“Is it then other than Allah’s religion that they seek (to follow), and to Him submits whoever is in the heavens and the earth, willingly or unwillingly, and to Him shall they be returned?” (Surat Ali Imran: 83)
Abu Huraira reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “Everyone from my nation will enter Paradise except those who refuse.” They said, “O Messenger of Allah, who will refuse?” The Prophet said, “Whoever obeys me enters Paradise and whoever disobeys me has refused.” (Bukhari)
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In this day and age, we hear a lot about the importance of choice, autonomy, and all the other values associated with personal agency that make liberty and freedom so great and wonderful. But what if these concepts when examined more closely were not all that meaningful?
The Challenge of Choice
Islam is often portrayed as a religion that does not acknowledge free choice or sexual autonomy. Critics of Islam claim, for example, that Muslims do not have a choice in terms of how they can dress. Also, Muslims do not have sexual autonomy since Islam has strict constraints on sexual behavior.
How can Muslims respond to these charges? Given the importance with which modern society views these concepts — namely, free choice and autonomy — Muslims need to be able to speak to such concerns.
The temptation that Muslims face is to respond with straight denial, i.e., to insist that Islam does acknowledge and, in fact, champion free choice and sexual autonomy in the sense that these terms are deployed in liberal secular discourse. But this would be in many ways dishonest. We do not find concepts like free choice and autonomy as independent values as such in the way they are meant in the modern context within the corpus of Islamic ethical and legal thought.
A more honest and intellectually compelling response would be to question the coherence of these concepts on their own terms. Undermining these concepts allows Muslims to throw a wrench in the motor that drives the intuitions behind these attacks on Islam.
The Hijab as Choice
First let’s consider the question of dress and free choice. Can Muslim women, for example, freely choose to wear the hijab or are they coerced to do so?
Critics of Islam claim that Muslim women are forced to wear the hijab and therefore it is not a free choice in the slightest. What is problematic to these critics is Muslim women’s lack of agency. They have no choice in certain aspects of their dress.
Against this, many Muslims argue that, as a matter of fact, there is a choice when it comes to hijab. Those women who do wear it are exercising free choice by doing so, and that choice is empowering. Some even go so far as to claim that, in the age of Trump, wearing the hijab is an act of defiant resistance against tyranny, and what could be more free and liberating than that?
So who is right? What we can notice is that both sides take the notion of “free choice” for granted. This is a mistake.
Consider the distinction between the following kinds of choices.
You are at the ice cream parlor and you can choose what flavor ice cream you prefer. That seems like a benign choice. This is a scenario where the concept of choice seems perfectly suited. It is a preferential choice and our intuition is that preferential choices ought to be “free” in the sense that to restrict them is nothing more than an arbitrary exercise of power. The idea is, if someone prefers vanilla, why force them to get chocolate? What reason would there be to coerce a choice in this case other than malice?
Here is a second scenario. You are at a red traffic light and you can choose whether to stop or to pass through the red light. This is a choice that is available to you. But this is not about preference. In contrast to the preferential choice, this is a choice that has to do with obeying the law. And since obedience to the law of the land has moral implications, we can call this a moralistic choice.
Along those same line, imagine you are at home and you have just changed your car’s motor oil. You could illegally dump the old oil down your drain even though that would be illegal and cause considerable environmental damage by contributing to the pollution of the water system. Local environmental authorities would never know if you did it, but you have that choice. Again, this is not a preferential choice. Rather, it is a moralistic one.
The Ambiguity of Choice
Even though these scenarios can be described as involving personal choice, the two kinds of choices are in no way analogous. We do not understand the choices that involve following the law or doing the right thing as “free choices.” There is a moral and ethical obligation to do what is right and what is just. And though we do describe a person as having the ability to “choose” to do what is wrong, unethical, and unjust, clearly that is not the same thing as saying that a person has the “free choice” to completely ignore, forego, or violate the moral code.
It is this ambiguity between preferential choice and moralistic choice that causes a great amount of confusion when discussing Islamic ethics and law. Equivocating between the two kinds of choices allows critics of Islam to attack the religion and characterize it as intolerant and dogmatic. In reality, Islamic law is as “intolerant” and “dogmatic” as all other ethical systems and legal codes which, by definition, require and obligate people to behave in certain ways and refrain from behaving in others despite what they may choose to do otherwise.
We all seem to have an aversion to the idea of constraining and using coercion in the realm of people’s preferential choices. We should also note that, while it is obvious to many that curtailing preferential choice is an illegitimate use of power, it is equally obvious that moralistic choice ought to be subject to restriction. People ought to obey the law, which is to say, people ought to choose to obey the law, people ought to choose to do the right thing, etc., and if they fail to do so, there ought to be some sort of consequence.
The Illusion of Choice
The existence of such consequences for disobedience means that moralistic choices are not truly free choices per se. Yes, in one sense, a person has the choice to obey the law and the requirements of morality. But in another sense, no real choice is available since disobedience will be met with repercussions.
The driver behind the red light certainly can choose to run the light, but that could result in a hefty fine if he is caught. And the person who has changed his motor oil certainly can choose to dump the oil down the drain, but that could result in a fine as well and if others were to find out about this dumper’s selfish behavior, that could result in social opprobrium. So these cannot be meaningfully described as “free choices” at all.
Besides these examples, we all are faced with countless moral choices in our day to day lives. We technically can choose to act against the requirements of morality. We can choose to act out in wrong and detestable ways. But those choices have consequences, sometimes severe, sometimes not, sometimes tangible, sometimes social, sometimes worldly, sometimes otherworldly, etc. Unlike our preferential choices, our moralistic choices are not free. And we all recognize that that is a good and perfectly natural thing.
The same considerations apply wherever Islam is charged with not respecting “free choice.” Yes, technically Muslims have a choice to abide by the religious code, but these are considered moralistic choices, not preferential ones. As such, it is a category mistake to charge Islam with restricting free choice. In the case of hijab or any other aspect of Islamic dress code, it is true that Muslims have a choice, but it is a moralistic one. All else being equal, going against the law has consequences, e.g., the requirement for the violator of the law to repent. Ultimately, when it comes to hijab, both those who argue that Islam does respect free choice as well as those who argue that Islam does not respect free choice are incorrect in that they are making a conceptual error.
Rhetoric that Masks Substance (or Lack Thereof)
Claiming that “Islam violates free choice” is merely rhetorical bluster. Similarly, claiming some other religion or ethical system “upholds free choice” is equally vacuous since, as we have seen, all ethical systems permit free choice in the matters that fall squarely within the preferential domain. Of course, the boundaries between these two domains, viz., the preferential and the moralistic, are subject to debate.
And this is what the conversation about Islamic dress vis-à-vis “conventional” standards of dress really boils down to. What about the way we dress and present ourselves to others should be up to personal preference and what should be determined by larger ethical considerations outside of that and who gets to decide?
This is a deep ethical question that requires delving into a host of metaphysical and quasi-religious considerations. In its rejection of all things metaphysical and religious, liberal secularism does not have the conceptual resources even to begin to wrestle with these issues. But this crippling inadequacy of liberal secularism is masked behind a facade of “free choice.” Appealing to this empty concept allows secularism and its proponents to pretend to have an intellectually and morally compelling perspective on issues such as dress, when in reality, they have only constructed a house of cards.
To complicate matters further, this is not a straightforward question to answer for those who mistakenly believe that, as a matter of principle, all dress should be a matter of personal preference. But how could all dress be solely a matter of personal preference? The existence of dress codes, standards of dress at different social functions and in different cultural contexts, and even indecent exposure laws found in every single nation on earth all belie this silly idea that people in the “free world” exercise full, unfettered choice in their clothing decisions in contrast to those in the Islamic world who must submit to “draconian Islamic regulations.” In reality, no respectable person in the history of God’s green earth has ever made a truly “free” choice about what clothes to wear in public, “free” in the sense of “without significant outside influence.” All such “choices” are inescapably influenced by social and cultural norms. For Muslims who abide by the Islamic dress code, these choices are influenced by what are held by Muslims to be guidelines set by God. Within those guidelines, Muslims have historically cultivated a great diversity of fashions. But for the wider non-Muslim culture, there are also strict standards and guidelines of dress, but it is not clear from where those standards originated other than the unmoored ebb and flow of mass infatuation and, in recent times, commercial interests.
Islam and Sexual Autonomy
The notion of autonomy is as vacuous as free choice and for much the same reasons. No one believes in an autonomy that permits one to break the law and violate moral principles, whatever those may be. Autonomy is not conceived of as a license to be a vile person. But if people want autonomy within the boundaries set by ethics, then all religions and ethical systems guarantee this sort of autonomy. So again, the notion of autonomy is empty.
Autonomy as a concept rides on what ethical commitments one subscribes to. If an adult believes that having sexual relations with 16- or 17-year-olds (i.e., individuals just under the legal age limit) is morally acceptable, then anyone who hinders that person from having that kind of sex is violating that person’s autonomy as far as that person himself is concerned. But according to those who deem sex with minors immoral, this is not an issue of autonomy because, according to them, sex with minors ought to be criminalized regardless of what any particular individual believes to be his sexual right.
Islamic law restricts and prohibits certain kinds of sexual behavior in this way, and for this, many have branded Islam as blind to people’s right to sexual autonomy. But, again, this is fundamentally confused. If we recognize the hollowness of the notion of autonomy, then it easily can be claimed that Islam fully grants sexual autonomy to all. It is Islam’s definition of sexual autonomy that is really what people have a problem with. Here again, we reach a moral and metaphysical question: What is correct, moral sexual behavior and what is indecent and immoral and who gets to decide that? Secular thought simply does not have the ability to give a compelling story for all the complicated sexual norms the average secular Westerner dutifully abides by in the course of life.
(And no, the notion of consent is not very helpful either, by the way, given that there are plenty of sexual behaviors that are fully consensual but are still considered immoral and illegal within major strands of liberal secular thought, e.g., sex with minors, prostitution, incest, among others. Philosophers and legal scholars, such as Yale Law School professor Jed Rubenfeld, have also problematized the notion of consent and its adequacy in accounting for common contemporary moral intuitions regarding permissible sex. But this is a larger topic beyond the scope of this essay.)
This inability on the part of secularism to justify satisfactorily its sex norms is overlooked because the notion of sexual autonomy is put on a pedestal as the ultimate good we must all strive for. This allows liberal secularism to criticize the sexual mores of Islam (and Christianity and Orthodox Judaism) for the crime of not adequately respecting sexual autonomy in the way that liberal secularism does. All the while, secularism’s deficiencies go unnoticed and unaddressed. It’s all smoke and mirrors.
These deficiencies ought to be brought to light and openly discussed (as I have done in past articles that can be read here and here, on zina and homosexuality respectively). In the meantime, critics of Islam, especially those invoking empty liberal secular concepts of free choice and autonomy, need to find better arguments to make their case against the religion.
Announcements3 weeks ago
Sarah
March 27, 2017 at 10:14 AM
Boring and out of touch.
A) “You have to wear hijab. Morality. Does free choice even exist? Bla, bla, bla.” As though none of us have heard this stuff before. Any article by a man in 2017 going on about Hijab hasn’t been around the Internet very long – I could’ve hit up Tumblr and found this exact discussion in 2011, and responses to the assumptions in it. The cheap shots might make writers feel all warm and fuzzy for having “enjoined the right and forbidden the wrong” and getting a lot of surface level “likes”, but they totally ignore the actual hard questions of sexual ethics being actually asked by many Muslims and nonMuslims today, like the presence of forcible marriage of free women in the mathahib (which you’ve interestingly decried elsewhere as totally wrong, without addressing that Malik endorsed it), many denying the moral (not even legal) existence of marital rape, as well as the forcible marriage and selling of slave women (whom certain ahadith portray literally being bedded whilst their actual husbands were alive) and the endless examples of truly messed up mathhab opinions that many were made to live with that work to the exact opposite of what this writer has defended elsewhere as “the sake of marriage” (E.g. defining marriage as a type of slavery, and zina with family slavewomen often going without a hadd punishment, and rape often having been near impossible to prove.)
B) “Liberal secularism” is a social contract, not necessarily a replacement for morality – be clear about what you are critiquing. Many believe in liberal secularism without believing that it should be the be all end all of morality – including critiquing nation state constructs and how they limit this. And from this article it’s pretty clear you’ve never lived somewhere where your religious decisions have been entirely made for you – and no, I don’t equate paying taxes whilst freely writing and believing and wearing what you wish and critiquing others and the government for their beliefs and actions, with being arrested and beaten and sent into exile for doing the same.
Sarah
March 27, 2017 at 1:51 PM
To clarify, because this comment will probably be dismissed as “irrelevant” – the issue with people asking about hijab and sexual autonomy isn’t their issue with people making a moral choice such as, say, choosing to abide by the law of paying zakat or not gossiping (which is how you frame it here). Their issue is questioning whether Muslim women are actually free to make this decision for themselves, as opposed to being excommunicated or physically persecuted or beaten by others into making the decision (which would imply invalidating their commitment to hijab). Virtual Mosque (formerly Suhaib Webb) had a fantastic article by a woman who WAS physically forced to wear hijab, talking about how this affected her sense of iman. An article that doesn’t recognize this, misses the point of the social question being asked. The reason I bring up the other questions of sexual ethics and autonomy is because those are the social issues that are the thrust behind these questions of sexual autonomy – not that consent is the ultimate arbiter of all sexual morality, but questioning a system in which it is hardly present. Maybe living a sheltered life as an American Muslim male who doesn’t interact with many women, you are simply unaware that these other questions are not outlandish but are often suffered by women both within the US and without (whose experiences are often dismissed due to their poverty or lack of community authority). An article that actually wants to help Muslim women stay in the faith needs to take this into account, as opposed to being entirely reactionary against the American left.
Daniel Haqiqatjou
March 27, 2017 at 2:39 PM
Thanks for the comment. I’ll just say that to address those “hard questions” that allegedly everyone’s asking (and by “everyone,” I mean a handful of Muslim grad students who read Kecia Ali in a seminar and it blew their minds), the question of choice and how the concept is constructed in liberal contexts and selectively deployed to further a liberal secular vision of Muslims is central and that is what this article briefly explores.
Majnoon
March 27, 2017 at 5:20 PM
Salaam
Your claim that its just grad students is foolish and ignoring the problem. Most of the people asking these questions are normal practicing Muslims who, after encountering some sheikh talking about sexual slaves or reading about the right of a husband to beat their wives(however “lightly”), are genuinely concerned about whether or not they can successfully reconcile their moral consciousness with the ethical code of their religion.
Your passive aggressive tone is going to tick people off, even if you have something worthwhile to say. Btw I think it shows up in all of your writings(that I read), not just this one comment.
Daniel Haqiqatjou
March 27, 2017 at 5:59 PM
They should rename the red herring fallacy the slavery fallacy in context of discussions like this. It doesn’t matter what the topic at hand is because: “Slavery!”
Is it passive aggressive when, instead of addressing the substance of my article, you pooh-pooh it and then proceed to assert, implausibly and without evidence, that your particular set of concerns is more important and anything that doesn’t address your particular set of concerns is “missing the point”?
Ami
March 27, 2017 at 6:10 PM
This is a very intellectual and well thought article. Not sure why people are hating? Responses here are pure emotional, and lack any respect. Brother Daniel is talking about a specific topic, yet the responses here are judging him because he didn’t address other questions. Why does he have to? That’s not the topic! Also, I have followed the brother for a while, never thought he’s passive aggressive. In fact, he is very fair and always engages in respectful intellectual discussions. If you have some deep insecurities about the work he does, then it’s not his fault.
Dr. Miriam Batul
April 15, 2017 at 10:09 AM
Assalaamoalaikum,
Thanks brother for explaining lucidly moral laws versus legal laws.
Yet, I feel that if some of our pained Muslim brothers or sisters have some urgent questions; even if not directly connected, with your article. you should not summarily dismiss their concerns.
These people want to remain Muslims and we must help the to do that.
These sad emergencies are arising because Muslims now grow up gaining full knowledge of the dominant culture, without studying their own deen first. We spend nearly two decades or more to acquire a professional degree; but we hardly dedicate any number of years for organized authentic study of our own!
Therefore, Muslims as we are, we think, feel and act as an outside critic, putting Islam in the dock… on the basis of sketchy Islamic knowledge, little love or devotion as a result of low priority treatment of Islam in our lives…wearing liberal and western tinted glasses on our Muslim eyes…
identity crisis…
Sarah
March 27, 2017 at 7:32 PM
Sigh. I doubt that the plentiful non-academic ex-Muslims or anguished questioning Muslims online have ever even heard of Kecia Ali, yet you find article after article online questioning Islam and the Muslim community on issues of sexual autonomy such as forcible marriage, and yes, sexual slavery (this is highly prevalent on Muslim websites and forums). If you think that the first time that someone reads these issues is by sitting in an academic seminar, then you’ve had the luck to never have been exposed to shaykhs who quote this stuff, or been an interested teenager who read Muwatta Malik on sunnah.com, or a horrified person reading about ISIS, or even so much as pressed “google” and had the countless Muslim and ex-Muslim articles on these topics come up.
It’s telling that you think that “slavery” is a red herring in relation to a discussion of AUTONOMY, when the very definition of slavery usually is related to the removal of types of autonomy. It seems perfectly reasonable to expect you to take larger questions such as slavery into account when talking about the “Islamic” conceptualization of autonomy, including regarding sexual ethics (which you brought up yourself) – especially since one of the first things anyone who reads influential Western “liberal” thinkers such as Locke does is take into account their ideas (and double standards) about slavery and consent.
Call it a red herring until the cows come home, it’s what’s making other Muslims lose their religion – which is why I commented as I did. I understand that you read this and you see “what does this have to do with my writing, I’m refuting a point about hijab and the assumptions of autonomy in liberalism in a useful way and a random person is talking about slavery, which has nothing to do with this” – but in your article you mis-conceptualize the concern behind the question of consent and hence attack a strawman, which isn’t helping anyone.
Hence, acting like the “issue” of sexual autonomy that is making Muslims all worried and on the defensive is “is it okay to tell women to make the moral choice of wearing hijab”, and that once the liberal conceptualization of this and of “moral choice” is thoroughly attacked, then everything is okay and Muslims have no problem with questions of sexual autonomy – rather than Muslims having much deeper problems that they and others are asking of themselves – leaves you not fulfilling what you purport to set out to do in terms of “answering liberalism”. You can refute a question of hijab and liberalism and triumphantly wave a flag over how you’ve felt yourself to have destroyed a moral assumption used over Muslims in particular ways, but what’s the point if you build your argument up in such a way that it messes up other questions of sexuality and autonomy that people are asking? (And if your statements have already been made before online, making it obvious that people’s problems with this rhetoric are deeper?)
You personally recognize, for example, that it’s problematic for Muslims to respond to questions about hijab by saying “yes it’s all by consent and therefore it’s fine” because in your eyes this leaves them in a quandary of looking at how they ask people to bow their wills to loads of other moral issues without talking too much about consent. In a similar way, it’s problematic for you to respond to questions about hijab by saying “liberal consent is next to meaningless” without looking at what all the “Islamic content” has to say about consent, since this leaves you having deconstructed liberalism very well and built up little actual Islamic response.
Sarah
March 27, 2017 at 8:02 PM
Since you’re seemingly going to take the path of arguing that “liberal consent is nearly meaningless”, then I am extremely serious in asking, what is this alternative meaningful conceptualization of consent? I have yet to see the thinkpiece that can convince me that “choice is an illusion” whilst straight-facedly claiming that God is going to punish us all for the choices that we make.
If you’re going to claim that the only meaningful consent is a “rational” one that is made to accept Islam, and that any other claim is irrational (and that bodily consent is also next to meaningless), then please just say so as fast as possible so that your readers can recognize the double standards of lambasting Muslims for not having strong religious autonomy whilst also calling autonomy meaningless.
Ahmad B.
March 27, 2017 at 9:47 PM
Salam Sr. Sarah,
You lost me there at the end when you said how can Daniel claim that “choice is an illusion” when we know that Allah may punish us for making immoral choices. The whole point of the article was to distinguish between “preferential choice” and “moral choice.” When people talk about “free choice” (as opposed to “free will”) in contemporary society, they always use it in reference to matters *they* regard as preferential choice, not matters they regard as moral issues. Everyone still has free will with regard to the latter, but exercising that will in the wrong manner entails consequences. So it is with Allah’s punishment of us for “choosing” (i.e., exercising our free will) to break His moral law. I’m afraid I don’t see where the inconsistency lies.
I understand your point about instances where Muslim women, you say, are not given the ability to choose to exercise their free will either in obedience or disobedience of the command to wear hijab because it is literally forced upon them by others. But that’s a different point that doesn’t detract from Daniel’s actual argument, does it? Also, don’t all societies enforce whatever they understand to be decent dress by force (not necessarily random beating, etc., but some sort of sanction)? In Boston in 1905, a woman was arrested for wearing knee-length shorts on the beach and exposing her arms up to the elbows. In the U.S. today, a woman can still get arrested for going topless in public, where that is uneventful in most of Europe, where in many places full nudity on beaches and sometimes even in public parks is totally okay.
Finally, I don’t get what you mean by “zina with family slave women going without a hadd punishment.” Are you talking about the actual owner of the slaves? If so, how is that zina (as it’s explicitly allowed in the Qur’an and sharply distinguished from zina)? Or are you talking about other males in the household taking advantage of them even though they have no shar’i right to them?
Majnoon
March 27, 2017 at 10:23 PM
I also get the feeling he could have stated his point far more clearly if he wasn’t afraid of the backlash. Now Muslims will look at this article and go,”Wow, this sounds smart. I think I got the argument, maybe…maybe….And it cleared ALL my doubts, so I guess its fine.” When in reality if he condensed the article to maybe two paragraphs and the reader didn’t gt lost in all of the rubble, they would surely have disagreed.
Ahmad B.
March 27, 2017 at 10:29 PM
Salam Majnoon,
Disagreed with what? The distinction between preferential choice and moral choice? And the fact that it’s not a question of Western society allowing preferential choice while Islam suppresses it, but rather, that each society defines differently what behaviors fall into preferential choice and which into the moral realm? This seems pretty obvious (once you think about it) and uncontroversial to me. As Daniel says, the real discussion is: how do we decide on specifics of what falls in the moral realm and what falls in the preferential realm? As Muslims, we do that on the basis of our religious texts, tradition, teachings, etc. In modern Western society, there isn’t much rhyme or reason to it and moral fashions change almost as quickly as the winds. Is that the part you’re disputing?
Marwan
March 28, 2017 at 7:09 AM
To be fair, Imam Malik never approved of forced marriage, neither did the people of Madina or even the Zahiriyyah, who were very literal in reference to textual evidence. I’ve only seen ex-Muslim claims this or crazy Saudi website like Islamqa.
As for the slavery issue, I believe Prophet Muhammad pbuh’s response to that social ill was the most empowering. You may want to check out Omar Suleiman’s “Slavery: A Past & Present Tragedy” ==> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR50Lw_16zo&feature=youtu.be&t=30m50s
Unimpressed
March 28, 2017 at 10:22 PM
Boring verbose nonsense. No counterpoints to the actual substance of the article. Let me guess, you’re a “progressive” Muslim?
Lenna
March 29, 2017 at 12:15 AM
My impression of Daniel Haqiqatjou’s work is exactly the opposite. He makes solid arguments against many modernist/progressive “reinterpretations.”
Unimpressed
March 31, 2017 at 2:10 AM
I agree with you! I think Daniel’s doing a great job. I was being critical of Sarah comments, which are just bitter verbose secular screeds. I really don’t any see constructive criticism or counter points to Daniel’s arguments.
Colonized minds are such a waste.
Quazi
March 27, 2017 at 10:19 AM
Very nicely written. Jazakallahu Khair. Just as an example of your first point about moralistic preferences, just today I saw a news where United airlines enforces dress code (no legging) on young women just because they get a heavily discounted price as relatives of United employees.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39401145
Daniel Haqiqatjou
March 27, 2017 at 2:44 PM
Wa iyyakum. Thanks for the reference. Dress codes are ubiquitous but few care to explore what a dress code could possibly be for. The only legitimate reaction to dress codes, as Twitter arguments have aptly demonstrated, is to decry them as categorically invalid, a “tool of patriarchy,” a path to the sexualization of women, etc.
Lenna
March 27, 2017 at 10:03 PM
Salaam,
Excellent article.
I started reading the comments, but couldn’t follow the tangents or see the relevance of some of them. As far as the actual topic pertaining to “free choice,” I found this article extremely helpful. I plan to incorporate these ideas into my own “talking points,” insha’Allah. Thank you.
Majnoon
March 27, 2017 at 10:18 PM
Could you please list the resources you used to write this article? I would like to read up further on it. Thanks
Sarah
March 28, 2017 at 12:30 AM
Salam Ahmad B.
My problem is that saying that “consent is nearly meaningless because every society makes its choices about what to constrict and allows the exercise of choice only within that spectrum” skips over many of the real-life moral concerns that are actually at hand from those who ask about consent. One can problematize consent as the be-all end-all of morality (I’ve read feminists themselves doing this), without denying its existence and implying that it is vacuous and that there is no difference between a choice made under physical duress without the ability to even voice dissent (as was the experience of the woman who wrote at Suhaib Webb), and a choice made under a social contract that gives space for people to voice their will and make arguments for how to best live together without infringing on each other and how to assert the truth from their hearts/wills – otherwise truth itself ends up being in danger of just being whatever the person with the most social power can physically forcibly assert (and Islamic interpretation is not free from this by virtue of having a solid religious text – the endless differences of opinion by past scholars over moral questions are very real).
Imagine how if a religion was physically forced on non-believers (who were told that they have the “free will” to disbelieve “in their hearts”) and maintained by physical violence, it would be nullified in the ability to make an argument for itself as the ultimate truth that is “naturally” recognized by all who hear it – since it would have shown that actually, it would go completely unrecognized if people hadn’t been forced into following it. I’m sure some silver-tongued person can sit at a desk and argue that this is all actually perfectly fine, but is that really what the average Muslim believes? Is it a form of reasoning that would actually work during dawah, or is it just something used to make people feel good about themselves without thinking about the logical endpoints of such arguments? Is it an argument that would convince someone who in their heart asks themselves whether they’re just following their religion because their ancestors imposed it on them?
I think that the phrase “choice is an illusion” is being too breezily thrown around without thinking about how physical coercion affects society – e.g. in the examples of sexual autonomy that I brought up, whereby many people would take Daniel’s arguments to their logical conclusion and argue that consent is nothing but a made up issue of modernity and hence the ISSUES behind consent simply don’t matter. These aren’t abstract questions, even if they seem unrelated – they’re ones playing out on the bodies of fellow Muslim women who’ve actively spoken about their pain. Are women who fall into depression as a result of living lives of forcible marriage, simply “Westernized” and being “infected by ideas of consent”? I’ve noticed that many like to make these arguments when it comes to female social autonomy, but I’ve never in my life seen someone argue that there is no difference between the experiences of being kicked out of your house as opposed to moving out, or leaving university as opposed to being expelled, because “society shapes your choices anyway” and “choice is an illusion”. Consent isn’t just the Western liberal argument about a concept as made by secular humanists – it hits at deeper ethical concerns about violence and the nature of the truth itself.
But I’ve been rambling for a while now – those unconcerned with wider issues of consent won’t see this conversation as relevant here. TLDR; would like to see what this proposed “better idea of consent” actually is and what it means for Muslims’ lives.
(The zina example is of certain past jurists having waived the hadd punishment for men who committed zina with their wive’s slavewomen – justifying this by giving the slave to him.)
Aliya
March 28, 2017 at 1:20 AM
The only way to please Allah is by leading our lives according to how Rasoolallah (pbuh) led it. We have to dress, eat, drink, sleep, wakeup, hold our functions, spend our days and nights in all spheres of life exactly as He (pbuh) did. Rasoolallah (pbuh) is our model no man or man made norms.
Jamilah Alia Baz
March 28, 2017 at 3:51 AM
may Allah guide us,wash away our sins. ameen. Beautifully written.
mohamed
March 28, 2017 at 10:53 AM
Beautiful article. May Allah bless you.
Bayan
March 29, 2017 at 2:43 AM
I live in Palestine and I have personally never met a sister who has been forced to wear hijab. I am sure there are some, but it’s definitely not the majority. Even within one family unit, you will see the mother, sisters, aunts, etc….all wearing hijab in their own style, and even some not wearing hijab. Chapter 10 verse 94 states:
So if you are in doubt about that which We have revealed to you, then ask those who have been reading the Scripture before you. The truth has certainly come to you from your Lord, so never be among the doubters.
Like I said, I live in Palestine and the observant Jewish women and Catholic nuns are all covering their hair and dressing modestly and really it is a sign from Allah.
My dear Muslim sisters it is time for us to wake up! Our lives are so short, there is so much good that can and needs to be done on this planet. 10 year old children in Yemen are in diapers because they are too weak to walk to the bathroom, and meanwhile women are wasting their time and money making sure their shoes match their bags and headscarf, chasing after the latest trend….why????? To get an approving look from people around you?? These people will not benefit you my dear sisters on Judgement Day! What about the hadith that says Muslims are like one body??? Is it just talk? Are you a slave to consumerism and materialism, using your body as a billboard for some corporation?! We have polluted our precious planet because of over producing all this STUFF that we don’t need! Wallahi it is Ghuroor and Lahwa dear sisters!! Allah has made it easy for us, but we insist on the hard way!!! If outward beauty is what keeps a man, then why are there so many divorces in Hollywood?? Allah says in the Quran, Sabran Jamil, “Beautiful Patience”…it is Patience and Perseverance that is true beauty my dear sisters!!
I put on my hijab at 25, it was a stylish hijab, and I would still spend so much time trying to match clothes, and making sure they were loose, too much time shopping trying to find appropriate outfits…then as I approached 40, I just became so sick of the materialism and greed, its never enough! I started wearing a plain black jilbab with a plain white hijab and I have never been happier to leave all that GARBAGE behind me. I have 4 outfits I wear in my home to look decent in front of my husband and relatives.,,,but I have never received so many condescending looks and comments from fellow Muslims who ask me “What happened to you???” “Why are you dressed like that??” “Your husband is going to marry a second wife” hahaha I swear I laugh!!! Wallahi when you do something to gain Allah’s Pleasure, the whole world can spit in my face and I will be the happiest person on this planet!!!
People actually go into debt and ribaa….they max out their credit cards chasing useless STUFF they don’t need!
Sisters!!!! Go out their and make a positive change in this world! Go and find an underprivileged child and help them with their homework, have a food drive or bake sale to help raise money for the poor, go and visit your grandmother, memorize a page of the Quran, volunteer in a senior’s home, clean the Masjid, etc…etc….
Bayan
March 29, 2017 at 8:49 AM
Trust me it is more often that a sister wants to wear hijab but she is too shy or afraid to. When I wore my hijab at 25 my Muslim parents were horrified. They had spent thousands on my university education and they thought hijab would get in the way of a good job. I was living in the West at the time and had an internship in a downtown business district. I realized that even on the hottest days men were expected to wear a business suit and tie and women always wore skirts and heels. A man is professional when he covers and a woman when she uncovers??!! A woman willing to go through the pain of high heels so other people can enjoy looking at her? I will keep my hijab thank you.
Cass
March 31, 2017 at 12:55 AM
This kind of academic debunking is all good and well but does nothing to help women who are physically beaten, forced etc because of hijab. I know y’all just gonna say “but that’s a differnt issue” and it is but it almost never gets addressed by “proper” muslims. Only the progressives address it. I would like an orthodox muslim to address it for once. Of course they’d just say “why would you assume that orthdox muslims condone such things” etc. Well it sure seems like they do. I’ve seen so many people brush off child marriages with “marriage =/= sex” as if that’s what’s actually happening. In my opinion it’s much more useful to write or do things that can actually help people than make this intellectual seeming arguments.
Unimpressed
March 31, 2017 at 2:04 AM
You have no counter arguments to the content of the article so you’ve resorted to distractors instead. So called progressives don’t care about Islam, they’re trying to twist the religion into a western secular mold. You’ve engaged in one strawman after another.
Bayan
April 1, 2017 at 1:41 AM
SMH…it’s sad to see Muslims falling into the OLD tricks of Islam haters. Dear Cass: A woman who is being beaten because of her hijab, will also be beaten because her cooking doesn’t taste right, the kids are too noisy, or she is 5 minutes late coming back from visiting her mother….do you get it? Any man who has the anger and violence in him to beat a woman, doesn’t need “Hijab” as an excuse, he will do it for whatever reason. So please stop with the “beaten and forced to wear hijab” thing. I am 40 years old. I have lived in the USA and now I live in Palestine and I have never met any young lady forced to wear hijab, but I have met many young women who have been forced NOT to wear hijab.
Bayan
April 1, 2017 at 1:56 AM
And you mentioned child marriages as if it is a Muslim problem, no sir, child marriages is a poverty problem. It happens in the Philippines, in China, Russia, Yemen, etc….When a parent feels that the only option for their child to survive is to give them away into marriage, really its something that rips your heart out! My friend works with an aid organization in Yemen and the horror stories coming out of there are something you and I have never seen or heard of. Wallahi we will be asked by Allah, the most High, what did we do to help these desperate people?? They are laying in their own waste, too weak to even go to the bathroom, eating bugs and thorns off of bushes, and we are questioning Islam’s mercy????? We need to question our own mercy, selfishness greed brother!!
Alex
April 16, 2017 at 8:21 PM
If you say that child marriage is not a Muslim problem, then you don’t know your own religion very well. It is true that it’s not a Muslim problem exclusively, but Islam certainly condones it. I mean, wasn’t Prophet Muhammad’s last wife Aisha 6 years old at the time of marriage? It is totally disingenuous to claim that child marriage is not a Muslim issue when the Prophet you all follow is known to have married a young child. It doesn’t take a genius to realize why people in the Muslim world think it’s acceptable to marry children…
Azum
August 30, 2021 at 6:38 AM
JazakAllah hu khairan