Laws

Jurisprudence types

See types page.

Bases

• Qur’an
• Hadith - narrations of the Muslim prophet [Muhammad]
  • mutawatir - several people heard it. super strong. around 100 hadith.
  • ahad - one person heard it from the Prophet, someone heard it from him etc. (all links known).
  • khabar - one person heard it from the Prophet, someone heard it from him etc. (some links unknown).
• sunnah - normative custom of Muhammad or the early Muslim community. May or may not have a supporting hadith.
• ijma - consensus of the Muslim community
• qiyas - analogical reasoning
• istihsan - juristic discretion
• urf / Adat - Local customs

Authority

• head of the Islamic establishment is wali al-`amr, the ruler. mufti and the Fatwa Board are like advisers to the King. ruler, has the final fatwa, has the bay’a.

On the theological support of the jihAdi-s

• Killing unbelievers: Qur’an 2:191, 4:89, 9:5, 9:29. Beheading: 47:4, 8:12. Violence against non-Muslims: 8:39, 48:29, 9:73. Terror: 3:151, 8:60. Sex slavery of infidel women (“captives of the right hand”) 4:3, 4:34, 23:1-6, 33:50, 70:30.
• ISIS justification: “The Islamic State does its utmost for the repentance of any infidel – whether Yazidi, Crusader, or Jewish. We have been fighting for no other reason than to extract people from their kufr (unbelief) and to usher them into the fold of Islam.” The commander also had a message for Yazidis who have not converted to Islam: “We advise, or even beseech, the Yazidis to come down from the mountains and convert, first and foremost in order to save their souls from the Hellfire, and secondly, if they remain in the mountains, they will die of hunger and thirst.”
• KE: “Thus, when Mohammed Atta, Mohammed Bouyeri and hundreds of other Muslim terrorists declare in their farewell letters/videos that their motive is Islam, we have to believe them. But when they talk about Islam, claiming that their own interpretation is the same as Prophet Mohammed’s, we have to ascertain for ourselves the truth of that claim. And then we find that Prophet Mohammed’s intention was indeed closer to al-Qaeda’s than to that of the Sufis, a movement which invokes Quranic authority but was quite unknown in Mohammed’s day.”
• Article by Tufail.
• Former terrorist and ex-muslim Maajid Nawaz’s interviews: Islamism.

Sharia enforcement

• Ridiculous fatwas (judicial opinions of mullah-s/ ulema-s) continue to be issued [SeeArun Shourie’s take] around the muslim world. Yes, this “high literature” does influence the lives and attitudes of muslims.
  • Examples: Opinions on beating women, sex slaves (Details in a separate section).
• Sharia policing within (even minority) muslim communities and neighborhoods.
  • Societies such as Tablighi Jamat (India) enforce retrograde mores among the muslim ummah.
  • In a German city.

Why is moving beyond bad theology difficult in Islam?

• Islam is historicentric - very much reliant on the deeds and words of a historical person (rather than a deity), Muhammad - whose existence is not questioned by believers.
  • An ideology centered around this ideal muslim (“muhammad ul rasUl allaH”), a historic person, is fundamentally flawed.
  • Mythic elements are rather weak - unlike in Hinduisms, where we have an abundance of talking monkeys, bears and eagles, set in a mythic age. So, it is much harder to challenge the emulation-worthiness of the deeds of Muhammad.
  • The best case:
    • “Muslims can say that slavery is not legitimate now, and that crucifixion is wrong at this historical juncture. Many say precisely this. But they cannot condemn slavery or crucifixion outright without contradicting the Koran and the example of the Prophet. … That really would be an act of apostasy.” [ISIS_A]
• Islam is highly text-centric: There is no part of their holy texts which declare that it is important to move beyond the texts [check].
• Later verses have precedence over earlier verses in Quran (vid), in traditional Islam. So, the mostly-Meccan peace-verses are abrogated by the Medina intolerance-verses. Eg: “No compulsion in religion” vs verse of the sword.
• To judge RoP (religion of peace/ Islam) by its holy texts:
  • Muhammad is the ideal muslim. (Anyone blaspheming him is going to be in deep trouble in almost any muslim country.)
  • Muhammad was a lecherous person, slaver and a mass murderer - making him a horrible human according to some. (Look at his life stories, starting with the banu qurayza massacre.)

Homosexuality

• Like other Abe’s madnesses, classical Islam considers homosexuality a sin.

“Ottoman Sheikhulislam Ebu Su’ud effendi (d. 1574), who served as the grand mufti of the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Suleyman (d. 1566), distinguished between sodomy with ‘men’ (rijal) and with youths’ (ghilman), the violations of the former motivating God’s condemnation of the people of Lot (el-Rouayheb, 2005, p. 126). This variation emphasizes a much discussed differential based on maturity indicating that sex with a pre-pubescent ghilman boy fell in many cases outside the purview of the law. In the Muslim religious tradition, it was when the people of Lot began sodomizing adult males that they were punished, leaving room for the interpretation that it was only sex between adult men that was condemned.”

Practice

• However, many of the muslim elite (even ghAzi-s) sodomized each other and other youth. Examples below
  • Mohammed Ghori, his slave Qutbuddin Aibak
  • Alaudin Khilji and his neutred slave Malik Kafur
• Pederasty (aka Baccha Bazi in Afghanistan) was/ is practiced in many muslim cultures.

Boosting due to non-availability

In his 29 years, Mohammed Daud has seen the faces of perhaps 200 women. A few dozen were family members. The rest were glimpses stolen when he should not have been looking and the women were caught without their face-shrouding burkas. “How can you fall in love with a girl if you can’t see her face?” he asks. Daud is unmarried and has sex only with men and boys. But he does not consider himself homosexual, at least not in the Western sense. “I like boys, but I like girls better,” he says. “It’s just that we can’t see the women to see if they are beautiful. But we can see the boys, and so we can tell which of them is beautiful.”

Lesbian exception

Lesbian sexual intercourse is punishable by death in Shi’ism but not in Sunnism. In many Sunni majority Muslim countries, female homosexuality is not punishable while male homosexuality is. eg Kuwait, Bangladesh, Turkmenistan, Gaza, etc.