In that case, the only way the family’s honor can be rescued is to kill the daughter or sister in question and the man she was involved with, too, if possible.  Such murders are called "honor killings" in Muslim societies, upon which most Muslims and even Muslim governments and courts look sympathetically, with little compassion shown for the women murdered for their real, suspected, or rumored sexual transgression along with their defiance of the father’s authority in particular and the authority of patriarchal institutions in general.

    Reports of honor killings in Muslim societies are easily found in the West, both in scholarly and academic books and in the popular press and media.  American viewers of the ABC Nightline program may recall the broadcast of a BBC documentary on February 15, 1999, under the title of "A Matter of Honor: In parts of Pakistan women are murdered in the name of religion and honor."  The broadcast reported facts and figures involving honor killings in Northern Pakistan and showed interviews with victims of attempted murders, who lived to tell their story but carried the painful, horrifying, and visible wounds of the murderous attacks upon them by their own fathers and/or brothers.  In the same broadcast were also shown interviews with their mothers, as well as men who had participated in or actually carried out honor killings.  Instructive is the reasons and justifications, which they provided for their actions.  Some of the answers, given by Pakistani men to the BBC reporter, Olinca Franco, in response to her question about the reasons for honor killings of daughters and sisters, were the following:
 

First Man: "Who can allow his daughter or sister forbidden love?  Do you agree with me?"

Second Man: "Here, we are restricted by Islam and our traditions.  We don’t let women out, as there are various dangers.  If women go out, there will be complete immorality and catastrophe."

Third Man: "A woman’s mind is weak and not as mature as a man’s.  She is easily swayed, unlike a man.  A man can judge a situation, a woman cannot."

Fourth Man: "If someone told me my sister had gone outside, I would obviously have to break her mouth and hand and everything else.  Otherwise, she would keep on doing it."

Fifth Man: My daughter ran away with someone, so we killed them both.  When she eloped, she wasn’t my daughter anymore.  I did the right thing.  I’m an honorable man.  I killed them both.  Was it not right?  We gave her birth, we would have married her to somebody but she ran off by herself."

Sixth Man:  (This man had killed his sister on being ordered by the father to fire the gun and the shot killed his sister on the spot.)  "I’m proud and ashamed.  I’m proud that I killed her, but ashamed that she was my sister."

On the following night, February 16, 1999, ABC showed an interview in which the presenter of Nightline, Forrest Sawyer, talked with Asma Jahangir, chair of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, about the BBC documentary.  Quoted below is only a part of it.
 

Forrest Sawyer: Ms. Jahangir, help me understand a little the mind of someone who would practice this kind of honor killing.

Asma Jahangir: You are seeing these people who are ignorant and who are sick and it has nothing to do with Islam [italics added for emphasis] except that these people have been allowed to get away with it by our state machinery.  And there are certain people who have not been able to get out of that patriarchal system where they think that they can rule the lives of women.  And I’m afraid that the film [BBC documentary] only shows ordinary people.  We have had judges of our superior courts expressing this kind of sentiment towards women.  So it is really the state that is allowing them to do it.  It has really nothing to do with religion [italics added for emphasis].  If the state comes down heavily on them and tells them that this is not the manner in which you can behave, I would like to see them get away with impunity and I would like to see them talk about it with such, you know, pride, actually.

Because when you give out in a society, and when I say society now, society is very much controlled by what is the propaganda of the state, that a woman in the society has no value, that she cannot say anything, that if you will control her life—and mind you, there is always some economic benefit behind it.  So, I mean, like traditional practices of giving a woman in exchange for another one.  And when the state says we are behind you, you continue your practice in the name of Islam, then people will do it…And I think this is what is happening in Pakistan.  We have self-righteous people sitting here.  The police will go and hunt people who have got married [without the permission or approval of the father, brother or a male guardian of the woman], the courts will sit and frown on them and the press will write about them in terms of very derogatory language.

Forrest Sawyer: If it is covered up, if many of these murders are kept quiet and made to appear to be accidents, it must be hard to determine exactly how many women are killed or harmed.

Asma Jahangir: Of course, it is very hard to discover how many women are being harmed and killed and there are so many women who are silenced they don’t speak at all.  There is absolutely no doubt about it, it’s only a few that we actually hear about through the press or, you know, through our own links.  And then we can make a noise about it.  What happens when we make a noise about it, too?  We haven’t really been able to get any firm decision or policy by the government.  On the contrary, every time we have made a noise about it, we have got a very poor response from our state institutions.

    The above needs no detailed commentary upon it.  Certainly, the honor killing of a girl or woman for marrying a man of her choice without the express permission and/or approval of her father, brother, or a male guardian is as reprehensible as is burying alive of a girl upon birth, i.e., infanticide, or suttee, the burning alive of a widow on the funeral pyre of her dead husband.  An honor killing must be recognized for what it is, i.e., a plain and simple murder, and punished as such.  I want to offer one more comment.  I accept the responses of Asma Jahangir to Forrest Sawyer’s questions as a correct representation of the state of affairs with the exception of one remark of hers.  I think she is mistaken when she remarks that honor killing of women "has nothing to do with Islam."  I think it has something to do with Islam, or as we have hitherto understood Islam, too.  Let me hasten to explain.  It is the Islamic teaching, legally speaking, i.e., according to the Shariah, or Islamic law, that denies validity to the nikah, meaning a marriage contract in Islam, when and if the woman, even an adult woman, is not given away in marriage by her father, grandfather, brother, or some other male guardian.  This means that a never before married Muslim woman, no matter what her age, education, and professional position, cannot enter into a marriage contract with a man of her choice of her own free will.  Whether she is a thirty-six year old spinster, physician, nurse, lawyer, teacher, businesswoman, factory or office worker, or a six year old girl, she is presumed to be virgin, hence not experienced in the ways of men, and is, therefore, denied the right of self-determination in the case of her marriage or whether she can marry at all at a particular time or place.  Therefore, not she but her parents, indeed her father, her brother, or a male guardian, must decide when, where, and whom she will marry, because he can determine what is in her best interest.  Only later, when and if she becomes divorced or widowed, and having gained knowledge and experience of the ways of men through cohabitation and carnality, may she be in a position to understand and protect her interest, when confronted with a proposal of marriage.

    Admittedly, there is certain wisdom in this.  Certainly, if the fifty-one year old Prophet Muhammad had directly courted and proposed marriage to the six year old Aisha, she probably might not have even comprehended what he was talking about, much less known, if she had known what a marriage proposal meant, whether their marriage was in her best interest.  Only her father could determine that, and, indeed, he did, and accepted the proposal for marriage on her behalf.  Hence, his permission and/or approval for his six-year-old daughter to marry Muhammad were perfectly in order.   In retrospect, I can say the same in behalf of my two sisters, who did not step out of the house after the age of eight or nine and who were married soon after turning teenagers, that it was wise that my father selected the men they married and handled all the arrangements of their marriages, as the custom was in my home village.

    By contrast, I see little or no need to vest in her parents the authority and/or prerogative and/or to place the onerous responsibility of finding a man to marry for and making all the arrangements of the marriage of a daughter who is in her thirties; who was born and grew up in Los Angles or New York; has watched tens of thousands of hours of television and countless films of various ratings; gone through twelve years of public schooling, four years of college, four years of medical school; and is a practicing physician with a hundred thousand dollar income a year.  With all that education, exposure to television, and experience of the world, she should be able to take charge of her life and her life’s decisions.  She is no longer the proverbial illiterate village girl, who needs to be led by the nose to help her cross the street.  She should be able to determine her own best interest, choose her own time and place of marriage, and, above all, the man to marry.  Indeed, I should require her to find herself a man to marry, make all the arrangements for her own marriage and pay for the same, and determine, too, what is in her own best interest.  Why not?

    To me the above way of thinking makes perfect sense.   Hence, I have no hesitation in recommending that, at least, in the educated, professional, and middle and upper class Muslim families, where even Muslim young women acquire higher education, work outside the home, and have already acquired very considerable degrees of freedom, equality, and independence, these women should start taking responsibility for themselves—including the responsibility of finding a man to

marry—and relieve their parents, especially fathers (brothers, too) of some of the unnatural burdens of life, as for instance, finding for the daughter a husband and giving his word of honor, too, that he is giving a virgin daughter as bride in marriage to the man.  Let every Muslim soul be responsible for it.  If this is a sound Islamic principle—and the Qur'an says it is—the moral and social responsibility of finding a spouse and soulmate has to rest with every Muslim individual—male or female.  At any rate, I would make it a part of the training and moral instruction of both boys and girls from the earliest years to impress upon and drive home the point to them that everyone, male or female, needs to and must learn to take care of him or herself and decide when and whom to marry and be morally and socially responsible for the choice of his or her spouse and that that is what is meant by being a grown up, mature, and self-responsible Muslim.

    I think being responsible for oneself, one’s life, and life’s decisions, including marriage, is good in itself.  But it would also help eliminate some of the traditional, historical, and social evils, certainly problems, connected with the arranged marriage in Muslim societies.  Some of these are:
 

• Marriages of children who are not yet teenagers, but also the marriage of prepubescent girls to men old enough to be their father or grandfather
• Forced marriages, especially of girls
• Traffic in women, for example, a man giving his daughter or sister to another man in marriage in exchange for the daughter or sister of the latter to avoid the payment of mahr, or bride price or dower (In my village this practice was called anta santa.)
• Early marriage, usually during the teens, when the man is not yet ready—because he neither has a job, nor yet the prospects of getting one in the foreseeable future—to handle the financial, social, and emotional responsibilities of marriage
• Total dependence of wives upon their husbands for their maintenance
• Expectation of parents and parents-in-laws for the arrival of children soon after marriage even in cases of early marriages, when neither spouse has any notion of parental skills, obligations, and responsibilities
• Frequent pregnancy on account of total lack of knowledge of family planning and consequently the birth of too many children in quick succession for whom the family is, more often than not, seldom able to provide even the minimum necessities of life, resulting in the ruined health especially of the mother, life-long poverty and impoverishment of parents and children, and a subhuman standard of life for one and all

    As I committed the above thoughts to paper, I received in the mail the issue of the weekly Pakistan Link, dated Friday, August 13, 1999.  It contained a news story under a bold headline: UK Moves to Tackle "Forced Marriages."  Reportedly, at least 1,000 forced marriages, in which girls as young as thirteen are given away in marriage by their fathers against their will, take place in the South Asian communities in Britain every year.  A substantial number of girls are taken by their parents to the places of their origin in the subcontinent and married to local boys.  In the same issue of Pakistan Link, it was reported: "Britain is setting up a working committee to study the extent of problem of forced marriages within Britain’s Asian Community and to suggest measures to end this practice.  The committee, to be announced on Thursday, will be led by two Asian peers—Lord Nazir Ahmad of Pakistani origin and Bangladesh-born Baroness Uddin."  It was further reported that: "Forced marriages are wrong and we’re determined to tackle the issue," Home Office Minister Michael O’Brien said in a statement.  He went on to say: "The government must respond sensitively to issues of cultural diversity, but multicultural sensitivity is no excuse for moral blindness." He warned: "Forced marriages will not be tolerated…. We’ll report by the end of the year on how we can challenge the behavior of a very small minority of men who think they can force their daughters into a marriage against their will."

    As we know only too well that forced marriages are common in the immigrant Muslims communities in the United States, too, in which, of course, arranged marriages are the universal rule in which varying degrees of parental influence and force are inevitably applied.  Muslim parents and religious and community leaders in the American Muslim communities of all ethnic groups and national origins categorically reject premarital dating and courtship to seek a marriage partner.  Indeed, immigrant Muslim parents of the candidates for marriage born and raised in the United States, prefer to import the husband for a daughter and the wife for a son from amongst their cousins in the old country, whose parents are only too happy to consent to the match on behalf of their offspring, because it enables him or her to obtain an immigrant visa for the United States.   The preference for imported spouses from Muslim countries is based partly upon the growing perception and opinion of immigrant Muslims in America that even the children of immigrant Muslim parents in the United States are adopting the attitudes and moral (immoral?) habits of Americans that do not conduce them to be the right type of sons-and daughters-in-law.  In this respect, there is more than a grain of truth for Muslim families in America where the attitudes and beliefs about and treatment toward women continue to be in the United States, too, what the immigrants were familiar with, used to, and considered normatively correct in their countries and cultures of origin, but which are largely out of place in the West.

    As we know, Islam also permits cohabitation of a man and woman outside nikah, or marriage, in the form of a Muslim man and his concubine, slave girl, or a female captive of war cohabiting.  The cohabitants are permitted to have sexual relations and to procreate, too.  Obviously, cohabitation in Islam is different from cohabitation or "living together" in the sense of two consenting adults deciding to cohabit, with each exercising his or her free will.  Islamic cohabitation was based upon the superior power or wealth, or both, of the man, who could afford to own and keep a concubine(s) or a female slave(s) or who came in possession of a female captive of war.  The woman in this sort of cohabitation had no will of her own.  This was a very different sort of cohabitation in form and arrangement from what it is when a man and woman—both single, adult, free, and self-responsible—consent, choose, and decide to cohabit or live together.  In Islam, the man need not be single.  He may even have four wives, but there is no bar to his having concubines, slave girls, and/or female captives of war as his sexual partners—not normatively speaking that is.  He may have them living in his harem along with his wives, but he may also maintain a separate dwelling place—separate from his permanent wife’s or wives’ dwelling place—for his concubine(s), slave girl(s), and/or the female captive(s) of war in his possession.  In Islamic history, there is evidence for both categories of women, viz., wife (wives) and concubine(s), living in a single harem, as well as the two living in separate dwelling places, much in the manner in which, in our own time, a man, who has both a wife and a mistress, may keep them in separate places and distribute his time between the two places.  It is important to keep in mind that the Islamic marriage is always to be thought of as being compatible with both polygamy and concubinage, though in our own time monogamous marriage is the predominant form among Muslims.  This is largely due to the Western influence in shaping Muslim life and living, especially in the West, largely because, for instance in the United States, polygamy is formally, which is to say, legally, a publicly prosecutable and punishable crime.

    Islam, Muslims, and Muslim society and culture are confronted with some very, very difficult, probably even insurmountable and intractable problems, in the world of today, on account of the large sizes of the populations of some Muslim countries.  This is true both at the family as well as the national level today.  Why people have a large number of children, both when they know only too well they cannot afford even to feed, clothe, and shelter—much less provide other amenities of life, such as medical care or a high school education—and when they give the matter no thought and simply reproduce in the natural scheme of things, is a highly complex question to which I do not think anyone has a definite answer.  Be that as it may, I am absolutely certain that a great part of the misery in the Muslim communities in the countries of the subcontinent—India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—derives from the sheer fact of overpopulation.  I know from personal knowledge and observation that families from a half to a full dozen children are common among the subcontinent Muslims.  The Islamic doctrines of the Bountiful Providence of Allah, both in the form of numerous children and the plentiful means of life; His commandment to Muslims to be fruitful and multiply; Prophet Muhammad’s teaching that the best Muslims (men) are those who marry early and have the largest number of wives and who do not limit their families for fear of poverty; and his express wish for Muslims to procreate prolifically so that, on Judgment Day, he can point with pride to the large number of his followers have all given the conscious or unconscious motive to Muslims to add to their numbers.  Be that as it may, and/or whatever be the motive for large families, I have not the least doubt that family planning with a view to limit the size of the Muslim family and the nation’s population is an urgent need of the Muslim society.  Without it, Muslim society is fighting and will continue to fight in the foreseeable future a losing battle and the magnitude of the misery of Muslims will only continue to grow.

    Thinking as I do—as I have stated summarily in the above paragraph—I am all and unreservedly for family planning in Islam and Muslim society.  Not only that I should like to see and urge in the strongest possible terms I can the institution, propagation, and implementation of social, community, and governmental programs of birth control; easy and cheap (free if the government can afford) availability of contraceptive devices; serious and effective education of boys and girls from early years to emphasize the importance of family planning; making available medical and counseling services in the use of the contraceptives by both men and women that reach those in the rural areas, too; making abortion legal in the first 120 days of the pregnancy, to stop the drain upon the health of the mother due to frequent pregnancies, child births, and breast-feeding the baby;  and the positive as well as negative reinforcement of programs of population control.   I should not even object to making it the national policy to pass positive legislation and enforce it, which limits the number of children to two or to a maximum number when a family has at least one child of each sex.  With the same purpose, I should not object to making polygamy unlawful in the contemporary Muslim society either.  The national goal has to be to keep the population of the nation in check.  It is the most outstanding social fact that the majority of Muslims is born, raised, and lives a precarious existence under what can only be regarded subhuman conditions, and this is largely the case on account of the birth of more children that neither the vast majority of families nor the nation can afford.  Under the circumstances, no real improvement in the standard and quality of life in the overpopulated Muslim countries is possible until and unless family planning becomes a permanent part of Muslim life and living.  There is a verse in the Qur'an that counsels, exhorts, and admonishes Muslims as follows:
 

Verily never will God change the condition
Of a people until they.
Change it themselves (with their own souls).
    Qur'an, 13:11