The original of this article was published in the New English Review.

The Abrahamic Fallacy

by Mark Durie (February 2014)
Introduction
The Abrahamic Fallacy is the belief that Abraham is a figure of unity for Islam, Christianity and Judaism. 
The phrase “Abrahamic Religions” has become very popular as a cover-term for these three faiths. It is particularly popular among Jewish and Christian progressives on the one hand, and Muslim apologists on the other. The term implies a kind of unity or brotherhood across the three faiths.
More broadly, the term “Abrahamic religions” has become the standard term, both in comparative religions and popular parlance, to refer to the three monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, in contrast, for example, to Indian religions and East Asian religions.
In essence the claim embodied by the expression is that Abraham is “shared” as a point of common origin by all three monotheistic religions, and naming him as their shared identity is meant to signal that these three faiths are linked together in some kind of theological continuity. 
The expression is in fact used in a variety of ways. Adam Dodds points out that for some, it is simply a cover term for the grouping of Islam, Christianity and Judaism, a kind of functional shorthand without any intended theological content. Others – perhaps the majority of writers – use the phrase to imply some degree of “historical and theological commonality,” perhaps unspecified. For still others the term implies an intimate unity, namely that it is one and the same God who has authored the Bible and the Qur’an, and the same eternal message is presented in both books.
But is the construct of “Abrahamic religion” helpful, or quite the opposite, a bad idea? And specifically, is the multi-faith Abraham the same person found in the pages of the Torah, or is he merely a product of wishful thinking?


Abraham in Genesis: Judaism and Christianity
To be sure, Christianity and Judaism do have the Abraham of Genesis in common. This is the Abraham of covenant and promise, the “father of many,” and specifically “father” or “patriarch” of Israel. The Abraham of the Bible is a symbol of God’s benevolence to the nations.
No model of moral perfection, the Abraham of Genesis is nevertheless also the prototype or forerunner for Israel of someone in intimate, personal, covenantal relationship with God, a state to which the Hebrew scriptures testify on almost every page.
While the overlap between Judaism and Christianity in their appreciation of Abraham – embodied in the Genesis account – is profound, there are important differences in how these two faiths understand Abraham. Neither Judaism nor Christianity is content to read Abraham solely through the lens of Genesis. 
For Christians it is Paul who frames Abraham, casting him as someone justified by faith: “For Abraham believed and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness” (Romans 4:22, Genesis 15:6). Thus the Pauline Abraham might be considered as the prototype of a de-Judaized, Gentile Christian liberated from the shackles of the rabbinical Law. 
While for Jews Abraham’s paternity is through literal descent, Christians consider themselves to be Abraham’s children “by faith,” following Paul who calls Abraham the “father of all who believe” (Romans 4:16). This involves a new lineage for Gentiles, or as Paula Frederikson put it,  “Christians are children of Abraham, but not from Isaac and Jacob.”
On the other hand, Jews read Abraham through the Oral Traditions (the Talmud), which portray him as an idol-destroying monotheist, and a forerunner of Torah observance. 
A story recorded in a Jewish midrash tells of how the young Abram smashed his father’s idols, and then told his father that the one remaining idol had attacked and destroyed all the others. The father disagreed, saying that the idol was only a statue, thus validating Abram’s contention that his father’s idols were no gods at all.
This story is not found in the Bible. In reality there is nothing in Genesis that unambiguously portrays Abraham as an exclusive monotheist or opposed to idol worship. To be sure, there is an implication in Genesis 18:19 that Abraham walked in accordance with God’s laws – which implies rejection of idolatry:
Here Genesis states that God has chosen Abraham for the purpose of establishing his generations to do “what is right and just” as a part of a covenantal relationship. However what cannot be deduced from Genesis is that Abraham actually lived out this commission in an exemplary way, nor that this involved an explicit rejection of idolatry. (The first time the theme of rejection of idolatry crops up in Genesis is when Abraham’s grandson Jacob tells his household in Genesis 35:2, “Get rid of the foreign gods you have with you, and purify yourselves and change your clothes.”)
In Joshua 24:2-3 it is implied that Abraham was chosen by God out from the religious context of his idol-worshipping father, Terah – implying that Abraham made a break with this practice – but here again, it is not stated explicitly that Abraham renounced idol worship. Indeed there is no reference to idols or other “gods” in the Abraham story.
Moreover there is no code of conduct, which might be called a “law,” described in connection with the Abraham of Genesis. In God’s engagement with Abraham in Genesis, there is no impartation of a system of ethics. What is there is covenantal relationship: favour, promise and references to Abraham’s faith and his notable acts of obedience (e.g. Genesis 12:4, 15:6, 22). The only regulation reported for Abraham’s religion, apart from the Lord being his family’s god, was the custom of circumcising males (Genesis 17:13), instituted as a sign of covenant faithfulness.
Although there is nothing explicit in Genesis which portrays Abraham as opposed to idols, what is of great relevance, in contrast to the competing idol worship of the surrounding nations, is the incident of the binding of Abraham’s son Isaac, in which God intervened to spare Isaac and symbolically put an end to child sacrifice, replacing this with the sacrifice of an animal instead. This act anticipates the instruction in the Law of Moses that Israelites had to “redeem” a firstborn son through an animal sacrifice (Exodus 22:29, 34:19-20). 
Later of course, for Christian theology, the story comes full circle when God replaces temple sacrifices of animals with the offering of his only Son, Jesus, on the very same mountain, Moriah, where Abraham attempted to sacrifice Isaac.
The binding of Isaac
The Akedah, or binding of Isaac, was important in defining the distinct identity of the Israelites. The Hebrews were culturally closely related to the surrounding Canaanites, and linguistically virtually indistinguishable from them. Hebrew is classified as a Canaanite language (others were Phoenician, Ammonite, Moabite and Edomite). Ancient Canaanite religion is well known for the practice of child sacrifice. The Akedah account of the interrupted sacrifice of Isaac — and the subsequent practice of redeeming the firstborn son — set the Israelites apart from their Canaanite neighbours, and elevated the worship of the God of Abraham above that of Molech, who welcomed human sacrifice. 
The practice of child sacrifice was at certain times also a Hebrew practice, an issue which much concerned the prophets (Jeremiah 19:4-5; Ezekiel 16:20-21). This practice continued among the Israelites right up until the Babylonian exile and was one of the reasons for it (Psalm 106:37-39). Solomon himself built a temple to Molech, and this was only torn down in the reforms of Josiah (2 Kings 23:13).
God’s intervention in the Akedah could be regarded as an anti-idolatry polemic (against Canaanite child-sacrifice practices). But if so, this is an indirect reference to idolatry, and apart from this, Genesis offers us little evidence to regard Abraham as a model monotheist. A follower of God, yes; a trenchant anti-idolator, no.
So, in summary, Christianity and Judaism share the Abraham of covenant, the father of many and patriarch of the nation of Israel.
A divisive figure
Despite the shared Biblical narrative, Abraham remains a divisive figure between the two Biblical faiths, because for the Jews he is the very model of a Torah-observant Jew — a perspective which is not so much Biblical as Talmudic; but for Christians he is the man saved by faith, a figure who stands opposed to continuing Jewish adherence to the Torah — a perspective which is based more on Paul than on Genesis.
There are of course tensions even in Paul’s view of Abraham and his children the Jews in general. On the one hand Paul extols Jewish identity, and affirms the promises of God to the Jews as irrevocable (Romans 11:28-29). On the other hand, Paul castigates Jews for holding on to the Torah in opposition — as he saw it — to salvation by faith, and for seeking to impose the Torah upon Gentile believers. It is not, he asserts, “the children of the flesh” who are the children of God, but the “children of the promise” (Romans 9:8). The legacy of Abraham is received by faith, not by adherence to the law (Romans 4:13): “For if those who depend on the law are heirs, faith means nothing and the promise is worthless” (Romans 4:14).
While both Christianity and Judaism accept the Bible’s narrative that the promise was passed on through Isaac (and not the older son Ishmael), the idea that the children of Israel, Abraham’s grandson, are the people of God’s promise has proved a stumbling block to Gentile Christianity. Often Christianity has adopted a supersessionist theology which dispenses with God’s covenant to the Jews, appropriating the title “people of God” to Gentile Christianity, and displacing the Jews as the beneficiaries of God’s promises to Abraham.  This was already a theme of early Christian thought: Paul’s Abraham of faith was used as a kind of stick for beating Jews over the head. In this way Abraham has become a core point of contention and division between Jews and Christians.
Abraham in the Quran
The later Jewish view of Abraham as the idol-destroying monotheist developed in extra-biblical Jewish traditions. From there it passed over — along with fragments of other Jewish traditions — into the Quran. However, although this is a link between the Abraham of Jewish tradition and the “Ibrahim” of the Quran, the Quran’s overall take on Abraham diverges considerably from that of Genesis. The word appropriation rather than inheritance is apposite. Ibrahim of the Quran is a very different figure from Abraham, the “father of many” of Genesis: his function in theological history and his relationship with God is very differently understood.
What does the Quran have to say about Abraham?
A great deal. There are 69 verses in the Quran which mention Abraham by name: he is the second most frequently mentioned Biblical figure after Moses. Like other Biblical references found in the Quran, this material appears to allude to Jewish traditions circulating in the 7th century AD. The references do not show signs of being directly shaped or even influenced to any degree by someone who was directly familiar with the text of Genesis.
Abraham is a figure alluded to repeatedly throughout the Quran. Unlike the Bible, the Quran normally does not have one specific section devoted to telling the story of individuals — such as Genesis 12-25 which deals with Abraham — but instead treats them allusively, making multiple references, some of which are fragments of narratives, presented in a way which implies that the reader is already familiar with the content of the story.
There are allusions in the Quran to some Biblical stories connected to Abraham. For example there are various references to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (e.g. Sura 26:160ff) and to the visit of the angels to establish a covenant (e.g. Sura 11:69-73). There are also extra-biblical stories taken from Jewish tradition such as the Talmudic narratives of Abraham’s destruction of his father’s idols (Sura 21:58) and being thrown into a fiery furnace, a trial he survived by the miraculous intervention of God (Sura 21:68-70).
Throughout these scattered references, Abraham is presented as one in a long line of prophets of Islam: Ibrahim of the Quran is prophet of Islam, a model monotheist and opponent of idol worship. Some of the key points are as follows:
“He hath named you Muslims”
Abraham is the one who gave the name Muslims to Allah’s followers:
One true religion
Abraham taught the same religion brought by Muhammad, the religion of Moses, Noah and Jesus:
Abraham had a book
Abraham, consistent with Muhammad’s understanding of “prophets” and just like Muhammad, had a “book” from God like that of Moses (i.e. like the Torah). 
A model imam
Instead of calling Abraham “father of nations”, the Quran describes him as the imam or “leader” of nations (Sura 2:124), and from his line other “leaders” will come (including Muhammad). Thus instead of Abraham being a blessing to the nations, he is a forerunner and model for future “leaders”, and ultimately for Muhammad. This is reinforced by tracing him as an ancestor of Muhammad by the line of Ishmael.
Abraham in the Quran adheres to core Islamic doctrines such as belief in Judgement Day (Sura 2:126), which was anachronistic for Genesis: in the Bible, this belief is only introduced much later, by the prophets.
A model of hostility and hatred
Strikingly, Abraham of the Quran also adheres to the same doctrine Muhammad taught of hatred and enmity to unbelievers:
Mecca and Ishmael
A distinctive of Abraham in the Quran is the report that he and his son Ishmael built the Kaaba in Mecca and established it as a place of worship for Allah: 
Of course, as the English scholar Guillaume pointed out:
The point Guillaume was making is that the form of the name “Ishmael” found in the Quran is borrowed from Greek and Syriac (from the Biblical traditions). It is implausible that a tradition of the Kaaba being built by Abraham and Ishmael could have been passed down and preserved only in Greek and Syriac (i.e. Christian) traditions, while the name “Ishmael” was forgotten by the Arabs for centuries.
Hadiths or traditions of Muhammad (not the Quran) refer to the Akedah event, but in these traditions it is Ishmael who Abraham sacrificed, not Isaac. 
Notably, the Quran refers to Ishmael as a prophet of God like Abraham, and within a litany of what the Bible calls patriarchs and the Quran calls “prophets” the name Ishmael can be found.  Jacob himself names Ishmael among his “fathers”:
However, in other places there is reference to “Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” without naming Ishmael.
The religion of Abraham was Islam
What is particularly interesting in the Quran – and a key point for this presentation – is that it is in the Quran that the expression “the religion of Abraham” is to be found. This is repeated several times.
What is the meaning of this Quranic phrase, the “religion of Abraham”? The meaning is made clear when the Quran commends the “religion of Abraham” to Jews and Christians, rebuking them for having rejecting it:
Muslims also are commanded to follow the “religion of Abraham” as the religion of Muhammad:
Thus, according to the Quran, it is Islam, in contrast to Christianity and Judaism, which is the religion of Abraham.  It is the followers of Muhammad who have the “best claim” to Abraham:
Abraham was neither a Christian nor a Jew
Christians and Jews are rebuked for commending their faith to the Arabs. Muslims, the Quran asserts, follow the religion of Abraham, not the religion of idolaters:
The Quran claims that Abraham was “neither a Christian nor a Jew”:
Muslims must accept Abraham
Indeed it is an article of faith that Muslims are commanded to “make no distinction” between the messengers — i.e. they should accept Abraham just as they accept Muhammad.
Following Muhammad is following Abraham (Sura 2:285, 4:152). Another way of putting this is that if you accept Abraham as a prophet of Allah, you should also “make no distinction” and accept Muhammad:
The prototypical Muslim
From the Quran’s perspective, Abraham was the prototypical Muslim. He is used by Muhammad in the Quran as a stick to beat over the heads of Christians and Jews. This arises for example in the context of Muhammad’s disputes with the Jews of Medina (specifically in this Sura: 4:44-57, 156-162). Muhammad is in effect saying, “You quote the name Abraham to me, but Abraham was a Muslim, one of a long line of prophets. If you accept Abraham, you must accept me.”
Islam is the true Judaism and the true Christianity
Not only Abraham, but Moses and Jesus were Muslim prophets according to the Quran. So Islam is the true heritage of Jews and Christians. Jews and Christians who convert to Islam are actually reverting to the faith of the patriarchs, returning to the one true religion.
An Abrahamic political vision for America
According to this view, the “religion of Abraham” is a kind of code for Islam’s precedence over all other religions. Islamic da’wa or mission to Christians and Jews involves calling them to the “religion of Abraham,” i.e. to Islam. Shamin A. Siddiqi of Flushing, New York put this position in a letter to Daniel Pipes:
This vision, clothed in harmonious-sounding language, in fact is of a sharia-compliant United States led by Muslims and created with the help of Jews and Christians. It is “Abrahamic” in the sense that it is Islamic, as Islam is the common heritage of the three faiths. And within this vision of sharia America, non-Muslims should be relegated to the subservient role of promoters of Islam.
Today the phrase “Abrahamic religion” has become a touchstone of interfaith dialogue and unity between Islam, Christianity and Judaism. But ironically this phrase is another rendering of the “religion of Abraham” of the Quran: the phrase refers to Abraham as a Muslim. 
Abraham a Figure of Division Between the Three Faiths
In reality Abraham is an intensely divisive figure between Jews, Christians and Muslims. For many Christians he is the apostle of salvation by faith alone, in opposition to Torah-observance. For Jews he is the Torah-observant father of the Jewish nation, and a reminder of God’s irrevocable covenant with the Jews. For Muslims he is the prototypical Muslim prophet, a prominent forerunner and validator of Muhammad’s claim and the ground of Muslim claims that Islam both predates and supersedes the Biblical faiths.
The Origins of the Expression “Abrahamic Religion”
I have been tracing the origins of the concept of “Abrahamic faith” in reference to monotheistic dialogue. Its most important and influential promoter was a Lebanese Maronite priest, Youakim Moubarac, following in the footsteps of his teacher, Massignon, who regarded Islam as a faith of genuine revelation — and Muhammad as a prophet — but in more primitive stage than Christianity.
Moubarac devoted his 1951 doctoral dissertation Abraham dans le Coran to the topic of Abraham in Islam. He was subsequently a significant influence on Vatican II’s policy on Islam, which has shaped the current Catholic catechism, which sees Islam and Christianity as united by adoration of the one God:
An Abrahamic utopia and dhimmi theology
Moubarac saw in the theme of Abrahamic faith a force which could unite Christians, Jews and Arabs into one family. Thus he wrote that one should “promote an egalitarian Palestine in which Jews, Christians and Muslims demonstrate together its abrahamic and ecumenical vocation.”
This vision of a political and spiritual reconciliation between faiths based upon a shared identity as followers of “Abrahamic faith” is fundamentally flawed. In fact it leads to Islamization, as a society based on the Quranic concept of Abrahamic faith is a sharia state, which by virtue of the structure of Islamic law, is devoted to the decline and ultimate disappearance of Christianity and Judaism.
It should not be surprising that a Christian from a dhimmi background, from a nation traumatized by the massacres of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, would produce an quintessential dhimmi theology, one which offers to Christians the option of serving Islam by embracing the legitimacy of Islam and thus of Muslim power. Bat Ye’or writes:
The promotion of “Abrahamic faith” as the touchstone of interfaith religious dialogue was linked in its origins with a vision of a Middle Eastern utopia in which Christians, Muslims and Jews would live side by side in unity. In reality this vision encouraged Islamophile church leaders in Lebanon to fight alongside Palestinians to destroy the political and national structures of Christianity in Lebanon. The ultimate outcome has been, and will continue to be, the progressive Islamization of that nation and destruction of the church – in accordance with the internal goals of Islamic doctrine, a process which is now reaching end-game stage in Iraq and perhaps also Syria.
Rowan Williams on Sharia law in Europe
I am minded to recall the previous Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’s suggestion that the British embrace aspects of Sharia law, claiming that “It is not as if we’re bringing in an alien and rival system.” Undoubtedly Williams’ views were based upon his experiences of interfaith dialogue, which had schooled him in the underlying unity of the Abrahamic faiths. Thus he became an apologist for sharia law and its alien and abhorrent treatment of women: the pointy end of Williams’s proposal is of course the entrenchment of sharia courts in the UK, which are not good for the rights of Muslim women. By making this statement he became, albeit unwittingly, an apologist for the sharia itself, including by implication its demand that Muslims be politically dominant. 
Conclusion
The concept of “Abrahamic faiths” is a fallacy. Its contemporary influence was, tragically, born out of a century of Christian suffering in the Middle East and foisted upon the unsuspecting West. It is reasonable to ask whether this is a theological Trojan horse designed to promote an Islamic worldview of relations between faiths. 
By all means, let us discuss Abraham and what he stands for in different faiths, and note that the narratives of the three monotheistic faiths refer to Abraham. But it is unwise to take Abraham as a touchstone of unity and theological continuity. On the contrary, the name of Abraham stands for the profound divisions between the three monotheistic faiths.

Andrew Brown of the Guardian has commented on my response to A Guide to Refuting Jihadism, which was published first on Lapido Media and then in fuller form on this blog.

Brown writes:

Can you dissuade fanatical jihadis using theological argument?

by Andrew Brown (as revised on Feb 10, 2014)

It doesn't really matter whether the fundamentalists are right about the nature of Islam – it's loyalties and peer pressure that drive them.

How much of what jihadis do is religiously motivated? At one extreme are those who claim their beliefs are entirely explained by oppression and reaction to social circumstances; at the other is the view that the Qur'an is a kind of brain parasite, compelling its victims to slaughter. This latter view is still quite popular on the fringes of the right. I'd like to think the view that religion doesn't matter at all has been abandoned entirely but there is bound to be some groupuscule or cult that still clings to it.

More sophisticated versions of the argument continue, though, and there was a fascinating outbreak this week when the Henry Jackson Society published a pamphlet organised by a former jihadi giving theological reasons why jihadi violence is as unjustified as terrorism, and a counterblast saying this would persuade no one, as Muhammad himself had clearly done indiscriminately violent things and the fanatics we are dealing with use only the text of the Qur'an.

Both sides in this dispute know what they are talking about. The Henry Jackson pamphlet comes with a foreword by the remarkable Usama Hasan, who himself fought in Afghanistan in the 1990s; the Christian counterblast comes from an experienced watcher of the jihadi scene.

Read the full article at:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2014/feb/09/fanatical-jihadis-theological-argument-islam-fundamentalists

In What Went Wrong, Bernard Lewis charted the decline of Islam in the modern era and the resulting theological crisis for the Muslim world.

Now Islam is going through a second crisis, caused by the repeated failures of revivalist responses to the first crisis.  This second crisis, combined with the cumulative effect of the first crisis, which remains unresolved, will lead to a long drawn-out period of political and social instability for Muslim societies.


The first millennium of Islam was a period of expansion through conquest.   However for five centuries from around 1500, Western powers were pushing back Islamic rule.  There were numerous landmarks of the ascendancy of the West (which includes Russia), such as:

• the conquest of Goa in India by the Portuguese in 1510; 
• the liberation of Christian Ethiopia in 1543 with the aid of the Portuguese soldiers; 
• the defeat of the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna in 1683 and 
• the ensuing liberation of Hungary and Transylvania; 
• Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt in 1798; 
• the USA-Barbary State Wars of 1801-1815, which put an end to tribute payments by the US to the north African states to prevent piracy and the enslavement of US citizens; 
• a long series of defeats for the Ottomans in Russo-Turkish wars stretching across four centuries and culminating in the 1877-78 Russo-Turkish war, 
• which led to the independence of Romania, Serbia, Montenegro and Bulgaria; 
• the overthrow of Muslim principalities in Southeast Asia by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English; 
• the final destruction of Mughal rule in India at the hands by the British in 1857; 
• the defeat and dismantling of the Ottoman Empire as a result of WWI; 
• and finally, the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948, in territory formerly ruled by Islam, which was considered by many Muslims to be the crowning humiliation in this long line of defeats.

We are not just talking about Western colonialism.  Some of the victories over Muslim principalities involved the occupation or colonization of primarily Muslim lands, but many involved the liberation of non-Muslim peoples from the yoke of Muslim rule, such as in Ethiopia, Hungary and India, and some were defensive responses to Islamic aggression, such as the defeat of the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna.

While the external borders of Islam kept shrinking, its position of dominance within its own borders was also being challenged.  During this same period there were in many places improvements in the conditions experienced by non-Muslims under Islamic rule – a weakening of the dhimmi system – which communicated to Muslims an impression of their own faith’s loss of dominance and its loss of ‘success’. A landmark in this long process was the Paris Peace Treaty of 1856, which settled the Crimean War.  As part of this settlement the Ottomans were compelled to grant equal rights to Christians throughout their empire. 

The gradual process of improvement of conditions for Christians and Jews under Islam was regretted by Muslim scholars, who saw it as evidence of Islam’s decline.  For example a request for a fatwa from a Egyptian Muslim judge in 1772 lamented the ‘deplorable innovations’ of Christians and Jews, who were daring to make themselves equal to Muslims by their manner of dress and behavior, all in violation of Islamic law.

In a similar vein, the Baghdad Quranic commentator Al-Alusi complained that non-Muslims in Syria during the first half of the 19th century were being permitted to make annual tribute payments by means of an agent, thus escaping the personal ritual degradations prescribed by Islamic law.  He concluded:  “All this is caused by the weakness of Islam.”

Why would Islam’s lack of dominance be evidence of weakness?

Islamic doctrine promises falah‘success’ to the religion’s followers, symbolized by the daily call to prayer which rings out from minarets: ‘come to success, come to success’. The success promised by Islam has always been understood to be both spiritual and material: conquest and rule this life, and paradise in the next. The Qur’an states that Allah has sent Muhammad “with the guidance and the religion of truth, that He may cause it to triumph over all (other) religions” (Sura 48:28).

Islam’s theology of success meant that the global failure of Islamic armies and states at the hands of ‘Christian’ states constituted a profound spiritual challenge to Islam’s core claims. Just as Muslim scholars had always pointed to the military victories of Islam as proof of its divine authority, this litany of defeats testified to its failure as the religion of the successful ones.

The urgency of the question ‘What went wrong?’ drove the Islamic revival, an interconnected network of renewal movements which have as their central tenet that Muslims will once again be ‘successful’ – achieving political and military domination over non-Muslims – if they are truly devoted to Allah and implement Islamic laws faithfully.   These are reformation movements in the original (medieval) sense of the Latin word reformatio, for they seek to restore Islam to its former glory by returning to first principles.

Some of the main formative strands of Islamic revivalism have been:

• the Wahhabi movement which originated in the 18th century; 
• the Deobandi movement in India and Pakistan which dates from 1866; 
• Jamaat e-Islami, which was founded 1941 in India; 
• the Muslim Brotherhood, founded 1928; 
• and the Iranian Revolution of 1979.  

Out of these have come a myriad of offshoots and branches such as the Taliban (from the Deobandi movement); Al Qaida (a product of the ideology of Muslim Brotherhood theologian Said Qutb); the missionary movement Tablighi Jamaat; and Hizb Ut-Tahrir.

Even the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the ‘United Nations’ of the Muslim world, is a revivalist organization: this is reflected in its Charter which states that it exists “to work for revitalizing Islam’s pioneering role in the world”, a euphemism for reestablishing Islam’s dominant place in world affairs.

In essence, Islamic revivalist movements aim to restore the greatness of Islam and make it ‘successful’ again.  This hope is embodied, for example, in the Muslim Brotherhood’s slogan “Islam is the solution”.  This implies that when Islam is truly implemented all the problems human beings face – such as poverty, lack of education, corruption, and injustice – will be solved.  The flip-side of this slogan is the thesis that all the problems of the Muslim world have been caused through want of genuine Islamic observance:  Allah allowed his people to fall into disarray because they were not faithful in obeying his laws. The correction to this spiritual problem should therefore be more sharia compliance.  This is the reason why headscarves and burqas have been appearing on Muslim women’s heads with increasing frequency all around the world.

For a time it appeared to many Muslims that the revivalist program was working.  The Iranian Islamic revolution, and the later victory of jihadis in Afghanistan and the break-up of the Soviet Union was considered to be evidence of the success of the revivalist program.  This was the certainly view of the translator of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam’s jihadi tract Join the Caravan:

“The struggle, which he [Sheikh Azzam] stood for, continues, despite the enemies of Islam. ‘They seek to extinguish the light of Allah by their mouths. But Allah refuses save to perfect His light, even if the Disbelievers  are averse. It is He who has sent His messenger with the guidance and the true religion, in order that He may make it prevail over all religions, even if the pagans are averse.’ [Qur'an, 9:32-33] Since the book was written, the Soviets have been expelled from Afghanistan, by Allah's grace, and the entire  Soviet Union has disintegrated.”

Utopian claims are risky, because they open up the possibility for even greater failure, and amplified cognitive dissonance as the gap between one’s faith and reality widens.  The first crisis of Islam was the rise of West through superior technological, economic and military prowess.  The second crisis is the failure of Islamic revivalism as a response to the first crisis.  The second crisis could prove even more painful and profound in its effects on Islam than the first.

The manifestations of revivalism’s failures are as diverse as the Islamist movements which generated them.  One could point to:

•  the atrocities and backwardness of the Taliban; 
• the corruption and cruelty after the 1979 Iranian Revolution; 
• the failure of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to govern for the benefit of the Egyptian people, leading to a wildly popular military coup in 2013; 
• the present-day economic collapse of Turkey under big-talking Islamist Prime Minister Erdogan; 
• the genocidal campaigns of Khartoum’s military campaigns against its own citizens, causing more than a million casualties; 
• and the ongoing Iraqi and Syrian jihad-driven bloodbaths.

Everywhere one looks there are good reasons for Muslims to question the Islamic revivalist creed. The outcomes of more than two centuries of theological fervor are not looking good. Muslim states are not realizing the utopian goals set by these movements.  Indeed the opposite is the case: again and again, wherever revivalist movements have gained the ascendancy, human misery has only increased. Too many Muslim states continue to be models of poverty and economic failure, despite all those female heads being covered up.

One inevitable consequence of this trend is disenchantment with Islam, and a growing sense of alienation from the religion. The manifest failure of the revivalist creed creates a sense of anxiety that Islam is under threat, not from the infidel West, but from reputational damage caused by the revivalists themselves.  It is a case of the cure being worse than the disease.

Recently General Sisi has been hailed by the population of Egypt, not merely as a liberator of the nation from the ravages of Muslim Brotherhood rule, but as the Savior of Islam:  he is now a man on a mission is to save the religion.  In a recent speech Sisi called for a ‘new vision and modern, comprehensive understanding of the religion of Islam’.  Sisi would rescue Islam’s reputation, by improving ‘the image of this religion in front of the world, after Islam has been for decades convicted of violence and destruction around the world, due to the crimes falsely committed in the name of Islam’.

By ‘crimes’ Sisi no doubt has in mind the prosecution of former President Morsi now underway in the Egyptian courts.  Among other charges, Morsi is alleged to have been in league with Al-Qaida.

Sisi’s statement represents a rejection of Islamic revivalism, because at the core of all revivalist movements is a desire to reinstate and vindicate the institution of jihad, as a symbol and a means of Islam’s longer-for ‘success’.  Thus the eminent Deobandi Jurist Muhammad T. Usmani wrote in Islam and Modernism:  “Aggressive Jehad is lawful even today... Its justification cannot be veiled … we should venerate ... this expansionism with complete self-confidence”.

While Sisi’s comments imply a concern for the image of Islam ‘in front of the world’ – i.e. in the eyes of all, including non-Muslims – the deeper, more visceral angst will be about whether Muslims will come to doubt their own faith.

This anxiety is not just theoretical.  Christian aid workers in the Middle East have recently been reporting thousands of Muslim Syrian refugees who are leaving Islam to embrace the Christian faith.  There was a remarkable growth of conversions to Christianity among Algerians in the wake of the Islamist regime in the earlier 1990’s.  There are also many reports of explosive church growth in Iran, in a context of declining mosque attendance and widespread disillusionment with Islam among young Iranians.

It seems that the more intensely a nation is shaped by Islamist revivalism or radical jihad, the more likely it is that significant numbers of Muslims will want to leave Islam.  This is not surprising: one cannot promise utopia and fail to deliver without risking reputational damage to Islam itself.

Another symptom of decline in confidence in Islam is the plummeting birthrates in Islamic states, no least of all in Iran.  David Goldman has pointed out that lower birthrates tend to be correlated with loss of confidence and decline in faith: “A lack of desire for children is typically a symptom of civilizational decline.”

Paradoxically, the revivalist movements have sought to promote the success of Islam but their actual trajectory provides strong evidence against Islam’s ability to solve the problems of living well in this world.

This issue arose in an unusual recent interview on Egyptian television of a burqa-clad woman who declared her intention to leave Islam and become a Christian.

In the interview the woman rejects Islam on the grounds that if Islam was a valid faith, its followers would not be killing each other:   “There is no (true) Islam, because (genuine) Muslims do not kill (other) Muslim(s), brothers do not kill their brothers, brothers do not send people from Hamas or Gaza to bomb us and kill us here; brothers do not kill their brothers in the police; brothers do not kill their brothers in the army.” In essence this woman is agreeing with General Sisi’s observation that some Muslism are causing Islam to be ‘convicted’ of violence.

There are reasons to doubt the authenticity of this interview: it could well be anti-Brotherhood propaganda, effectively saying “Look what a mess the Brotherhood have created: it is so bad that now Muslims are even thinking of leaving Islam because of all the violence and killing being done by Muslims.” Nevertheless, even if this interview is propaganda – and some of what the woman says does sound quite peculiar – what is important is that the interview reflects a growing desire to give air space to the sense of disenchantment caused by the violent acts of the revivalists.  Even as propaganda – if that is what this video is – it points to public anxiety about Islam being judged and found wanting because of the deeds of the reformers.

In the first part of the 20th century, the Dutch Arabist C. Snouck Hurgronje predicted that Islam would follow the path of Christianity in Europe, and become toothless.  Muslims, he argued, would relegate Islam to the domain of personal piety, eschatology and the next life.  He regarded the marginalization of Islamic practice – i.e. of sharia law – as inevitable, under the dominance of European values. He wrote in The Achehnese, “The … laws and institutions of Islam will share the same fate [as the laws of the Bible] … their study will gradually take the place of their practice. … Such is our prediction as to the future of Islam, which we utter with all the more confidence as symptoms of its realization have already appeared.”

The opposite has proved to be true.  The trend Snouck Hurgonje saw proved illusory and short-lived:  in the post-colonial area, revivalist movements gathered force and credibility among Muslims the world over, until they became the dominant theological trend of twentieth century Islam.  It is telling that Snouck Hurgonje completely underestimated the Wahhabi movement when he wrote:  “The Wahhabite movement, which set Arabia in a tumult on the threshold of the nineteenth century … was subdued by Mohammad Ali and Wahhabitism has since been confined to an insignificant sect…”

Confidence in Islam is now being punctured as the bitter fruits of violent Islamist revolutions become more apparent.  Snouck Hugronje also observed that “All uniformity of public and domestic life that prevails among Mohammedans of difference races… owes its origin to external force.  The foreign missionaries of Islam were her fighting men, and her internal propaganda was the work of her police.”  While force may have worked in the past, it is not working as well today.  In the modern era, with mobile phones and ready access to information via the internet, the attempt to impose conformity based upon the use of force is more likely to result in disillusionment.  Today people know better and can find out information to help them choose what to believe.

Islamic revivalist groups are being convicted by Muslim public opinion of damaging the reputation of Islam itself, and this can only lead to further spiritual disorientation among Muslim populations.  The first crisis of Islam led to such far-reaching effects, from the re-Islamicization of Muslim communities around the globe, to the 9-11 atrocity.  The second crisis of Islam will also have a far-reaching impact no less profound in its effects.

For a long time revivalist movements have offered the only serious Islamic theological response to the first crisis of Islam.  They were the only dog on the street.   Now that this second crisis is unfolding and revealing its bitter fruit to the Muslim world, the manifest failure of Islamic revivalism means that there is no remaining theological safe-haven left where Islam can hide. The spiritual disorientation caused by revivalist movements, which only bring conflict and death instead of the promised utopia, will increasingly lead some Muslims to agree with the Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, that ‘Islam is the problem’.

While some will welcome this development, it will almost certainly lead to increasing political and social destabilization of Muslim societies, including aggressive backlash reactions in the form of attempts to shore up Islam’s credibility.  Communism, another utopian ideology, was also discredited due to its many abject failures, from Stalin to Pol Pot, but this did not prevent some from remaining true believers, even to this day.

The Australian Imams Council, in response to reports of under-age marriages among Australian Muslims, recently stated“any religion ... should not be held accountable for violations by its followers.”  Yet this is the nub of the matter and a naming of an anxiety gripping the Muslim world:  Muslims will hold Islam accountable when Islamic revivalists promise utopia but deliver chaos and human rights abuses.

The Iranian nuclear threat is serious, not only because of traditional Shi’ite infidel hatred, but also because Iran’s leaders are undoubtedly aware that the hold of Islam upon ordinary Iranians is slipping away.  Spiritually, the revolution has failed.  A nuclear bomb could be deployed as a desperate ploy to shore up Islam’s credibility.  It is the unpredictability of such ‘backlash’ reactions to the decline of Islam that is particularly concerning in the times ahead.

The religion of Islam has long been regarded by Muslims as a prestigious brand, a symbol of stability in Islamic politics.  Thus politicians would be obliged to advertize their Islamic credentials.  If Islam itself loses credibility– which is already happening – a spiritual vacuum of considerable proportions will be created.  How this vacuum is filled will be difficult to predict, but what we can be sure of is that revivalism and the revivalists will not go quietly.

Fasten your seat-belts: the world will be in for quite a ride in the years to come, as Muslims – who constitute around a quarter of the world’s population – struggle to make theological sense of the trashing of their religion’s utopian vision.  It is one thing to blame the infidels for this – or the proxy tyrants which revivalists claim the West has foisted on the Muslim world – what is more threatening by far is the damage being done to Islam’s name by revivalist Muslims themselves.



Dr Mark Durie is a theologian, human rights activist, Anglican pastor, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Adjunct Research Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Islam and Other Faiths at Melbourne School of Theology. He has published many articles and books on the language and culture of the Acehnese, Christian-Muslim relations and religious freedom. A graduate of the Australian National University and the Australian College of Theology, he has held visiting appointments at the University of Leiden, MIT, UCLA and Stanford, and was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1992.

Recent reports of under-age marriages in Australia are evidence that the authorities need to do more to enforce marriage laws in Western nations, and to restrict the practice of unregistered ‘clandestine’ religious marriages, particularly Islamic marriages.



This article was first published on Quadrant Online (here). 

Two cases recently came to public attention of NSW girls being married to older men in unregistered religious ceremonies, allegedly with the approval of their guardians.  The first case was of a 14-year-old girl who reported she was deceived into marrying a 21-year-old.  After being subjected to years of sexual and physical abuse she fled the relationship.  Her case came to light in October, 2013, when she needed to pursue custody of her daughter through the courts.

The second case was of a 12-year-old married to a 26-year-old overseas student by her father, an Australian-born convert to Islam.   Imam Riaz Tasawar, who allegedly conducted the ceremony, has been charged by the police, which is remarkably the first prosecution in NSW for at least 20 years of someone for solemnizing a marriage without being an authorized marriage celebrant.  The father has also been charged with procuring his daughter for sexual intercourse and being an accessory to a sexual offence against a child.

The Daily Telegraph has reported an ‘epidemic‘ of young girls becoming ‘child brides’ or being in de facto relationships in NSW.  The state Community Services Minister, Pru Goward, commented“I understand there are actually a significant number of unlawful, unregistered marriages to under-aged girls in NSW, particularly in western Sydney, southwest Sydney and the Blue Mountains.”

The Australian Marriage Act 1961 (paragraph 101) makes it a crime for anyone to conduct a marriage without being authorized by the state.  It is also an offense for an authorized celebrant to conduct a marriage without receiving proper notice of intention, ensuring on the basis of the information provided that the parties are eligible to be married, and registering the marriage with the state.

It is crystal clear from the legal history of marriage’s evolution in the West that the reason for public registration of marriages was to protect vulnerable women — and their children — from predatory and dishonest men. As Sir Roger Ormrod stated in Collett vs. Collett [1968], “The control of the formation of marriage in this country [i.e. in England] has a long statutory history, much of it intended to prevent clandestine marriages:” marriage laws were designed to to guarantee that marriages, through public registration, met minimum legal requirements in order to prevent abuses against women.

The public registration of marriages was first introduced in Western jurisdictions through canon (i.e. church) law: the Council of Trent ruled in the 16th century that a wedding must be preceded by public notices read out in church services; there had to be at least two witnesses; and an official wedding register had to be maintained.  These provisions were justified on the grounds that ’clandestine’ (unregistered) marriages put women at risk of exploitation.

In England registration of marriages was  enforced by the state in the Marriage Act of 1753, which was formally titled “An Act for the better preventing of clandestine Marriages”.  The whole focus on this law was the prevention of private marriages – which had become a scandal in England – and again the reason given was the protection of women. Severe penalties were provided for clergy who solemnized illegal marriages or tampered with marriage registers.

In the light of the history of marriage laws, it is hardly surprising that one result of neglect in enforcing them would be a rise in exploitative, abusive relationships which disadvantage women, including forced and underage marriages. The Australian Islamic underage marriages which have attracted so much recent attention are but the tip of the iceberg of unregistered religious marriages across Western jurisdictions.

The practice of conducting unregistered religious ceremonies has become so widespread that in some cases those who solemnize or are a party to illegal religious marriages may not even be aware that they are committing an offence.  When a former Muslim told me recently about his unregistered marriage in Australia, entered in to while he was still following Islam, he was shocked to learn that the marriage had most likely been illegal.

The proliferation of unregistered religious marriages in recent years is a sign that the Australian authorities need to do much more to enforce the provisions of the Australian Marriage Act.

In the wake of the recent cases, it was to the credit of the Australian National Imams Council that it was outspoken in rejecting underage marriages.  However the Imams should also have spoken out against unregistered marriages, because it is a culture of unregistered unions which is placing  Australian women and girls at risk of exploitation through forced and underage marriages. The whole point of registration has always been to help prevent such abuses.

A longer article by Mark Durie on religious marriage and marriage as sex-trafficking will appear in the March edition of Quadrant

The Imams Council also stated that ‘any religion … should not be held accountable for violations by its followers.’ It could be objected that many Islamic authorities have argued that the marriage of young girls is permissible in Islam.  However this is beside the point: for the authorities it ought to be irrelevant whether a particular religion’s teachings condones the marriage of young girls or forced marriages: the point is that these practices should not be tolerated in Australia, irrespective of what particular religions may or may not teach.

It is not just Muslims who are engaging in unregistered marriages in Western jurisdictions.  The unregistered polygamous marriages of some Mormon sects present serious challenges for the authorities in the United States; Melbourne academic Sheila Jeffries in Man’s Dominion has criticized a growing polygamous trend on the fringes of American protestant Christianity; and UK courts have also had to deal with the issue of unregistered Hindu marriages.

In the UK Muslim leaders have become concerned about the trend for Islamic unions not to be registered, because of the impact this  has upon women.  According to muslimmarriagecontract.org, a project of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, “it is clear that many thousands of [Muslim] couples, for one reason or another … are only in what is locally known as a nikah– a marriage that is not accompanied by a civil marriage and is therefore not recognized by the law in Britain.  It is equally clear that this lack of proper legal status often results in problems for the couple and suffering, especially for the woman…”  The site contrasts the situation in the UK with Canada, where Muslims ‘almost always’ register their marriages with the state.

The UK has badly mismanaged the issue of non-Christian religious marriages for decades.  Although it is a felony in England to solemnize a marriage without meeting the requirements of the Marriage Act of 1949, Islamic marriages have proved to be beyond the reach of the law. In a key legal decision from the 1960’s (R v Bham), a court of appeal ruled that a Mr Bham, who solemnized an unregistered Islamic marriage with a Christian woman, was not in violation of the English Marriage Act because the ceremony was not “a marriage of the kind allowed by English law” (see here):  in effect the court found that because the union was not a Christian one, or purporting to be like a Christian marriage, it was not actually a ‘marriage’ at all, which had the effect that its solemnization was not regulated by the state.

A series of English rulings have reinforced this approach (see the review here). For example in Gandhi vs Patel [2002] Judge Park decided that a

In a similar vein, in AAA v Ash [2010] it was accepted by the court that an Islamic marriage held in a mosque was a non-marriage in English law: English law distinguishes between a valid marriage and a ‘void’ marriage – both of which are regulated by the marriage laws – and ‘non-marriages’ which fall outside the scope of the law.

Such legal decisions were only possible because English marriage laws are constructed around the marriage ceremonial of the Church of England and its Christian understanding of marriage. The outcome is that in the UK today Christian marriages are far more rigorously controlled by the state than Islamic marriages.

In A-M vs A-M [2001] Judge Hughes commented that if the parties to a religious marriage were all fully aware that it was polygamous, then this could mean that “it in no sense purported to be effected according to the Marriage Acts, which provide for the only way of marrying in England.”  In other words, solemnizing a religious polygamous union in the UK would not be in breach of the marriage laws if the parties all understood that the union was not a legal marriage as defined by English law! This strays a long way indeed from the intended purpose of the marriage laws.

To treat Christian and non-Christian marriages differently disrespects non-Christian religions because their unions are considered ‘non-marriages,’ and not even ‘void’ marriages.  More importantly, it puts the women who enter such unions at risk because the failure of the state to regulate their marriages makes them vulnerable to the very abuses which the centuries-old  marriage laws were meant to to prevent.

It was the Islamic character of the ceremony which proved critical in the appeal court’s decision in R v Bham that no ‘marriage’ had taken place, and thus there had been no felony of conducting an unauthorized solemnization of a marriage. Such legal decisions have been detrimental to the state of marriage in England. By declaring certain religious marriages to be beyond the regulatory power of the marriage laws, they have validated the proliferation of unregistered religious ceremonies.  This has helped foster a culture of non-registration of (non-Christian) religious marriages which, through the privacy of such unions, can serve to conceal and validate abuses such as underage marriages and polygamous unions.

It remains to be seen what the outcome will be in the prosecution of Imam Riaz Tasawar in New South Wales.  Will the union in question prove to be a ‘void’ marriage and thus against the law, or a ‘non-marriage’ and thus outside the scope of the law?  A crucial difference is that, in contrast to the English situation, Australian marriage laws are not tied to the concept of a state church or any particular religion, so there is a much sounder basis for prosecution than there would be in the UK. In any case the prosecution of Imam Riaz Tasawar will be an important test of Australia’s apparently neglected marriage laws.

The central place of the established Church of England in the English Marriage Act of 1949 has attracted a good deal of recent attention in the deliberations of the English Parliament over revising marriage laws to allow same-sex unions.  The debate has focussed on the tension between parliament’s intention to change the marriage laws on the one hand, and the Church’s rejection of same-sex unions on the other.  A pressing question for the UK is whether the interests of vulnerable women and children would be better served by decoupling English marriage laws from a particular religion altogether, so that all religious marriage ceremonies can be placed on an equal footing under the one law, and Islamic marriages in particular can be regulated to the same extent as Christian or secular marriages.

If this were to happen, a key issue would be what constitutes a marriage.  The comment of a 1973 Law Commission report on marriage laws in England and Wales is no less relevant today:  “Unfortunately, the Act gives little indication of what are the minimum requirements of a form known to and recognised by our law … as capable of producing … a valid marriage.”

Since the ceremonies of the Church of England can no longer be taken to be the yardstick by which a ‘valid marriage’ is defined – a situation which has become even clearer with the extension of marriage in England and Wales to same-sex couples – it should become a matter of some urgency for UK legislators to construct an agreed definition of marriage which will encompass non-Christian religious unions, so as to ensure there is equal protection afforded by the marriage laws to women in non-Christian marriages, and to allow the prosecution of those who conduct unregistered religious ceremonies.

There has been a great deal of debate in Western states about the function and purpose of marriage in recent years, much of it around same-sex unions.  What is often forgotten is that the public registration of marriages, developed over centuries, was always intended as a device to prevent men from abusing women – and their dependent children – through poorly documented relationships.  The recent rise in forced and underage religious marriages in Australia, and in other Western jurisdictions, underscores the need for greater vigilance on the part of the authorities to uphold and strengthen marriage laws.  We can all learn a lesson from the shambolic failure of UK marriage laws to provide reasonable protection for women in non-Christian religious marriages.

It is concerning that in NSW no-one has been prosecuted for conducting an unregistered marriage in at least 20 years.  It is equally troubling that despite the intense efforts devoted to extending marriage to same-sex couples in the UK, so little has apparently been done to bring non-Christian religious marriages under the scope of the marriage laws.  This is despite the fact that the reasons for the state to enforce marriage laws through a transparent system of public registration by properly authorized celebrants are no less valid today than they were in centuries past. Not to do so is a failure of compassion.

Why should women in Islamic marriages be treated as second class citizens, with fewer rights before the law than women in Christian or secular non-religious marriages?

Mark Durie is a theologian, human rights activist, Anglican pastor, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Adjunct Research Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Islam and Other Faiths at Melbourne School of Theology.

 

Western nations are facing what has been called an “epidemic” of forced marriages of their young Muslim women. While those who compel young Muslim women and girls into marriages could be charged with human trafficking offences and also in some cases placed on the national register of sex offenders, governments also should target for prosecution all those who are involved in the solemnisation of these illegal marriages.

This article first appeared in the March 2014 edition of Quadrant.


In 2008, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, (here) and Nicholas Phillips, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales (here), both suggested that the UK could consider, in Lord Phillips’s words, “embracing Sharia law” because “there is no reason why Sharia Law, or any other religious code should not be the basis for mediation or other forms of alternative dispute resolution”. Williams commented: “it’s not as if we’re bringing in an alien and rival system”.

However, two recent widely reported cases of marriage between Muslim men and under-age girls raise troubling questions about these assumptions. One case in New South Wales where an imam married a twelve-year-old girl to a twenty-six-year-old man with her father’s consent is before the court.

In another case involving a custody battle, however, a judgment has been made that questions the way Western jurisdictions interact with sharia marriage regulations, specifically in relation to the widespread practice of conducting private, unregistered religious marriages. A Sydney Muslim girl aged fourteen was forced by her parents to become the child “bride” of a twenty-one-year-old man. Her mother had told her she would “get to attend theme parks and movies and eat lollies and ice-cream with her new husband”. Instead she endured years of sexual and physical abuse and intimidation before fleeing with her young daughter. Her story only saw the light of day ten years after her wedding when she pursued custody of her daughter through the courts.

This “marriage” was never registered with the state: it would have been impossible to do so because the girl was too young to marry under Australian law. A particularly troubling aspect of her story is that she reported her predicament to her school teacher, who under Australian law was a mandatory reporter of child sex abuse, but it seems no report was made, and no intervention attempted.

In passing judgment in favour of the woman, Judge Harman invited the authorities to take matters further: the “groom” could be presumably be charged by the police with sexual offences against a child and placed on the sex offenders register. He and the girl’s father—who in accordance with Islamic tradition would have been the two parties to the marriage contract—could also be charged with trafficking offences. There would also almost certainly have been an exchange of money—the mahr—handed over by the man to the girl or her father in accordance with Islamic law.

The UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, defines people-trafficking as:

the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force, or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, [or] servitude … The consent of a victim of trafficking in persons to the intended exploitation set forth [above] shall be irrelevant where any of the means set forth [above] have been used.

The forced marriage of a fourteen-year-old girl, as reported in this Australian case, fits the definition of trafficking. The girl was transferred from the custody of parents to that of her “husband” by use of deception, and he then kept her for the purpose of sexual exploitation and servitude, controlling her by violence and threats.

Pru Goward, the New South Wales Minister for Community Services and Women, has reported that there are around a thousand cases a year across Australia of women and girls being trafficked into forced marriages. She stated, “No ethnic group has a monopoly on violence against women, but some groups experience violence against women disproportionately.” Indeed. Some groups also perpetrate violence against women “disproportionately”, and it might be more accurate to speak of “religious groups” rather than “ethnic groups”. While there have been no official statistics reported on the religious affiliation of these victims of trafficking, it seems that a great many of the victims and the perpetrators involving in “marriage” trafficking have been Muslims.

Recent reports of a link between trafficking-for-marriage and Islamic marriages have not been limited to Australia. An investigation by ITV in the UK identified eighteen mosques—around one third of those approached by the reporter—where clerics were willing to conduct a wedding of a fourteen-year-old girl against her will.

Nazir Afal, Crown Prosecutor in the North of England, has reported that there are estimated to be 8000 to 10,000 forced marriages or threats of forced marriages of people against their will in the UK each year. Britain’s Forced Marriage Unit (see here) handled 1485 cases in 2012, 35 per cent of which involved girls aged seventeen or younger, and 13 per cent where the girls were under fifteen. A British government survey found that hundreds of girls aged eleven to thirteen had simply disappeared from school rolls.

Governments have been very slow to tackle the trafficking of women and girls for the purpose of forced marriage. Kaye Quek, in a recent article in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, argues that multicultural ideals prevalent in UK society have made the authorities reluctant to criminalise this practice: they have preferred instead to treat these liaisons as violations of the women’s choice. Quek challenges the government’s preference for seeking civil remedies to forced marriages, and suggests that this is giving rise to a two-tier system of rights, in which it is acceptable for Muslim women to be sexually assaulted through forced marriage.

In the case of forced Muslim marriages, a systemic problem is the widespread acceptance by the community of unregistered marriages: it is the lack of registration of such unions which makes marriage all the more dangerous for young women and girls, because registered marriages are subject to long-established age limits and procedures to establish consent, which provide a degree of protection to potential victims of marriage trafficking. The families and communities involved may consider such marriages to be legal, because they accord with their understanding of Islamic law, but the fact that these marriages are unregistered places the women and girls who undergo these ceremonies at higher risk of abuse.

Islamic marriage practices present multiple challenges to Western jurisdictions. The Koran states that men are the protectors of women (Sura 4:34). A marriage is normally a contract between two men: the male wali or guardian of the bride—usually her father—and the groom. In addition, to be lawful under sharia, a marriage must have two witnesses, and a sum of money, the mahr, must be given over by the groom. Marriage, thus contracted, is the transfer of a woman from the “protection” of one man to another.

If the wali is the woman’s father or grand­father, he is considered to be a wali mujbir, literally a “forcing guardian”, because he is permitted by Islamic law to force his daughter or grand-daughter into marriage. The word mujbir (“forcing”) comes from an Arabic root which can mean “to set a broken bone”, or, by extension, “to force”. E.W. Lane, citing Arabic authorities, gives this explanation of the meaning of the word: “He compelled him, against his will, to do the thing … originally signifying the inciting, urging or inducing, another to restore a thing to a sound, right, or good, state.” By this understanding, a forced marriage is an exercise of “therapeutic force”, which is considered to be good for the woman. Like setting a broken bone, a forced marriage at a father or grandfather’s behest “restores” the woman to her rightful state.

The Reliance of the Traveller, a manual of Sunni Islamic law from the Shafi’i school, states:

Guardians are of two types, those who may compel their female charges to marry someone, and those who may not. The only guardians who may compel their charge to marry are a virgin bride’s father or father’s father, compel meaning to marry her to a suitable match without her consent … Whenever the bride is a virgin, the father or father’s father may marry her to someone without her permission, though it is recommended to ask her permission if she has reached puberty. A virgin’s silence is considered as permission.

Note that The Reliance anticipates a context where a girl may be married off by her father before she reaches puberty; in this case it is not even recommended to ask her permission. In addition to fathers being permitted to force their virgin daughters into marriage against their will, Islamic law also permits polygamy and marriages of young girls, following the example of Muhammad, who consummated his marriage to Aisha when she was aged nine lunar years. (See Sahih Al-Bukhari, Volume 5, Book 58, Number 234).

In several other respects Islamic laws which regulate marriage, divorce and the custody of children render women vulnerable to abuse by their husbands and families.

Many Muslim states have enacted laws which limit the application of Islamic family law, for example by extending women’s custody rights beyond those granted by the religion, requiring that a man seek permission from his current wife or wives before contracting further marriages, or limiting a husband’s right to divorce his wife merely by a private pronouncement against her.

Because many features of Islam’s marriage laws are incompatible with internationally accepted human rights standards, and some Muslim communities consider that Islamic law takes precedence over the law of the land in which they live, it is in the best interests of Muslim women living in the West if governments suppress unregistered religious marriages, and strictly regulate the conduct of Islamic marriages. All too often governments have legitimised and even rewarded unregisterable marriages through additional state benefits.

The phenomenon—and challenge—of unregistered Muslim marriages is by no means limited to Western states. The emergence of unregistered marriages as a social issue in the West is paralleled by the popularity of various kinds of marriage in the Middle East which evade the control of the state (see Consuming Desiresby Frances Hasso).  Although some Islamic countries require marriages to be registered with the state, many marriages go unregistered. For example, marriages known as nikah ufr (“customary marriages”) have become popular among young Egyptian students who choose to live together as couples without the legal and social complications of a registered, public marriage. In Egypt a nikah ufr is in effect a clandestine religious ceremony, which normally takes place without the knowledge or consent of the bride’s guardian, and without the husband having to pay a dowry. By this means a couple can protect themselves legally and religiously, for example against a serious charge of fornication, but not without risk to the woman. If the marriage contract is lost or destroyed, a woman may not be able to prove that the marriage has taken place, and if she becomes pregnant she may have no legal means of compelling her partner to support her and her child. A woman in an urfi marriage may also find it difficult to obtain a divorce, leading to the possibility that if she contracts a later marriage with another man, she could be convicted of polyandry or adultery, which are criminal offences in Egypt. In contrast, the man can marry again without risk, even if his urfi marriage is of unclear legal status, because Islam permits polygamy.

One of the challenges of the way sharia works in Islamic states is that the trend over recent decades has been to reinforce the principle that Islamic law takes precedence over state jurisprudence. In some cases national constitutions enshrine sharia law as above the constitution and the power of the state of legislate. For example, article three of the Afghan constitution states that “no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam”. This means that although a state may pass laws to regulate marriage, courts may not be able to declare unregistered Islamic marriages invalid, because official registration is not one of the recognised conditions in Islam for a marriage to be legitimate, and state law has no authority to overrule Islamic law. While states can discourage unregistered marriages in various ways—for example by denying certain kinds of legal privileges to unregistered couples—they are not able to deny the religious and hence social legitimacy of these contracts in a nation whose constitution grants sharia law precedence over laws made by the state, which Islamists call “man-made” laws.

A further difficulty with the ascendancy of sharia law in Islamic states is the complication of legal uncertainty, because issues in Islamic law are often subject to conflicting interpretations. For example, while the Hanafi school of jurisprudence states that a woman can marry without the approval of her guardian, subject to certain conditions, other Sunni legal schools consider such a marriage to be null and void. Thus a man and woman who contract a marriage without the permission of the bride’s parents may or may not get the marriage recognised by the court, depending upon the legal opinion the judge chooses to follow.

In Western jurisdictions the regulation of marriages by the state is of comparatively recent origin. However, the idea of regulating religious marriages is hardly a new one. Public regulation of marriages in Europe was first enacted through canon (church) law: the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 required all marriages to be announced in advance in a church by a priest, “so that if legitimate impediments exist, they may be made known”. The Council of Trent (1545–63) refined the requirements further: weddings had to be conducted by the parish priest of one of the two parties; banns—an announcement of the wedding—had to be “published” during three major public worship services; there had to be at least two witnesses apart from the priest; and clergy had to keep a marriage register, a book in which they recorded every wedding they performed. Both Councils’ rulings on marriage were expressly designed to prevent “clandestine” marriages. The Council of Trent justified its provisions by citing the case of a man, having conducted a clandestine marriage, abandoning his first wife, and marrying another woman publicly.

In England state regulation of marriage was first introduced in 1753, also for the reason of preventing the notorious abuses of clandestine marriage, which were to the detriment of women. The legal recourse was to target unscrupulous clergy, some of whom had been making a handsome living from conducting such marriages.

The Marriage Act of 1753, formally named “An Act for the better preventing of clandestine Marriages”, took over some of the provisions of canon law, such as the requirement for witnesses, the publication of banns, and the recording of marriages in a parish register “for publick use”.

The purpose of the 1753 Act was to ensure that marriage was a well-documented public event which helped protect vulnerable women and children from unscrupulous men by curtailing the practice of people marrying secretly. Clandestine marriages were considered objectionable because women who entered into them were more vulnerable to desertion and sexual exploitation. Their secret character meant that there was no public process of testing of the man and woman’s marital status before the ceremony. It could also turn out later that there was inadequate documentation of the clandestine ceremony, leaving a woman without legal recourse if she was abandoned after becoming pregnant or bearing children. In the famous 1748 case of Creswell v Creswell a wealthy heiress, Anne Warneford, discovered that her husband had been clandestinely married twice before, which rendered her public marriage to Thomas Creswell void and their several children illegitimate, with no entitlement to their father’s estate.

Under the 1753 Act, a minister of religion who conducted a clandestine marriage was punishable by transportation “to some of His Majesty’s Plantations in America for the space of fourteen Years”. To forge, alter or destroy a marriage register became a hanging offence.

Such draconian punishments as deportation, hanging, or cropping the ears of offending clergy—the latter penalty applied on the Isle of Man from 1757—may seem repugnant today, but the point is that imposing harsh penalties upon those who conduct unregistered marriages has a long-standing precedent in law. First the church and then the state introduced penalties to help ensure that marriages took place as public events and were officially registered, in order to protect vulnerable women and their children.

Unfortunately in recent years Western jurisdictions have been largely indifferent to the damaging implications for Muslim women of the creeping acceptance of sharia marriage practices, including the proliferation of unregistered marriages. Forgetting the hard-learned lessons of the past, a misplaced multicultural benevolence has caused authorities to turn a blind eye to the dangers of illegal religious marriages.

An example of such blindness was reported in 2001, when the Australian radio and television host Geraldine Doogue interviewed Sheikh Fehmi, a leading Australian imam, the Grand Mufti of Australia from 2007 to 2011. Sheikh Fehmi claimed that the Australian government had accepted unregistered polygamous marriages when it granted the right to Muslims to conduct weddings in 1968: previously the Muslim practice of polygamy had made the government reluctant to grant Islamic clerics status as marriage celebrants. Sheikh Fehmi reported coming to an understanding with the then Attorney General, Bill Snedden, that a Muslim man’s first marriage would be registered, but the authorities would turn a blind eye to further marriages as long as they were unregistered:

Narrator: Muslims rarely marry outside their religious group and while this couple probably take it for granted they can have a wedding according their custom, in Australia this is a relatively new occurrence. Islam recognises polygamy so prior to 1968 Imams like Sheikh Fehmi were not permitted to celebrate marriages.

Sheikh Fehmi: It used to be at the time the late Mr Snedden he was the Attorney General. So I had a good meeting with him one day and tried to convince him that it is important for the Muslim to marry their own people. But he used to say to me, Well you know Sheikh Fehmi that you Muslims may marry more than one and when we are not allowed to let anybody here for have only one wife. I said to him, Listen to me please you may register the first one and don’t worry about the second one. He laughed and said, All right we won’t have anything to do with the second one. I stopped at the idea and at the time we had gained recognition from the Attorney General for all our Imams around Australia from that year onward.

Western jurisdictions originally legislated for public registration of marriages in order to prevent the very practice which Bill Snedden allegedly agreed to condone. This indifferent attitude to marriage is one reason why forced marriages are running out of control in the West, to the detriment of thousands of young Muslim women.

The reasons for preventing the practice of unregistered Islamic marriages are as valid today as they were in thirteenth-, sixteenth- and eighteenth-century Europe: to ensure that vulnerable women and girls are not coerced into marriages against their will, and to reduce the vulnerability of women to sexual exploitation and abandonment.

Many feminist scholars have criticised the institution of marriage and called for its abolition altogether. There is a decline in confidence in the institution of marriage across the West, and perhaps this is one reason why Western jurisdictions have become lackadaisical about policing illegal religious marriages. However, the fact remains that some forms of marriage are worse for women than others: these include concubinage, polygamy, and forced marriages in which girls are compelled to marry older men against their will. Such “marriages” stand worlds apart from the long-established ideal in Western jurisdictions of two adults entering into a publicly registered lifelong exclusive marriage covenant of their own free will. The reasons for the state to regulate marriages apply equally well to unregistered unions contracted by minority religious groups today as they did for Church of England marriages in the mid-eighteenth century.

Western nations need to take firmer measures to deter a variety of marriage-related practices condoned by specific interpretations of Islamic law, including polygamy and the trafficking of under-age girls into forced marriages. Such measures must not only target the “grooms” and the walis; they also need to target marriage celebrants, as in the Marriage Act of 1753. It should be illegal—with criminal penalties—for a registered marriage celebrant to conduct unregistered religious marriage ceremonies.

Governments should also make it illegal for marriages—even unregistered ones—to be conducted by anyone except in conformity to the marriage laws. Celebrants who conduct extra-judicial marriages should be stripped of their licence to conduct marriages and they should be denied tax-deductible charitable status as ministers of religion. Those who conduct unregistered forced religious marriages should feel the full force of the law by being charged with criminal offences under anti-trafficking and anti-paedophilia legislation. Male relatives who act as walis for forced marriages should likewise be prosecuted for sex trafficking. Furthermore, religious organisations who employ someone found guilty of conducting an illegal religious marriage should be made criminally culpable and stripped of their charitable status if they cannot show due diligence in preventing their staff from conducting illegal marriages. The witnesses of illegal marriages should also be made culpable for their actions: if witnesses are aware that the bride is under-age, or being married against her will, they should be prosecuted for aiding and abetting sex trafficking or paedophilia.

Modern states once again need to find the will to protect women from abusive “marriages” solemnised under the guise of religion by targeting those who conduct illegal Islamic marriages. There can be no place for complacency driven by multicultural political correctness. The Australian feminist academic Sheila Jeffries has rightly called the privileging of Islamic religious perspectives on women’s rights “reverse racism”. It is an unacceptable and dangerous fallacy that second-class human rights for Muslim women are good enough for them, simply because they happen to be Muslim. It would be grotesque if those who choose to speak up about the plight of Muslim women are accused of “Islamophobia”. The true bigots are those who find the sexual abuse of Muslim women to be multiculturally acceptable.

Governments cannot afford to be negligent where Islamic marriages are concerned. The first victims of such negligence will be Muslim women. They are already being victimised in their thousands. Those who conduct or collaborate in conducting unlicensed religious marriages—whether they be the “husband”, the woman’s male guardian, the witnesses, or a cleric—must be made to suffer the full force of the law.

Mark Durie is an Anglican Vicar in Melbourne and a Shillman/Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum, Philadelphia. He is an authorised marriage celebrant.

This blog is a bit different from usual. It provides a broader context for my writings on Islam.

There are two aspects to my speaking and writing on Islam.  Some of this is for secular or multi-faith audiences: in such forums I do not assume the audience adheres to or even sympathizes with a Christian worldview. By and large this markdurie.com blog adopts this approach: virtually all my articles on Islam intended a more general audience end up on this blog, where they go out to around 650 people.

Although not assuming a Christian audience, my concerns here are almost always theological, as I seek to make Islamic ideology understandable, and its significance in shaping the behaviour of at least some people, not all of them Muslims.  (My book The Third Choice takes this approach.)  This perspective is important for understanding issues of human rights, war and peace, and human behaviour in general.  Theological illiteracy is one of the crucial disabilities of modern western people in engaging with the world of Islam.

I am an academic by training and background, but a pastor by profession, and I also teach for specifically Christian audiences.  (My other two books Liberty to the Captives and Which God? fit into this category.) Some of this teaching focuses on persecution of Christians.  Other teaching has been concerned with evangelism: for example how to understand Islam in a way that puts presenting the Christian message in context.  Some of this teaching has also been concerned with how to help people of Christian faith who are leaving Islam or who suffer fear of Islam or Muslims.  

I have recently reorganized the videos at http://www.markdurie.com/videos-and-audios. At that site is a set of three lectures delivered at Calvin College which many have found useful in explaining Islam. 

On the same web page there are also videos of two lectures presented at Moody Church in Chicago, which speak about persecution of Christians. One of these teaches on 'dhimmitude' and provides prayers for Christians in response to dhimmitude.  Many people of Christian faith have found this an impacting and liberating message (which can also be found in more detail in the book Liberty to the Captives).

There are also links to other audios and videos, including talks at think tanks and for public forums including radio.

I also write on other topics besides Islam, including more general ethical issues, such as abortion, slavery and marriage.  These writings tend to show up on my 'vicar's blog'.

I often preach at the church where I serve, and my sermons are regularly loaded on the church website at smac.org.au.  Some are better than others.


Mark Durie is a theologian, human rights activist, Anglican pastor, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Adjunct Research Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Islam and Other Faiths at Melbourne School of Theology.

Tony Blair delivered a major speech on April 23 entitled, “Why the Middle East Matters”. In summary, he argued that the Middle East, far from being a “vast unfathomable mess” is deep in the throes of a multi-faceted struggle between a specific religious ideology on the one hand, and those who want to embrace the modern world on the other.  Furthermore, the West, blinded up until now as to the religious nature of the conflict, must take sides: it should support those who stand on the side of open-minded pluralistic societies, and combat those who wish to create intolerant theocracies.




In his speech Blair makes a whole series of substantial points:

• He states that a ‘defining challenge of our time’ is a religious ideology which he calls ‘Islamist’, although he is not comfortable with this label because he prefers to distance himself from any implication that this ideology can be equated with Islam itself. He worries that “you can appear to elide those who support the Islamist ideology with all Muslims.”
• He considers Islamism to be a global movement, whose diverse manifestations are produced by common ideological roots.
• He rejects Western non-religious explanations for the problems caused by Islamist ideology, including the preference of “Western commentators” to attribute the manifestations of Islamism to “disparate” causes which have nothing to do with religion.  Likewise he implies that the protracted conflict over Israel-Palestine is not the cause of this ideology, but rather the converse is the case: dealing with the wider impact of Islamist ideology could help solve the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
• According to  Blair, what distinguishes violent terrorists from seemingly non-violent Islamists – such as the Muslim Brotherhood – is simply “a difference of view as to how to achieve the goals of Islamism”, so attempts to draw a distinction between political Islamist movements and radical terrorist groups are mistaken.  Blair considers that the religious ideology of certain groups like the Brotherhood, which may appear to be law-abiding, “inevitably creates the soil” in which religio-political violence is nurtured.
• He considers “Islamism” to be a major threat everywhere in the world, including increasingly within Western nations. The "challenge" of Islamism is “growing” and “spreading across the world” and it is “the biggest threat to global security of the early 21st Century.”

Because of the seriousness of the threat of this religio-political ideology,  Blair argues that the West should vigorously support just about anybody whose interests lie in opposing Islamists, from General Sisi in Egypt to President Putin in Russia. He finds it to be an absurd irony that Western governments form intimate alliances with nations whose educational and civic institutions promote this ideology: an obvious example of this would be the US - Saudi alliance.

In all this, one might be forgiven for thinking that Blair sounds a lot like Geert Wilders, except that, as he takes pains to emphasize, he emphatically rejects equating Islamism with Islam. Tony Blair and Geert Wilders agree that there is a serious religious ideological challenge facing the world, but they disagree on whether that challenge is Islam itself.

Mr Blair’s speech is aimed at people who do not wish to be thought of as anti-Muslim, but who need to be awakened to the religious nature of the Islamist challenge. He is keen to assure his intended audience that if they adopt his thesis they would not be guilty of conflating those who support radical Jihadi violence with all Muslims.

Two key assumptions underpin Blair’s dissociation of Islamism the religio-political ideology from Islam the religion.

First, Blair presupposes that Islamism is not “the proper teaching of Islam”. It may, he concedes, be “an interpretation”, but it is a false one, a “perversion” of the religion, which “distorts and warps Islam’s true message.”  He offers two arguments to support this theological insight.

 One is that there are pious Muslims who agree with him: “Many of those totally opposed to the Islamist ideology are absolutely devout Muslims.” 

This is a fallacious argument. It is akin to asserting that Catholic belief in the infallibility of the Pope cannot be Christian merely because there are absolutely devout protestant Christians who totally oppose this dogma.  The fact that there are pious Muslims who reject Islamism is not a credible argument that Islamism is an invalid interpretation of Islam.

Blair’s other argument in support of his belief that Islamism is a perversion of Islam is an allegation that Christians used to hold similarly abhorrent theologies: “There used to be such interpretations of Christianity which took us years to eradicate from our mainstream politics.”  This is a self-deprecating variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy, in which another’s argument is attacked by accusing them of hypocrisy. Here Blair rhetorically directs the ad hominem attack against himself and his culture. In essence, he is saying “It would hypocritical of us to regard Islamist ideology as genuinely Islamic, because (we) Christians used to support similarly pernicious theologies in the past (although we do not do so today).”

This logic is equally fallacious: observations about the history of Christian theology, valid or not, prove nothing about what is or is not a valid form of Islam.

Blair’s second key assumption is a widely-held view about the root cause of “the challenge”. The fundamental issue, he argues, is people of faith who believe they and only they are right and do not accept the validity of other views. Such people believe that “there is one proper religion and one proper view of it, and that this view should, exclusively, determine the nature of society and the political economy.” “It is not about a competing view of how society or politics should be governed within a common space where you accept other views are equally valid. It is exclusivist in nature.” 

Hilary Clinton has expressed a very similar understanding of extremist religionists, who “define religion in such a way that if you do not believe what they want you to believe, then what you are doing is not practicing religion, because there is only one definition of religion.”

Such views about religion may reflect the secularist Zeitgeist, but they offer a very weak explanation for the challenge of radical Islam.  The problem is not that Islamists believe they and only they are right.  The problem is all the rest of what they believe. 

Consider this: Tony Blair himself believes his goal is valid, true and worth fighting for, namely a tolerant, open, democratic society, and the Islamists’ goal of a sharia society is invalid.  He does believe that his view should determine the nature of society.  Likewise many religious groups believe that they follow the one true religion, including the Catholic Church, which Tony Blair formally joined in 2007: Mother Theresa of Calcutta certainly did not consider alternative religious views equally valid to Catholic dogma.  But none of this certainty of belief implies that Tony Blair or Catholics in general are disposed to become terrorists, cut hands off thieves or kill apostates.

Blair’s argument manifests the paradox of tolerance. His vision of a good society is one in which people must respect the views of others as “equally valid”. At the same time he argues that we should disallow and combat Islamism because it is “perverse”. He is asking for Islamism not to be tolerated because it is intolerant.

If Blair’s explanation for Islamist nastiness is flawed, what then is the explanation? This takes us back to Islam itself.  Does Blair’s position on Islam hold water? 

Blair’s arguments for his positive view of Islam are weak. The validity of Islamism does not rest or fall on whether there are pious Muslims who accept or reject it, nor on whether Christians have advocating equally perverse theologies in the past.  In the end, Islam as a religion - all mainstream Muslim scholars would agree - is based upon the teachings of the Sunna (the example and teaching of Muhammad) and the Koran. Islam’s religious validity in the eyes of its followers stands and falls on how well it can be justified from those authorities. 

There are at least three respects in which Islamist ideologies claim strong support from Islam - that is, from the Koran and Muhammad.

One is the intolerance and violence in the Islamic canon.  The Koran states "Kill them / the polytheists wherever you can find them (Sura 9:5, 2:191). Muhammad, according to Islamic tradition, said “I have been sent with a sword in my hand to command people to worship Allah and associate no partners with him. I command you to belittle and subjugate those who disobey me …” He also said to his followers in Medina, "Kill any Jew who falls into your power." Following in Muhammad’s footsteps, one of Muhammad’s most revered companions and successors as leader of the Muslim community, the Caliph Umar, called upon the armies of Islam to fight non-Muslims until they surrender or convert, saying “If they refuse this, it is the sword without leniency.”

It will not do, in the face of many such statements found in the Koran and the traditions of Muhammad, to throw one’s hands up in the air and say there are also bad verses in the Bible.  If Jesus Christ had said such things as Muhammad did, Christianity’s political theology would look very different today and medieval Christian Holy War theology – developed initially in response to the Islamic jihad – would have come into being as part of the birth-pangs of the religion, just as the doctrine of the Islamic jihad did in the history of Islam. 

Islamist apologists find it relatively easy to win young Muslims over to their cause precisely because they have strong arguments at their disposal from the Koran and  Muhammad’s example and teaching.  Their threatening ideology is growing in influence because it is so readily supported by substantial religious foundations.  Islamism may not be the only interpretation of Islam, but by any objective measure, it is open for Muslims to hold it, given what is in their canon.

Blair makes a telling over-generalisation when he states that Islamist ideology is an export from the Middle East.  Another important source has been the Indian sub-continent.  Today Pakistanis today are among the most dynamic apologists for Islamism. Abul A’la Maududi, an Indian (later Pakistani) Islamic teacher and founder of Jamaat-e-Islami was writing powerful texts to radicalise Muslims more than 70 years ago - including his tract Jihad in Islam (first published in 1927). His works remain in widespread use as tools of radicalization by Islamist organisations. Maududi’s theological vision was driven, not by Middle Eastern influences or Saudi petrodollars, but by his life-long study of the Koran and the example of Muhammad.  The spiritual DNA of Maududi’s Islamist theology was derived from the Islamic canon itself.

The second point to understand about Islamist ideologies is that the conflation of politics and religion, which is one of Blair’s main objections to Islamism, has always been accepted as normative by the mainstream of Islamic theology.  It is orthodox Islam.  As Bernard Lewis pointed out, the separation of church and state has been derided by most Muslim thinkers since the origins of Islam:  “Separation of church and state was derided in the past by Muslims when they said this is a Christian remedy for a Christian disease. It doesn’t apply to us or to our world.”

The third point about Islamist ideologies is that their vision of a closed society in which non-Muslims are second-class participants is in lock-step with the conservative mainstream of Islamic thought.  Here again Bernard Lewis:  “It is only very recently that some defenders of Islam began to assert that their society in the past accorded equal status to non-Muslims. No such claim is made by spokesmen for resurgent Islam, and historically there is no doubt that they are right. Traditional Islamic societies neither accorded such equality nor pretended that they were so doing. Indeed, in the old order, this would have been regarded not as a merit but as a dereliction of duty. How could one accord the same treatment to those who follow the true faith and those who wilfully reject it? This would be a theological as well as a logical absurdity.” (The Jews of Islam, Princeton University Press, 1987, p.4).

Tony Blair is right to call the world to engage with and reject radical Islamist ideology. This is a defining global challenge of our time.  He is also correct to affirm that this ideology is religious.  But he is profoundly mistaken to characterise it as un-Islamic.  The fallacious arguments he puts forward for distinguishing Islam from Islamism are nothing but flimsy rhetoric.  The hard evidence against separating Islamism from Islam is clear, the sentiments of some pious Muslims non-withstanding.

Islamism is a valid interpretation of Islam, not in the sense that it is the only ‘correct’ or ‘true’ one, but because its core tenets find ready and obvious support in the Islamic canon, and they align with core principles of 1400 years of Islamic theology.  (To make this observation is not the same thing as saying that all pious Muslims are Islamists!)

Blair is right to call for the West to combat “radical Islam”, but the reason why “radical” is a correct term to use for this ideology is that radical means “of the root,” and Islamist ideas are deeply rooted in Islam itself. Islamism is a radical form of Islam. This explains why the radicalization project has been advancing with such force all over the world.

In order to combat radical Islamic views we do need to have a frank and open dialogue about the dynamics of radicalization. Blair is concerned about the damage being caused by denial about Islamism, but he indulges in his own form of blinkered thinking, which is just as unhelpful.  He was right to identify Islamist ideology as the soil in which violent jihadi ideologies "inevitably" take root, but fails to identity mainstream Islam itself as the soil in which Islamism develops. In reality the Islamist movement is but the tip of the iceberg of the Islamic movement, a deeper and broader revival of Islam across the whole Muslim world.

When countering radical Islamic ideologies, Western leaders should refrain from putting themselves forward as experts on theology, who are somehow competent to rule on whether a particular interpretation of Islam is valid or “perverse”. There is something ridiculous about secular politicians ruling on which manifestations of Islam are to be judged theologically correct. As Taliban Cleric Abu Qutada once said, “I am astonished by President Bush when he claims there is nothing in the Quran that justifies jihad violence in the name of Islam. Is he some kind of Islamic scholar? Has he ever actually read the Quran?”

Ritual displays of respect for Islam should not be naively used as sugar to coat the pill of opposition to the objectionable beliefs and behaviour of some Muslims. Leaders need to be absolutely clear about what values they stand for, and insist on these values. They should not need to express a theological opinion about what is or is not valid Islam in order to challenge the anti-semitism of Palestinian school textbooks, the denial of basic religious rights to non-Muslim guest workers in Saudi Arabia, incitement against Christians in Egypt, the promotion of female genital mutilation in the name of Islam in the Maldives, or the UK practice of taking child brides. 

In this post-secular world, our leaders need to “do God” with less naivety.  They need to grasp that the inner pressure they feel to manifest respect for Islam whenever they object to some of its manifestations is itself a symptom of the ideology of dominance which powers the Islamist agenda.  They should resist the pressure to mount an apology for Islam.  The mullahs can do that.

Here is my recent appearance on the Glazov Gang: 



In the interview I suffered a slip of the tongue and at one point said that Islam permits a man to have five wives. Of course the correct limit for the number of wives is four!

Also, when I referred to Islam permitting sex with young girls (for example the kidnapped Nigerian school girls), I was speaking of the legitimacy, according to many Islamic scholars, for men to marry girls as young as nine, following the example of Muhammad when he married Aisha (see Sahih Bukhari, Book 58, Hadith number 236).  Of course there are Muslims who disagree with following this path, but many leading Muslims in Nigeria support child marriages of girls, see here.

Abubakar Shekau, the leader of Boko Haram, is considered by his followers to be a religious scholar, and he certainly would not be selling girls in the marketplace and marrying them off unless he considered this was permitted by his religion.  One may or may not disagree with his conclusions, but it is beyond dispute that he is sincere in his beliefs and these beliefs are what guides his group’s actions.  It is also clear what theological authority he relies on for these beliefs and actions, namely the Sunna, or example and teaching of Muhammad.  His organization’s commitment to following the Sunna is expressed in their official name. For a  discussion of this and the popular name for this group, Boko Haram, visit this earlier post, where I explain that:

Their official Arabic name ... means 'A Group of People of the Sunna (the example and teaching of Muhammad) for Da'wa (proclamation or Islamization) and Jihad'.  The Boko Haram nick-name for the group refers to their objection to the Latin alphabet, which has become dominant in Nigerian education, including for writing Hausa:  the Hausa word boko (from English book) refers to the Latin alphabet.  It can also refer more generally to non-religious education.  The Arabic word haram means a 'forbidden' or 'prohibited' practice according to Islam.  So the phrase boko haram could mean 'secular learning is prohibited for Muslims'.

Qasim Rashid, an American Muslim, published on FoxNews a heart-felt expression of deep distress at the kidnapping of Nigerian girls by Boko Haram (‘What would Muhammad say to Boko Haram’).  He declared that Muhammad himself would not recognize this group as acting in line with his teachings:

“Boko Haram’s claim that Islam motivates their kidnappings is no different than Adolf Hitler’s claim that Christianity motivated his genocide. This terrorist organization acts in direct violation of every Islamic teaching regarding women.”

Qasim Rashid is not the only Muslim who has been speaking out in support of the kidnapped girls, while denying that their plight has anything to do with Islam (see here).

Qasim Rashid is a member of the Ahmaddiyah community, which is regarded as unorthodox by most Muslims.  Indeed Ahmaddiyahs are often severely persecuted for their beliefs in Islamic nations.  Although Qasim Rashid does not speak for mainstream Islam, he is nevertheless to be commended for speaking up against Boko Haram’s repugnant acts.

But does the claim that Boko Haram is not Islamic hold up to scrutiny?

What counts as a valid manifestation of Islam? Ahmaddiyah beliefs can be considered Islamic, in that those who hold them do so on the basis of a reasoned interpretation of Islamic canonical sources, even if the majority of Muslims reject them as Muslims. By the same token, the beliefs of Boko Haram must also be considered a form of Islam, for they too are held on the basis of a reasoned interpretation of Islamic canonical sources. 

It needs to be acknowledged that Boko Haram has not arisen in a vacuum.  As Andrew Bostom has pointed out, violent opposition to non-Islamic culture has been a feature of Nigerian Islam for centuries. Today this hatred is being directed against Western education and secular government, but in the past it was indigenous Africa cultures which were targeted for brutal treatment, including enslavement and slaughter.  The modern revival of absolutist sharia-compliant Islam in the north of Nigeria is a process which has deep roots in history.  It has also been in progress for decades.  Khalid Yasin, an African American convert to Islam and globe-trotting preacher waxed lyrical about the advance of sharia law in Nigeria on Australian national radio in 2003: 

“If we look at the evolution of the Sharia experiment in Nigeria for instance. It’s just a wonderful, phenomenal experience. It has brought about some sweeping changes, balances, within the society, regulations in terms of moral practices and so many things. …What did the Sharia provide? Always dignity, protection, and the religious rights?”

But let us consider the evidence Qasim Rashid gives for his view that Muhammad would disown Boko Haram.  His arguments can be summarized as follows:

• ‘Boko Haram violates the Koran 24:34 [i.e. Sura 24:33] which commands, “and force not your women to unchaste life,” i.e. [this is] a condemnation of Boko Haram’s intention to sell these girls into prostitution.’
• ‘They violate Koran 4:20 [i.e. Sura 4:19] which declares, “it is not lawful for you to inherit women against their will; nor should you detain them,” i.e. a specific repudiation of Boko Haram’s kidnapping and detention.’
• ‘Prophet Muhammad’s dying words embodied these commandments. He implored, “Do treat your women well and be kind to them, for they are your partners and committed helpers.”’
• The seeking of knowledge is an obligation on all Muslims, including ‘secular  knowledge’.
• ‘Islam ... commands female education.’

Although Qasim Rashid’s views are sincerely held, his reasoning is weak. Let us consider his points in order.

Compel not your slave-girls — Sura 24:33
Contra Qasim Rashid, Sura 24:33 does not say ‘force not your women’ but:

“… compel not your slave-girls to prostitution when they desire to keep chaste, in order to seek the frail goods of this world’s life. And whoever compels them, then surely after their compulsion Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.” (The Quran translation used here is cited from a translation by Ahmaddiya scholar Muhammad Maulana Ali). 

The word translated ‘slave-girl’ here can also mean a young woman, but in this passage it clearly refers to female slaves. A standard interpretation of this verse by Sunni commentators – such as Ibn Kathir– is that if someone owns a slave girl, he should not prostitute her, but if he does, Allah will forgive her. 

Strictly speaking, this verse does not appear to apply to the situation of the Nigerian girls taken by Boko Haram.  The outrage is that they were taken captive and enslaved in the first place, becoming what the Koran refers to as ‘those whom your right hand possesses’.  That they may have been raped by their captors seems highly likely, but this is not the same thing as being prostituted to produce income for their owners. Islam permits men to have sexual intercourse with their slave women, and also to sell them into the service of another, but it frowns on hiring them out for prostitution.

In Sura 33:50 of the Koran it is stated that it was permissible for Muhammad to have sex with his female slaves: 

“O Prophet! We have made lawful to thee thy wives to whom thou hast paid their dowries, and those whom thy right hand possesses, out of those whom Allah has given thee as prisoners of war”,

and in verse 23:6 this prerogative is extended to Muslim believers:

“Successful indeed are the believers ... who restrain their sexual passions except in the presence of their mates [their wives], of those whom their right hands possess.”

The actions and teaching of Muhammad also support the practice of sexual slavery for women taken captive in jihad.  Chapter 547 of the Sahih Muslim, a revered collection of sayings of Muhammad considered reliable by most Muslims, is entitled ‘It is permissible to have sexual intercourse with a captive woman…’. Abdul Hamid Siddiqi, the translator and editor of the Sahih Muslim, added the following footnote to this chapter:

“As for the expression malakat aymanukum (those whom your right hands possess) [it] denotes slave-girls, i.e. women who were captured in the Holy War … sexual intercourse with these women is lawful with certain conditions.”

Boko Haram is reported to be intending to sell the girls at a slave market.  This is no doubt based upon the precedent of Muhammad’s own practice. There are many examples from Muhammad’s actions and those of his companions which could be cited.  For example, after putting the men of the Jewish Quraiza tribe in Medina to the sword, Muhammad’s biographer Ibn Isaq reports that he sold some of the Jewish women and used the money to buy horses and weapon:

“Then the apostle divided the property, wives, and children of B. Qurayza among the Muslims, and he made known on that day the shares of horse and men, and took out the fifth. … Then the apostle sent Sa‘d b. Zayd al-Ansari brother of b. ‘Abdu’l-Ashhal with some of the captive women of B. Qurayza to Najd and he sold them for horses and weapons. (Sirat Rasul Allah, by Ibn Ishaq)

The rest of the Jewish slaves were divided among the Muslims.  Muhammad himself took one of the leading Jewish women, Rayhana, for his concubine, but she refused to marry him:

The apostle had chosen one of their women for himself, Rayhana d. ‘Amr b. Khunafa, one of the women of B. ‘Amr b. Qurayza, and she remained with him until she died, in his power. The apostle had proposed to marry her and put the veil on her, but she said: ‘Nay, leave me in your power, for that will be easier for me and for you.’” (Sirat Rasul Allah, by Ibn Ishaq).

Rayhana, who became Muhammad’s concubine by capture in warfare, is revered to this day as one of the ‘wives’ of the prophet of Islam.

In addition to the support for this practice found in the Islamic canon, historical sources give ample evidence that enslavement of women as captives of war and resulting sexual servitude has been a persistent feature of Islamic warfare conducted by pious Muslims.  Consider for example the report of Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani, Saladin’s chronicler, of the fate of 8,000 Christian women in Jerusalem who were unable to pay a ransom for their release after the conquest of that city by Saladin:

“Women and children together came to 8,000 and were quickly divided up among us, brining a smile to Muslim faces at their lamentations. How many well-guarded women were profaned, how many queens were ruled and nubile girls married, and noble women given away, and miserly women forced to yield themselves, and women who had been kept hidden stripped of their modesty, and serious women made ridiculous, and women kept in private now set in public, and free women occupied, and precious ones used for hard work, and pretty things put to the test, and virgins dishonoured and proud women deflowered, and lovely women’s red lips kissed, and dark women prostrated, and untamed ones tamed, and happy ones made to weep!” (Arab Historians of the Crusades, ed. by Francesco Gabrieli, pp. 96-97).

It is has been widely accepted by Islamic jurists down the ages that Islam permits Muslim men to have sex with women who have come into their possession through being taken captive in war, either because they personally captured them, or because they acquired them by purchase or gift from another.  Indeed this was the legal basis in Islam for the harem system: the women of the harem were mainly sourced from jihad campaigns waged against non-Muslim communities.

It is simply incredible that Qasim Rashid would quote a verse which prohibits Muslim men from hiring out their concubines for sex as evidence that Islam is against the use of sexual violence against captive women.  If we are supposed to deny the label ‘Islamic’ to Boko Haram, are we also to conclude that Saladin and even Muhammad himself cannot be called Muslims?

Inheriting and troubling wives — Sura 4:19
Sura 4:19 is another passage cited by Qasim Rashid.  Maulana Muhammad Ali’s translation throws a different light on this passage: 

“O you who believe, it is not lawful for you to take women as heritage [i.e. to inherit them] against their will. Nor should you straiten them by taking part of what you have given them …”

The standard explanation of this verse is that it prohibited two practices: a man ‘inheriting’ the wife of his male relative, which had apparently been a pagan Arab custom before Islam; and oppressing one’s wife in order to make her seek a divorce, so that she will pay back the bride-price. This latter practice had been occurring in Muhammad’s time, because if a Muslim man divorced a wife, he was not entitled to any financial compensation, but if a woman initiated divorce proceedings, she had to compensate him for her bride-price.  (See Ibn Kathir and also Muhammad Ali's explanation in footnotes which both concur with the explanation given here.)

Sura 4:19 is thus not a prohibition against detaining women: it has absolutely nothing to do with the situation of the captured Nigerian girls.

Treating your women well
With regard to Muhammad’s command to Muslims to treat their wives well, these words could apply as an instruction for the men who have married the captured girls, taking them as their wives.  It says nothing, however, about the issue of their capture, enslavement or sale.

On seeking secular knowledge
With regard to Qasim Rashid’s next point, most pious Muslims would agree that seeking knowledge, including Western scientific knowledge, is an obligation for Muslims.  Most Muslims do not agree with Boko Haram’s desire to banish all learning apart from Islamic instruction.  However antipathy to non-Islamic education and knowledge has had a long history in Islamic thought.  This is not a new idea, nor even a particularly aberrant one, but is part of the broad range of Islamic theological perspectives.

Learned Muslim women in the past
With regard to Qasim Rashid’s fifth argument, it is of course possible to find examples in history of capable Muslim women who were well-educated.  On the other hand there are traditions of Muhammad which denigrate the intellectual capacity of women, such as the following:

Once Allah’s Apostle went out to [to pray] … Then he passed by the women and said, “O women! Give alms, as I have seen that the majority of the dwellers of Hell-fire were you (women).” They asked, “Why is it so, O Allah’s Apostle ?” He replied, “You curse frequently and are ungrateful to your husbands. I have not seen anyone more deficient in intelligence and religion than you …” The women asked, “O Allah's Apostle! What is deficient in our intelligence and religion?” He said, “Is not the evidence of two women equal to the witness of one man?” They replied in the affirmative. He said, “This is the deficiency in her intelligence. Isn’t it true that a woman can neither pray nor fast during her menses?” The women replied in the affirmative. He said, “This is the deficiency in her religion.” (Sahih Bukhari, Book 6, Hadith 301)

In any case, asking what Muhammad would say on the subject of educating women is irrelevant to what Boko Haram has done. It did not attack the girls’ school because Boko Haram believes women should not be educated.  They did it because they are opposed to secular, non-Islamic education per se, and they believe they have the right to kill, enslave and plunder people who they count as their enemies.  They also wish to terrorize their enemies by stirring up as much fear and emotional trauma to them as possible.

Islam is not the victim here
Qasim Rashid writes: “Do not give the terrorists known as Boko Haram the dignity of attributing any religion to their name.” This is a common refrain of pious Muslims in the face of atrocities done by other Muslims in the name of Islam: whenever an atrocity dishonors Islam, non-Muslims are asked to agree that ‘This is not Islamic’ so that the honor of Islam can be kept pristine.

However the real issue is not what might be good or bad for Islam’s reputation.  The sight of Boko Haram’s leader saying on video that ‘by Allah’ he will go to market and sell the captive girls, because his religion permits him to do so, has already dishonored Islam.  Muhammad and Saladin, by their actions, could equally be considered to have dishonored Islam, but this is beside the point. The real challenge here is not preserving the honor of Islam, but what can be done to counter Boko Haram.
What is crystal clear is that nothing can be gained by denial of the truth about the jihadis’ religious ideology. Other Muslims may — and do! — disagree with Boko Haram's beliefs. That is a not a bad thing.  But what will not help anyone – least of all the victims of this outrage – is putting forward weak arguments that no-one should judge Islam on the basis of Boko Haram’s actions.  That line of thought is completely irrelevant to addressing the problem.

Islam is not the victim here. The pressing issue here is not to get people to think well of Islam, but how these girls can be rescued, and above all how Boko Haram’s murderous rampage can be halted.
To achieve progress with this second goal it is necessary first and foremost to acknowledge the theological character of the challenge.   In historical contexts, such as colonial India and the Dutch East Indies, colonial governments were able to turn the tide on long-running and costly Islamic insurgencies by acknowledging the religious character of the challenge they were facing – that they were up against a jihad.  This enabled them to pursue appropriate strategies, such as:

• Getting leading mainstream Muslim scholars to issue credible rulings (fatwas) which declared the specific jihad insurgency to be sinful and forbidden by Islam.  (Such fatwas continue to be used by Islamic regimes today to counter their home-grown insurgents.)
• Making it a primary military objective to pursue and take out the ideologues – Islamic clerics – who were driving the insurgency through recruitment and religious formation of the jihadi combatants.  It is essential to cut off the flow of ideology.  US Navy Seals may be able to go in and rescue the kidnapped girls, but many more girls will continue to be kidnapped until the transmission of the ideology is disrupted.

Attempting to persuade non-Muslim Westerners that Islam is not the problem actually makes it much harder to formulate an effective strategy for countering jihadi insurgencies.  The aversion of the US State Department to acknowledge that Boko Haram was an Islamic religious movement – they only classified it as a banned terrorist organization in late 2013 – has had a crippling effect on America’s ability to make a difference in Nigeria (see Nina Shea’s analysis). 

Boko Haram will not be contained by sending in hostage negotiation experts, or making public statements about poverty, disadvantage and ‘poor government service delivery’. These are not the cause of all this hatred.  Acknowledging the potent religious roots of the insurgency movement is the basic first step in shaping a credible response.  To accept this is not the same as saying that Boko Haram’s interpretation of Islam is correct.  One can be completely agnostic about what is or is not true Islam but yet grasp that Boko Haram is an interpretation of Islam, which at least for its followers has become the most compelling interpretation around.  Finding a solution to the challenge of Boko Haram can only start from this premise.

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Mark Durie is a theologian, human rights activist, pastor of an Anglican church, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle Eastern Forum, and director of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness. He has published many articles and books on the language and culture of the Acehnese, Christian-Muslim relations and religious freedom. A graduate of the Australian National University and the Australian College of Theology, he has held visiting appointments at the University of Leiden, MIT, UCLA and Stanford, and was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1992.

Today a report appeared in The Australian, a national daily newspaper, which discussed forced marriages in our nation.  There were many good points made in this article, which was entitled It is the young flesh they want. [This article has now been amended - see below: changes paragraphs are in blue.]

However the article reported, as if it were true, a completely false and easily disprovable statement about the Koran.


The offending paragraph was:

“It is critical that the whole community is educated,” says Jennifer Burn of Anti-Slavery Australia. “The Koran does not support child marriage and the Grand Mufti of Australia says that consent is vital. But there are over 60 different traditions within the Muslim community, with different interpretations of the religious scriptures. We need the religious leaders to take the message into the communities, because they will listen to their leaders rather than us.”

[Since The Australian appeared, I contacted Associate Professor Burn, and she reported to me that she had been misquoted.  She has successfully requested the Australian to correct the quotation to:  “It is critical that initiatives to address child marriage and forced marriage are developed in consultation with communities and with community leaders,”   This is the version which is published on the Australian's website — as of  21 June 2014.]

It is true that the Koran does not refer specifically to child marriage.  However in discussing divorce it does refer to conditions applying for a female who has not yet menstruated, i.e. for a pre-pubescent girl. The reference is found in Sura 65:4 in a list of regulations concerning the waiting period (the Iddah or Iddat) for divorced women before they can remarry.   The verse deals systematically with different cases of women who for some reason are not having regular periods. It reads:

“And of those of your women who have given up hope of menstruating, if you doubt, their (waiting) period is three months, as well as those who do not menstruate. And those who are pregnant, their period is until they deliver their burdens.” (Sura 65:4)

It might be thought that this verse is ambiguous in relation to young girls. However it is quite clear.  It systematically covers the three main cases where a female is not menstruating: the old, the young, and those who are pregnant. 

Ibn Kathir’s highly respected commentary on the Koran has this to say about this passage (see here).

Allah the Exalted clarifies the waiting period of the woman in menopause. And that is the one whose menstruation has stopped due to her older age. Her ‘Iddah [waiting period before marriage] is three months instead of the three monthly cycles for those who menstruate, which is based upon the Ayah in (Surat) Al-Baqarah. [see 2:228] The same for the young, who have not reached the years of menstruation. Their ‘Iddah is three months like those in menopause.

The reference to ‘Surat Al-Baqarah’ is to Chapter 2 verse 228 of the Koran, which states that divorced women must wait through three menstrual periods before remarrying. Ibn Kathir also refers to two hadiths or traditions of Muhammad that Sura 65:4 was revealed when someone asked Muhammad about the young, the old and the pregnant, because their waiting period could not be determined from the principle of three menstrual periods, given in Sura 2: 228.

Furthermore, Islam is not just based upon the Koran. It is also based upon the example and teaching of Muhammad, and here there is very clear support for what today we would call ‘underage’ marriages, because Muhammad married Aisha when she was six and consumated this marriage when she was reported to have been nine years old (that is nine lunar years, which means she was aged somewhere between 8 years, nine months and 9 years, nine months).  The revered Sahih al-Bukhari, a collection of sayings of Muhammad, includes a chapter with this heading:

Giving one’s young children in marriage (is permissible) by virtue of the Statement of Allah ‘… and for those who have no courses (i.e. they are still immature) (65:4). And the ‘Iddat for the girl before puberty is three months (in the above Verse).

This chapter consists of the following hadith:

64. Narrated ‘Ā’isha that the Prophet married her when she was six years old and he consummated his marriage when she was nine years old, and then she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death).

Collections of hadiths are arranged for legal purposes. The heading of each chapter indicates the relevance of the hadiths it contains for jurisprudence.  In this case, referencing Sura 65:4, a hadith about the marriage of Aisha is taken as evidence that it is permissible for a father to marry off his young daughters, specifically if she has not yet reached puberty.

I have written in Quadrant (here) about the rule in Islamic law that a father or a grandfather is considered to be a wali mujbir, or ‘forcing guardian’, who has the right to marry a virgin daughter without her permission.

What Anne Barrowclough of the Australian seemed to be trying to do with the offending paragraph (now amended) was entirely laudable. She seems to be allowing for the possibility that Muslim communities could be persuaded, on the basis of Islam's religious teachings, to reject forced marriages of female children.  However to do so she reported as factual a statement that this practice is not supported by the Koran, which is quite false. [This paragraph was updated 24 June 2014.]

Is it praiseworthy to make a false statement about a religion’s teachings in order to incite its followers to behave well?  Whatever the answer to this question may be, this strategy is bound to fail, because anyone who is better informed about the religion will simply reject advice based upon ignorance.

A strategy which acknowledges the authorities in Islam for a practice, and then mounts a case against the practice, is far more likely to have enduring success than one based upon wishful thinking or misleading information.

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Mark Durie is a theologian, human rights activist, pastor of an Anglican church, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle Eastern Forum, and director of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness. He has published many articles and books on the language and culture of the Acehnese, Christian-Muslim relations and religious freedom. A graduate of the Australian National University and the Australian College of Theology, he has held visiting appointments at the University of Leiden, MIT, UCLA and Stanford, and was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1992.

In my last post I criticized  an article which had appeared in The Australian, It is the young flesh they want.  

 I challenged a paragraph in which an academic, Associate Professor Jennifer Burn was quoted as claiming that “The Koran does not support child marriage”.  However Associate Professor Burn asked the Australian to amend the article by removing this quote, as she had been misquoted: Anne Barrowclough, the journalist who wrote the article, had apparently not checked the quotation its alleged source. The Australian has made this correction. 

The original offending paragraph was:

“It is critical that the whole community is educated,” says Jennifer Burn of Anti-Slavery Australia. “The Koran does not support child marriage and the Grand Mufti of Australia says that consent is vital. But there are over 60 different traditions within the Muslim community, with different interpretations of the religious scriptures. We need the religious leaders to take the message into the communities, because they will listen to their leaders rather than us.”

The corrected paragraph is:

“It is critical that initiatives to address child marriage and forced marriage are developed in consultation with communities and with community leaders.”  

I have amended my previous post to inform readers about this correction.

I would also ask those who have reposted my earlier article to update their versions using the version at: http://markdurie.blogspot.com.au/2014/06/the-koran-and-child-marriage.html. 

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Mark Durie is a theologian, human rights activist, pastor of an Anglican church, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle Eastern Forum, and director of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness. He has published many articles and books on the language and culture of the Acehnese, Christian-Muslim relations and religious freedom. A graduate of the Australian National University and the Australian College of Theology, he has held visiting appointments at the University of Leiden, MIT, UCLA and Stanford, and was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1992.

By Mark Durie

An important documentary by VICE News has been published which uses extensive footage gained by a journalist embedded with Islamic State forces.  The youtube video linked here is set to start at 29m 58s, just before a section in which it is declared that Christians had asked for a dhimma pact, requesting to pay jizya.



(The link for the youtube video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUjHb4C7b94)

There are many noteworthy things about this documentary.

Theology Rules

One is the intensely theological content of the IS fighters and leaders.  Their speech is littered with references to the Qur'an, the Hadiths (traditions of Muhammad) and the Sira (biography of Muhammad).  This shows that the jihadis’ worldview is profoundly shaped by Islam’s scriptures. Islam is their driving motivation, determining - at least in their eyes - the boundaries of their behavior, their goals, and their morality. Whatever else Muslims find in Islam’s scriptures – including words of peace or reconciliation – it is abundantly clear that the Qur'an and Sunna are more than adequate to sustain the ideological base which drives the IS actors.  This conforms to the pattern of other jihad wars throughout the history of Islam.

Euphoria

Another notable feature of this documentary is joy;  the joy of the jihadis; the joy of local Muslims about the caliphate; the joy of young boys who are being recruited to become jihadis for the Islamic State.  The Islamic State is being established on a wave of the pious, exuberant joy of its supporters.  Islamic State soldiers do not suffer from morale-sapping doubts about what they are doing. They believe they are making great sacrifices to what they consider to be the noblest of causes.  If morale were enough to guarantee victory, these men would sweep all before them.

Grooming Young Boys

Another thing that struck me about the documentary is the reality that the Islamic State is intentionally gathering young boys, grooming them, and placing them in training camps to become a  jihad generation.  Some of the youth who appeared in the documentary were full of excitement and anticipation about this.  The current Islamic State fighters have been drawn from all over the Muslim world, including from Western states, and are bound together by their creed.  Now that they are establishing themselves in Iraq and Syria, they are raising up a jihad generation from the sons of the local people.  Judging from the pattern established by Muhammad’s example, these boys will include young Christians who have been converted to Islam by the jihadis and are even now being trained for war.  This is consistent with the practice of jihad campaigns down through history.

Fear

Another thing that struck me was the undercurrent of fear.  One jihadi declared that weapons are the best way to establish Islam.  The Islamic State jihadis consider it perfectly righteous to impose Islam by force, which means through fear.  This is, in their view, Allah’s way.  I was reminded of the words of the Qur’an:  “I will strike fear in the hearts of the unbelievers” (Sura 8:12); “If you come upon them in war, deal with them so as to strike fear in the hearts of those who are behind them” (Sura 8:57); “Soon we shall strike fear into the hearts of the unbelievers” (Sura 3:151); and Muhammad’s own words “I have been victorious through terror” (Sahih Bukhari).  Fear was etched onto the smiling faces of men, interviewed in prison, who were awaiting sentence by an IS sharia court.  As they eagerly praised the Islamic State, and confessed their gratitude for being brought to a correct understanding of Islam, their own fear was standing in the background, monitoring everything they said.

‘Willingly’ the Christians pay Jizya

An IS leader made the memorable claim that Iraqi Christians have asked to pay the jiyza. They have asked, he said,  for a dhimma pact – the alternatives were to convert to Islam or be slaughtered.

The idea that the dhimmi status is willingly accepted by Christians and other non-Muslims living under Islamic rule – that they want and choose to be dhimmis – is reflected in the statements of many jurists and Islamic commentators from the past.

Here is what I wrote about the ‘willing’ submission of dhimmis in The Third Choice (pp. 140-141), in a discussion of the annual Islamic jizya payment ritual, in which non-Muslim men of past generations received a ritual blow on the neck to symbolize their escape from beheading through paying the non-Muslim tax.

“The 18th century Moroccan commentator Ibn ‘Ajibah said that [paying jiyza] represented the death of the ‘soul’, through the dhimmi’s execution of their own humanity:

[The dhimmi] is commanded to put his soul, good fortune and desires to death. Above all he should kill the love of life, leadership and honor. … [He] is to invert the longings of his soul, he is to load it down more heavily than it can bear until it is completely submissive. Thereafter nothing will be unbearable for him. He will be indifferent to subjugation or might. Poverty and wealth will be the same to him; praise and insult will be the same; preventing and yielding will be the same; lost and found will be the same. Then, when all things are the same, it [the soul] will be submissive and yield willingly what it should give. [Tafsir al-Bahr al-Madid fi Tafsir al-Quran al-Magid. Commentary on Sura 9:29 ]

The intended result of the jizya ritual is for the dhimmi to lose all sense of his own personhood. In return for this loss, the dhimmi was supposed to feel humility and gratitude towards his Muslim masters. Al-Mawardi said that the jizya head tax was either a sign of contempt, because of the
dhimmis’ unbelief, or a sign of the mildness of Muslims, who granted them quarter (instead of killing or enslaving them): so humble gratitude was the intended response:

The jizya, or poll tax, which is to be levied on the head of each subject, is derived from the verb jaza, either because it is a remuneration due by reason of their unbelief, for it is exacted from them with contempt, or because it amounts to a remuneration because we granted them quarter, for it is exacted from them with mildness. This origin of this impost is the divine text: ‘Fight those who believe not in God …’ [Q9:29] [Al-Ahkam as-Sultaniyya]

Although some today falsely claim that the jizya tax was simply a tax like any other tax, or merely a payment to exempt dhimmis from ‘military service’, the remarks of al-Mawardi and Ibn ‘Ajibah make clear that its true meaning is to be found in psychological attitudes of inferiority and indebtedness imposed upon non-Muslims living under Islam, as they willingly and gratefully handed over the jizya in service to the Muslim community.”

Many have claimed that Islam’s historical record has been maligned by ‘Orientalist’ western historians.  To understand the dynamics of jihad across the generations, and the meaning in Islam of  Al-Futuh ‘conquest’ (literally:  ‘the opening’ of a nation to Islam) one only need look at what the Islamic State is doing in Iraq.

What about the future?

Finally, let us consider the future.  I venture to make a few predictions.  The lack of air power of the Islamic State means that it cannot sweep all before it.  Nevertheless it is here to stay.  The movement will continue to excite the Muslim world and draw recruits to its cause, as well as funding.  It will also continue to destabilize surrounding states. 

The utopian promises the Islamic State has made to Sunni Muslims under its rule will prove in the end to be a profound disappointment to almost everyone.  Prosperity, morality and justice will not flourish under the rule of the caliphate.  The application of unfettered power, together with abuses of that power under strict Islamic conditions will corrupt the utopian rule, and will turn the current euphoria into a symphony of pain, including for Sunni Muslims.  Force can win power, but it cannot make people good, despite what the jihadis believe.  As in Iran, revivalist fervor will eventually give place to cynicism and despair about Islam itself, so the on-going crisis within Islam, namely the failure of revivalist movements to deliver on their utopian promises, will continue to unroll.

The most vehement rejectors of Islamic utopianism will eventually be the Muslims who have had the misfortune to live under the regimes it has created.  We are already seeing the outworking of this process in Egypt and Iran.  At the same time, it will be in the West that Islamic utopian sentiment, with all its dangers, will continue to thrive, for this will be the place where revivalist Muslims do not have to actually live under the conditions created by their ideal of a strict Islamic state.  For this reason it will be in the West that many will persist in remaining true believers in the coming Islamic world order, despite what is happening before their eyes across the Middle East.

The tragedy for the areas now occupied by the Islamic State is that the loss of the dream will take years, and in the meantime the rising jihad generation will kill and be killed in large numbers.

What is also certain is that the refugees will continue to come.  For now the ones fleeing the Islamic State are Christians and others for whom radical Sunni rule is an existential threat.  In time however the disillusioned Sunnis of northern Iraq and Syria will make their own exodus.  Just as post-revolutionary Iranian Shi’ites are now fleeing Iran’s failed sharia utopia, so also will the Iraqi Sunnis.  They will want a better life than the Islamic State can offer.

GLOSSARY

dhimma– covenant or pact of surrender, by which a conquered non-Muslim community have agreed to live under Islamic rule, and by virtue of which this community is protected from jihad

dhimmi– a non-Muslim living under Islamic rule, who is considered to be subject to the conditions of a dhimma pact

hadith– traditions, first spoken and later written, which record things which Muhammad is believed to have said or done, as well as things said and done by his companions

jizya– tribute paid to Muslims to prevent jihad attack; for dhimmis this is payable as an annual ‘head tax’ by adult dhimmi males

Qur’an– Allah’s revelation to Muhammad, believed to be dictated to him by the angel Jibril (Gabriel); also spelled Quran or Koran

Sunna– the example and teaching of Muhammad, recorded in hadith and sira literature; the word sunna also means religiously recommended

sira– biography (of Muhammad)

Recently Lapido Media published an article of mine entitled ‘Three Choices’ and the bitter harvest of denial: How dissimulation about Islam is fuelling genocide in the Middle East.  In it I argued that Western theological illiteracy, made worse by demonstrably false statements put out by scholars, has weakened leaders’ and governments’ capacity to manage the risks associated with Islamist radicalism.  Because of this illiteracy Western leaders have had great difficulty grasping the implications of the global Islamic revival, especially its impact upon religious minorities.
 

•it would alienate Muslims who oppose radicalism; 

•it would justify radical ‘twisted zealots’ - by validating their ‘excuses’; and

•it would inspire more fear, hatred and violence (Azumah even refers to bombing the Ka’bah in Mecca).

•arguments against radicalism by moderate Muslims which do not hold up to scrutiny offer only flimsy, unstable protection against radical violence: because they are unsustainable in the end they only make problems worse by concealing their true nature;

•it is immoral to equate explaining the reasoning of evildoers with justifying their acts;

•to name Islam as the problem is not the same thing as inciting hatred against Muslims, not least of all because Muslims suffer so much disadvantage from problems of Islam. 

•to conceal the causes of injustice is to partner with it.

By Mark Durie

This article first appeared in Eternity Magazine.

The past few weeks have been hard ones for Australians, not least for Australian Muslims. Various alleged plots by Islamic State supporters to slaughter Australians has Islam in the news. Even as I write, five out of ten of the “most popular” articles on The Australian’s website are about Islamic jihad and national security.

What are ordinary Australians to make of conspiracy theories aired by Muslims on the ABC’s Q&A program, implying that recent police raids were staged as a cynical act to manipulate public opinion?  Are Muslims being unfairly victimized by all these security measures?

How are we to evaluate Senator Jacqui Lambie’s claim that sharia law “obviously involves terrorism”?  Or the Prime Minister’s decision to mobilise Australia troops against the Islamic State? 

What about the Islamic State’s grandiose claim that “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women.”  Or Mr Abott’s declaration that the balance between freedom and security needs to be adjusted in favour of greater security and less freedom? 



Earlier this month, an 18-year-old Melbourne man, Numan Haider, was shot dead by police after he stabbed two officers outside a suburban police station. At the time of writing, news was breaking that authorities believed he intended to behead a police officer and post the photos online.

Prison officers in Goulburn jail have struggled to contain the worst riot in ten years, during which rampaging prisoners were heard to be crying “Allahu Akbar.”

A Christian woman, who works in a church close by an Islamic centre has asked her employer to install security measures to protect her and others at the church.  Someone else, a convert from Islam to Christianity, reports that his personal sense of being under threat has risen, because he feels that people he knew from his earlier life as radical Muslim are more likely to be activated to violence after the successes of the Islamic State and their global call to arms. Are such responses reasonable? Or are they Islamophobic? 

Many young Muslims have been using the hashtag #NotInMyName on social media.  Many are insisting that IS does not speak for them:  as Anne Aly put it “This isn’t in my name, this isn’t what Islam is about, I am against it and they don’t have my allegiance, they don’t have my support.”  How then can we know the truth about Islam?

 

What is a Christian response to all this?  How can we find our way through these crises: does protecting national security mean we risk losing some part of our soul? 

A truly Christian response to the multi-faceted challenge of “Muslims behaving badly” must embrace both truth and love in equal measure.

Truth will acknowledge that the Islamic State ideologues do claim to speak for Islam, and that they justify their actions from the Koran and Muhammad’s example.  Truth will acknowledge that IS has recruited tens of thousands of Muslims to fight for their cause, but apparently not a single Christian, Jew or Buddhist.  As Brother Rachid, a Moroccan convert to Christianity put it in a widely distributed letter to President Obama “ISIL’s 10,000 members are all Muslims. None of them are from any other religion. They come from different countries and have one common denominator: Islam.”

Truth will recognise that the self-declared ‘caliph’ of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi has a PhD in Islamic studies: he is not ignorant of Islam. It will also acknowledge that the very idea of a caliphate – a supra-national Islamic state – is a religious ideal widely shared by many Muslims.  However this ideal bodes ill for any non-Muslims who fall under its power.

Truth will accept that there is a price to pay for increased security.   Since 9/11 we wait in line for queues at airports because of the actions of jihadis.  As the level of threat increases, it is inevitable that our need for increased security measures will only grow.

Truth will also acknowledge that many Muslims vehemently reject the methods and goals of the Islamic state, and that the  #NotInMyName hashtag campaign is genuine and heartfelt.  But this begs the question: “What is the real Islam?”

Love on the other hand, will reject stereotyping Muslims or denigrating them with labels of hatred and suspicion.  Love will reach out a hand of friendship.  It will show grace instead of fear, kindness instead of rejection or indifference.  Love demands that we emphatically reject speech which dehumanizes Muslims or pins labels on them.  It will honour those Muslims who reject the Islamic State’s ideology.  Love will find new friends even on the blackest of days.

It can be tempting at times such as this to chose between love and truth.  Love without truth can be gullible, opening the door to many threats.  I am reminded of a Persian fable:

A Fox met a Heron and said “My, what lovely feathers you have, dear Heron. May I have one?” The Heron obliged.  The next day they met again.  Day after day the Fox’s question was repeated, and day after the day the Heron’s response was the same. One day they met for the last time. The Heron had been plucked bar, so the Fox said “Heron, you look delicious. Now I will eat you.” And he did.

Love without boundaries, at the cost of truth, can wreak incredible havoc on innocent lives.  In the end such love is false, and will prove profoundly unloving.  Genuine love does not fear the truth.  True love will not deny or obscure the damaging effect of sharia law upon Christians living in Islamic societies, or the atrocities being perpetrated in the name of Islam against Christians and others by the “caliphate”.  It will be mindful of the words in Proverbs 24:11-12: “Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering towards slaughter. If you say ‘But we knew nothing about this,’ does not he who weight the heart perceive it.’ ” 

On the other hand, truth without love can become merciless, excluding and cruel.   Love counts the cost of aggressive argument and rejecting rhetoric.  It takes pains to understand the other; it seeks to see the world through another’s eyes and to hear words through another’s ears.   Love nurtures life-giving relationships.  It reaches out to enmity and answers it with grace. It does not jump to conclusions, but is patient and careful.  It delights to partner with and nurture truth and does not fear it.

Professor Peter Leahy, former Army Chief and leading defence strategist has warned Australians that we face a war that is ‘likely to last for the rest of the century’.  If he is right, then the troubles we are facing now as a nation are only the beginning, and dealing with the potential horrors ahead will stretch us to our humanity to its limits. 

As Christians we are called to be salt and light in the world.  If this means anything, it means staying true to Jesus’s two great statements “the truth shall set you free” and “love your enemies, and do good to those who hate you”.  This is no time for circling the wagons and cowering behind them in fear.

This is a time for Australians to reach out to our Muslim neighbours, to show and receive grace.  In the present difficulties many Muslims will agree with Melbourne lawyer Shabnum Cassim who stated that “the every-day Muslim just wants to get on with their day.”  As a nation the fact that we need to respond realistically to genuine threats to our peace, and seek a true understanding of the religious beliefs that generate these threats, should not deflect us from the everyday task of getting on with our lives together, graciously, inclusively and generously. 

Mark Durie is the pastor of an Anglican church, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness.  His book The Third Choice explains the implications for Christians of living under Islamic rule.

By Mark Durie

Many leaders have been stating that the Islamic State’s actions are ‘unprecedented’, ‘extreme’, ‘unique’, or even ‘eccentric’.  Western leaders who are intervening in the Syria-Iraq conflict justify their actions by declaring the Islamic State to be uniquely evil.  In announcing military action and increased security measures, Australian Prime Ministry Tony Abbott said of the Islamic State that “To do such evil — and to revel in doing such evil — is simply unprecedented”. David Cameron stated that“ISIL is a terrorist organisation unlike those we have dealt with before.”  Barack Obama claimed“these terrorists are unique in their brutality.”

The actions of Islamic State’s adherents are morally repugnant in the extreme, but only by applying historical amnesia and selective vision could one claim that their evil is unique or unprecedented.

In recent decades, not dissimilar horrors have regularly been reported from around the world, for example the abuses of the ‘Lord’s Resistance Army’, or the genocide pursued by the government of  Sudan against the Christians and traditional believers in the Nuba mountains and  the Blue Nile region, and before that against tribal Muslims in the Dafur region.  Indeed for decades the Sudanese government has unleashed jihad – with all the atrocities of the Islamic State – against its own (black African) citizens, often assisted by jihadis from all over the Arabic world, just like in Syria and Iraq today.

The Islamic State's actions are also not unique in history.  Quite apart from the horrors of Nazism and Communism, Andrew Bostom has rightly pointed out that the atrocities of the Ottoman Caliphate in exterminating Christians under their rule were greater in magnitude than what is currently being experienced in Syria and Iraq. He writes:

“Notwithstanding the recent horrific spate of atrocities committed against the Christian communities of northern Iraq by the Islamic State (IS/IL) jihadists, the Ottoman jihad ravages were equally barbaric, depraved, and far more extensive. Occurring, primarily between 1915-16 (although continuing through at least 1919), some one million Armenian, and 250,000 Assyro-Chaldean and Syrian Orthodox Christians were brutally slaughtered, or starved to death during forced deportations through desert wastelands. The identical gruesome means used by IS/IL to humiliate and massacre its hapless Christian victims, were employed on a scale that was an order of magnitude greater by the Ottoman Muslim Turks, often abetted by local Muslim collaborators (the latter being another phenomenon which also happened during the IS/IL jihad campaign against Iraq’s Christians).”

Bostom also points out that the Yazidi’s recent sufferings at the hands of the IS are nothing new, but are consistent with a a pattern of genocidal assaults against them which stretches back to Ottoman times.

What is so disturbing to Western people about the Islamic State is not the extremity of the barbarity, which is far from unprecedented, but the fact that so many Western citizens have been signing up with IS, and the psychological warfare being directed by IS against the outside world, including the West, manifested, for example, in the videos of beheadings, and the way some enslaved, raped women have been forced to phone their families to tell them about their abuse, even while it is going on.

What is unique for us in the West is the way the fear is now upon our doorstep: this is the fear that what is happening there will come back home to haunt us.

The challenge facing the West now is not simply stopping the Islamic State – as important as that is – but what to do about the fear.

Dropping bombs on the Islamic State will not do it.

By Mark Durie

This is an edited version of an article posted by Fulcrum.

John Azumah has taken yet another bite of the apple by releasing a third response to my Lapido Media article “‘Three Choices’ and the bitter harvest of denial”. This is an earlier response, now re-issued, in edited form, with Fulcrum (for his previous comments, both reported on Lapido Media, see here and here).

I can refer readers to my previous rejoinder to Azumah: “Complexity, Truth and the Islamic State: a response to John Azumah and Colin Chapman.” In respect of Azumah’s new material for Fulcrum I make the following observations:

I did not say that the conditions of the dhimma “always” applied to Christians living under Islamic rule. My point was subtly different, namely that coexistence after Islamic conquest was “always regulated by the conditions of the dhimma”.  By this I did not mean to imply that dhimma laws were consistently or uniformly applied to Christians at all times and in all places: my point was that the dhimma conditions and worldview profoundly framed and shaped the patterns of coexistence of Muslims and their conquered subjects.

John Azumah emphasizes that groups like the Islamic State, Al-Qa’ida and Boko Haram trace their theology to the Hanbali madhab (Sunni school of law), which, he points out, is followed by only a minority of Muslims today. He insinuates that other schools – representing the majority of Muslims – have different rules concerning jihad and the treatment of conquered non-Muslim subjects.

This is misleading on several counts. Although it is true that Hanbali jurist Ibn Taymiyya has been influential among Salafi groups, his student Ibn Kathir, who has been almost as influential, was Shafa’i. Terrorists today follow all four of the main madhabs: Al-Shabab are Shafa’i, the Afghan Taliban were Hanafi, and Gadhafi, a long-term sponsor of terrorism, governed according to Maliki jurisprudence. In any case the rules for the treatment of non-Muslims during and after conquest are essentially the same in all four schools: for example it is permissible to kill male captives of war in all the schools of Sunni jurisprudence.

It seems ironic that Abdullah Azzam, whose influential tract Join the Caravan incited many to go for jihad in Afghanistan, reported that of the four schools, the Hanbalis rank the duty of jihad below the duty to perform daily prayers:  the other three schools rank jihad more highly when it has become an individual obligation (fard ‘ayn): for them it is equal to praying and fasting.

I would be intrigued to discover whether Azumah can provide even a single illustration of how the actions of terrorist groups follow Hanbali jurisprudence in contrast to the teachings of the other three schools.

[It is worth noting of the four schools, Hanbalis are particularly emphatic in their rejection of rebellion.  This is because the school’s founder, Ahmad Ibn Hanbal was the last of the founders of Sunni schools of jurisprudence, and he had seen more of the damage to the Muslim community caused by rebellion.  Hanbal himself preferred to suffer arrest and abuse by the ruler of this day to rebellion.  Today the Hanbali state of Saudi Arabia is particularly harsh in their treatment of jihadi rebels.]

Azumah’s main criticism of what I have written is that I claim that groups like the Islamic State have the ‘correct’ understanding of Islam as delivered by Muhammad. This is not my belief. My point rather is that such groups claim – vigorously and ably – to defend their views on the basis of the essentials of Islam as delivered by Muhammad.  I am not saying their defence is correct: I merely point out that for many it is a compelling defence.

In regard to Azumah’s theological silver bullet – that the Islamic State’s jihad is invalid because only a legitimate leader can declare a jihad – I would draw attention to the position of the jihadis.  It has long been accepted by jihadi ideologues that when Muslim lands are occupied, jihad becomes fard ‘ayn, an ‘individual obligation’, without the need for a leader to declare it.  This is also a mainstream view of Islamic jurists.  It is also widely accepted by jihadis that Muslim lands are occupied by unbelievers today, despite Azumah’s claims that this does not apply to Iraq or Syria, and that it did not apply “prior to 9/11”.

The point is not whether John Azumah believes Iraq, Syria or Afghanistan are occupied.  The point is that Muslim radicals believe this.  And not only they, but many leading others have made similar statements in the past. Bin Ladin considered that Saudi Arabia was occupied by Americans during the Gulf War, and it was this that led him to found Al-Qa’ida a few years later.  The jihad in  Afghanistan under Soviet occupation was justified on the basis that Afghanistan was occupied: the argument is laid out very clearly in Abdullah Azam’s Join the Caravan.  The Sunni rebels fighting in Syria believe Assad is an unbeliever and an occupier of Muslim lands.  Four years ago, Abu Omar Al-Baghdadi, now ‘caliph’ of the Islamic State rejected the validity of parliamentary elections in Iraq and committed himself to jihad against the American ‘occupier and his agents': the ‘agents’ being of course the elected government of Iraq. The Islamic state continues to reject the validity of Iraq’s government for this same reason: that they consider them stooges of the occupying Americans. There would be the same attitude to the Saudi Arabian ruling family.

Let me be perfectly clear: I am not saying that the Islamic State’s ideology is the only interpretation of Islam, nor that it is the ‘correct’ one. What I am saying is that it is a reasoned interpretation.  And that is a problem which needs to be understood.

John Azumah’s argument is presented at a very abstract level. Just to take one example, he does not offer any evidence that the sale of captive women in jihad – as the Islamic State is doing – is against the precedents set by Muhammad, or against the rules of jihad in any of the schools of Islamic jurisprudence.  I submit that he does not because he cannot.  Such practices are not “eccentric” as he puts it, but they have been widely applied in historical jihad campaigns.  Of course Muslims are not the only ones who have done such things, but the point is that such formerly mainstream Islamic warfare practices as selling slaves or beheading captives have been re-emerging for religious reasons: this is something the Islamic State’s ideologues have been quite clear about.

John Azumah’s solution is to argue that such groups do not have a true understanding of Islam as it has existed historically, and the correct response to jihadi terrorism is to inform Muslims of the correct understanding of their religion. This is patronising.

Finally, John Azumah seems to consider that as a ‘good protestant’ I must be some kind of fundamentalist, and consequently I interpret Islam through that prism. I have already rejected and refuted this simplistic view (see here).

And yes, I do insist that Islam is a problem – not the only problem in the world, but a problem all the same – and that is something worth talking about.

Mark Durie is the pastor of an Anglican church, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness.  His book The Third Choice explains the implications for Christians of living under Islamic rule.

An earlier version of this article appeared in the November 2014 edition of The Melbourne Anglican.

A slogan of the Muslim Brotherhood is “Islam is the solution”. Dean Philip Jensen recently stated in regard to the Islamic State (ISIS) that “It is time to face the truth that Islam itself is part of the problem.” Solution or problem: what is the truth about Islam?

The world has been shocked by ISIS, which has committed beheadings, crucifixions, stonings, enslaving and selling captives, and imposing the notorious ‘three choices’ upon Syrian and Iraqi Christians. More than this, it has showed itself proud to do such things. The fact that thousands of Muslims from around the world have been traveling to the Levant to join ISIS suggests that these people also consider the acts of ISIS to be in accordance with Islam.

The publicly stated position of ISIS is that it is motivated by religious devotion. The English language version of the ISIS magazine Dabiq recently praised the enslavement of the Yazidis, a non-Muslim group in northern Iraq. The article ‘The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour’, defended the practice from Islamic legal history, the example of the first Muslims, and Muhammad himself:

“The enslaved Yazidi families are now sold by the Islamic State soldiers as the mushrikīn [idolators] were sold by the Companions [of Muhammad] … before them. … enslaving the families of the kuffār [non-Muslims] and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Sharī’ah that if one were to deny or mock, he would be denying or mocking the verses of the Qur’ān and the narratives of the Prophet [Muhammad] … and thereby apostatizing from Islam.”

ISIS is a product of Islamic revivalism. After enduring several centuries of Islamic decline, a view developed across the Muslim world that if only Muslims were more religiously observant, Allah would make them ascendant again. This conviction has driven the Islamic revival, which seeks to renew Islam by going back to original sources, including the life of Muhammad.

What is significant is that a groundswell of protest against such revivalism is now rising up across the Muslim world. Magdi Abdelhadi, former Arab affairs analyst for the BBC, recently blogged that “a growing number of voices are laying the blame for the proliferation of groups such as ISIS squarely on Arab-Islamic shoulders … One writer after another concluded that ISIS, far from being an aberration, was in fact a textbook example of brutality in the name of Islam.

For example, one of the writers referred to by Abdelhadi criticised an Islamic tradition in which Muhammad said “he had come to slaughter” his enemies. This was featured in an ISIS propaganda video Clanging of the Swords Part 4 (view from 2:20) of Lavdrim Muhaxheri, a Kosovar ISIS commander. Muhaxheri was quoting the Qur’an to justify hatred: “to ... infidels wherever they may be we say the same thing that Abraham said to his father … ‘We have rejected you and between us and you there is enmity and hatred and hatred for ever until you believe in Allah alone.’” (The Qur’an, Sura 60:4) He then recited Muhammad’s words to the Meccans: “We say to you as the Prophet Muhammad said: ‘We have brought slaughter upon you’.” He was saying that ISIS is hating and killing because it desires to be faithful to Islam.




It is beyond dispute that many of the offensive acts of the Islamic State have precedents in Islamic sacred texts. For example, Muhammad enslaved two young Jewish women, Rayhana and Safiyya, after killing their husbands. These women are counted among his wives.

One of them, Safiyya, was a Jew from Khaybar who had been allocated in the division of the spoils of war to one of Muhammad’s companions, Diyha Ibn Khalifa. When Muhammad saw how beautiful Safiyya was, he desired her for himself, so he took her, telling Diyha to choose another.

Safiyya was led to Muhammad by Bilal past the mutilated bodies of her male relatives, including her father and husband. (Later Muhammad rebuked Bilal for this insensitivity.) When Muhammad made Safiyya his wife, he declared that he was freeing her from slavery, and the gift of her ‘freedom’ would count as her bride-price. On their ‘wedding night’ one of Muhammad’s companions, Abu Ayyub, Khalid b. Zayd was marching around the nuptial tent until dawn. When quizzed in the morning by Muhammad about this, he replied: “I was afraid for you with this woman, for you have killed her father, her husband, and her people.” Muhammad congratulated him on his thoughtfulness. According to Baladhuri’s Kitab Futuh al-Buldan (“Book of Conquests”), after Muhammad's death, Safiya confessed that “Of all men, the prophet was the one I disliked [actually hated] most, for he had killed my husband, father, and brother.”  

Years ago I spent a summer reading through Islam’s canonical sources: the Qur’an, the hadith ‘traditions’ and sira ‘biographies’ of Muhammad. It was a deeply disturbing experience encountering many texts such as this. These days, when I see ISIS ideologues citing these very same sources, I continue to be disturbed, but am no longer surprised.

These are not easy things to discuss in public. Certain fears rise up. But discuss them we must. One problem is that until someone has read authentic sources for themselves they will have difficulty imagining just how problematic their contents are. Nevertheless it is rational and necessary to give sober consideration to such information.

Many have said that anyone can find hatred in the scriptures of any religion. Of course it is true that Christians have quoted scripture to support gross wrongs. A case in point was Augustine’s appeal to Luke 14:23 ‘compel them to come in’ to justify forced conversion. Some, knowing about the history of Christians’ abuses of the Bible, imagine they can thereby understand Islamic extremism, but if this is all they know, they do not know Islam. The canonical Islamic sources are several orders of magnitude more problematic than anything found in the Gospels or even the whole Bible. The imagined comparison is not reality-based.

It also will not do to say that ISIS’s actions are un-Islamic because only a legitimate Islamic ruler can declare a military jihad. This technical argument ignores the fact that even if the ISIS fighters’ reasoning can be faulted, the point still holds that their actions are guided by their theology.

The religion of Islam has long been regarded by many Muslims as a prestigious brand, a symbol of stability and justice. However wherever Islamic revivalism has been implemented in recent decades, as a ‘solution’ to the problems Muslims face, it has produced results which many Muslims are finding intolerable: consider Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, Sudan, Algeria, Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood, and now what remains of Iraq and Syria under ISIS.

In the light of the failures of Islamic revivalism, Western denial serves little purpose.

Muslims themselves are now deeply embroiled in a debate about Islam. The key question being aired across the Muslim world is not whether ISIS has been influenced by Islamic teachings – that is a given – but whether this is, as ISIS itself claims, the long-awaited solution to Islamic decline, or whether it is, as Dean Jensen has intimated, a “problem”.

Mark Durie is the pastor of an Anglican church, a Shillman-GinsburgWriting Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness. His book The Third Choice explains the implications for Christians of living under Islamic rule.

Sister Religions? a series of extended interviews with Mark Durie and others has been published in DVD form by Hatikvah Films.  It is available on Amazon (US) and direct from Hatikvah in the UK.

Sister Religions features groundbreaking interviews with Mark Durie, Elizabeth Kendal and Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali.

As a battle of ideologies rages across the Middle East, many people are asking the questions: Do Muslims and Christians worship the same God? Are Judaism, Christianity and Islam Sister Religions? Simple questions or maybe not...