Islamic conference say Homosexuality is ok... say WHAT??

[Lusankya]

I think the main point is not that Indonesia is a large or small part of Islam, sure it has the largest numbers of Muslims in the world. But as a rule the Muslims of Indonesia are not the radical sort and their mosques do not include many if any radical sects bent on bomb chucking.

Dude - haven't you ever heard of the Jemaah Islamiya? They were involved in the 2002 Bali Bombings, the 2004 Australian Embassy bombings and the 2005 Bali Bombings, amongst other things. And yes, they're based in Indonesia.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

Not that the Gulf Arabs have any better claim than Indonesians to being more 'mainstream' muslims. Levantine Arabs, North Africans, Iranians, Turks, and most of the Central Asian ethnicities are all more liberal, or more secular, or more diverse than the classic Western caricature of the conservative Wahabiist waiting with a flask of acid in one hand and a rock in the other ready to stone any women who step out of the Burka, and views relating to homosexuals are as varied as the people themselves, since there is no central authority, or central dogma, or central tenet to Islam, aside from the idea of submission to God. For extreme examples, just look at the Taqwacore movement, or check out the nightlife in Beirut. There is not 'main-stream'.

[Count Chocula]

Help me understand, partly so I can reply intelligently to Patrick Deagan in the "Chocula is Paranoid & Stupid" thread: what is ijtihad? If I'm reading this correctly, it's a secular review of the validity of various passages of the Koran, with real effects on the secular life of the people in a given state. Understand I was raised Catholic, so I'm used to centralized interpretations of holy writ that I can either snarf Coke out my nose upon reading or go "hmmm, okay, that makes sense."

If I'm understanding "ijtihad" correctly, the implication is that the faith of Islam is highly fragmented without a single point to direct ire at contradictions in doctrine, different nominally Muslim states interpret the Koran in different ways (for the most part), some Muslim states throw out the bullshit while others take a literal hard-line view, and the Muslim world is about 500 years behind Christianity in doing the curbstomp on the more violent fundamentalist interpretations of their holy writ.

Am I getting the general gist of the topic, and the role of ijtihad? If not, flame away.


EDIT to Nietzche: are you saying Iran is moderate? Isn't Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the guy who's agitating for Armageddon and the return of the Twelfth Imam, whoever he is? He reads as a radical/fundy Shi'ite, NOT a moderate. His being president of Iran implies that a plurality or majority of Iranians agree with him, as he's hardly kept his beliefs to himself.

[Duckie]

Chocula, why are you participating in a discussion on Islam with patrick degan if you don't understand what Ijtihad is save a really you sound like you're creating by pretending Islam is just Inverse Catholicism with funny words? Doesn't that strike you as you being underequipped with knowledge about the very people you're demonizing as an enemy conspiracy?

In any case, as I understand it, Ijtihad is interpreting the Quran for one's self, rather than using Islamic legal jurisdiction. Think of it as Judicial Activism, but for a single person's reading of the rules. Exercising Ijtihad requires you know a lot about Islam- no Muslim considers it valid if you suddenly decide pork-eating is okay and can't back up your opinion. The two main sects also have different opinions on it- one holds that Islamic law is basically complete and while scholars can reinterpret things, the common man should just have faith and trust the judgement of scholars since the meaning of the text has been revealed by wise scholars and jurists long ago. The other still considers Ijtihad valid in certain situations. The Sufis especially stress Ijtihad as a component of enlightenment, since one must understand the meaning embedded in the text rather than what the texts say themselves. Ijtihad tends to be more common in moderate Islam, naturally, compared to Wahabbism or the Taliban.

[Darth Yan]

I read somewhere that the ottomon empire struck down executing apostates in 1844 on pretty much the exact same grounds.

[Serafine666]

I suppose it IS a sign of hope that the moderate Muslims got together and issued an opinion that homosexuality is compatible with Islam. However, moderate in terms of Islam is an exceptionally tiny group without any particular impact who are already sympathetic to social liberalism's values; in essence, this is a declaration of principle from those that already believed rather than a conversion of those that did not. The give-away is

"Like gender bias or patriarchy, heterogeneity bias is socially constructed. It would be totally different if the ruling group was homosexuals," she said.

You could lift this exact phrasing directly out of a book by bell hooks; talking about "gender bias" and "patriarchy" that is "socially constructed" is a hallmark of modern feminist thought.

Sadly, (and I genuinely regret this) among those that have influence in Islam, your wait for such good news may take a very long time.

[xerex]

Understand I was raised Catholic, so I'm used to centralized interpretations of holy writ that I can either snarf Coke out my nose upon reading or go "hmmm, okay, that makes sense."

If I'm understanding "ijtihad" correctly, the implication is that the faith of Islam is highly fragmented without a single point to direct ire at contradictions in doctrine, different nominally Muslim states interpret the Koran in different ways (for the most part), some Muslim states throw out the bullshit while others take a literal hard-line view,

I dont know about itjihad specifically but that second paragraph is absolutely correct. Islam is highly fragmented. not only between Sunni and Shia but within those groups. Google Shafi, Maliki, Hanbali, Hanafi and you'll get an idea .

this point cannot be stressed enough but there is NO central Church in Islam.

[Simon_Jester]

Help me understand, partly so I can reply intelligently to Patrick Deagan in the "Chocula is Paranoid & Stupid" thread: what is ijtihad?

Itjihad, explained informally, to the best of my ability:
Once upon a time, there was a guy named Muhammed who said a bunch of weird mystical stuff, led a ragtag bunch of refugees to wealth and power, and was otherwise pretty badass and philosophical. Then he unexpectedly keeled over dead.

His followers reacted accordingly: "Fuck, now what do we do?" They were used to being a community led by a prophet, and they couldn't exactly just nominate a new prophet, because Allah wasn't interested in giving them one. So, one after another, several of Muhammed's closest followers became the new chief of the Muslim community. Over the next few decades, this "community" expanded to imperial proportions, and the Muslims found that they needed an actual legal system rather than just bringing all their disputes to the designated chief of the community (the caliph).

This became a problem under the reign of the Caliph Omar. So Omar decided that the smart thing to do would be to gather up everything Muhammed had ever said that anyone ever wrote down, and collect it into a book. That would at least be a good place to start writing a legal system, because Muhammed was legendary for making fair judgements and for being divinely guided.*

*This was only about 10 years or so after Muhammed died.
_________

Now, Omar was canny enough to realize that not everything anyone remembered Muhammed saying would be accurate. People forget over time, and sometimes they actively make shit up. So he invented what one might call a primitive form of the peer review process. He started out with a massive collection of everything the Prophet ever said, written down on whatever had been handy at the time: parchment, rocks, leaves, hunks of wood, you get the idea.

Then he had everyone who had known the Prophet personally go over this huge collection of Muhammed quotations, trying to cross-reference them. The ones that many people could vouch for ("Yes, he said that one third of a man's inheritance should be guaranteed for his widow") were kept. The ones that could not be vouched for ("No, Achmed the date merchant is the only guy who remembers him saying that everyone should buy dates") were thrown out, set on fire, or both.

When the dust settled, Omar had a finalized set of Muhammed quotations. The "best" (most canonical, if you will) were set down as the Koran. Nobody was allowed to modify the Koran, because it was the canonical collection of Muhammed quotations.

But even with the Koran finished, he had a large number of not-quite-so-canonical Muhammed quotations, with more trickling in all the time. Some of them were obvious crap (like the one about buying dates), but others were too convincing to ignore casually. The ones that were too good to ignore, but that did not make it into the Koran, became known as the hadith. They're sort of the "expanded universe" of Islam.
_______

Now, zoom forward a century. After a few civil wars in the Islamic world, the caliphs are now for all practical purposes just another kind of emperor, rather than the weird community organizer/field marshal/master theologian combination that the early caliphs were. There is a large community of dedicated scholars of Islamic law (funded by the caliphs). If you want to know what the Muslim way of doing things is (aside from the obvious ones of Mom and pomegranate pie), you go to these scholars. Here is what they will do, in order:

1) Look in the Koran.
If the Koran tells you what to do, it's as simple as that, you know what to do. Ask an imam "how much money should I leave my wife in my will?" and he will give you a straight answer, because that's in the Koran. Possibly while looking at you like you're a moron for not already knowing this.
2) Look in the hadith.
The hadith aren't as good as the Koran, but they're still good. Unfortunately, there were (and are) a ton of hadith, and they were not well organized until several centuries later, so finding a hadith that actually had something to do with your problem was like searching for a needle in a haystack.
3) If neither the Koran nor the hadith have anything to say about your situation, reason by analogy.
X is like Y, the Koran says that we should do Z in situation Y, therefore we should do something like Z in situation X. This kind of thing dates back to the time of Omar: he was asked what the punishment for public drunkenness should be, and couldn't remember anything Muhammed said about it. So he thought "what does being drunk make you do that is wrong?" and applied the punishment for that to drunkenness in general. The punishments were stiff enough that it became a longstanding Muslim tradition not to drink alcohol at all.

Finally, if none of this worked- if you could not find anything in the Koran or hadith that was at all relevant to your situation, even by analogy, your imam would have to go to:
4) Make shit up.
In this case, the imam honestly has to make the decision themselves, guided so far as possible by Muslim-style ethics, but with no specific guidance from any part of the sacred texts.

This is itjihad.

===========

Now, it's obvious why, in the Muslim frame of reference, (4) is less authoritative than (1) through (3). For cases (1) through (3), you can set up a chain of reasoning that runs directly back to the Prophet. It is still possible that other imams reviewing your work will say "no, you're an idiot, that's not what the text means," in which case you wind up with egg on your face and no one will listen to you anymore... but at least they will accept that your premises are sound. That places your actions on a much more secure footing.

Whereas with (4), everything is up in the air. Your reasoning is far more open to attack, and there's no obvious way to prove that your reasoning is better than that of a rival imam. Since there is no formal hierarchy of imams (except for the massive pain in the ass of becoming an accredited imam in the first place), (4) can obviously lead to trouble.

So one of the great efforts of the religious scholars in the first centuries after Muhammed was to try to get as much of the world as possible into categories (1) through (3). Partly, this meant coming up with systematic use of analogies for (3). It also meant obsessively cataloging all the hadith, so that you could have big encyclopedias where you flip to a topic (say, "taxes" or "divorce") and find ALL the hadith relevant to that topic, with commentary by various learned scholars, including a sort of bibliography of historical research into the authenticity of the hadith and the authority of the commentators.

After this had been going on for a few centuries, the Muslim scholars were pretty much finished with the job of compiling all the hadith. At this point, itjihad became less popular, because it was increasingly not necessary. You could no longer plead "but I can't find a hadith that covers this!" because it was right there in the encyclopedia.

At this point, there was a rousing debate between the rationalists (who thought that itjihad had its place even after all the hadith were fully compiled) and the traditionalists (who thought that the Koran and hadith were enough guidance for anyone, and that further itjihad was just a stupidly complicated way of introducing random errors into the Muslim legal system). The traditionalists won, but the rationalists never quite gave up... which is where we come to the current situation.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

EDIT to Nietzche: are you saying Iran is moderate? Isn't Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the guy who's agitating for Armageddon and the return of the Twelfth Imam, whoever he is? He reads as a radical/fundy Shi'ite, NOT a moderate. His being president of Iran implies that a plurality or majority of Iranians agree with him, as he's hardly kept his beliefs to himself.

First, Ahmadinejad is an outlier, he's never 'agitated for Armageddon', his views on Mahdist ideas are... Unclear at best, and yes, he's a fundy. Iranians, by and large, are not. Traditional Arab culture - with its strongly-defined hierarchy, gender roles, and cultural values of honour and modesty - don't fit with traditional Persian culture, nor the culture of the youth of today. Mahmoud was elected - once - on the basis of his strong anti-American stance at a time when America was seen as a huge and lumbering monster, his (failed) promises to restore the economy, and his appeal as a 'working class man' and veteran which appealed to the lower class. Basically, he was a Populist, and he was never that popular to begin with, let alone now. Most Iranians have a pretty liberal religiously. In the Eighties and nineties, lots of events - reactions to Western imperialism, the successful revolution, the war with Iraq, the baby boom - combined to bring about a great Religious revival, with its values largely imported from Arabia, but in the next couple generations I expect things to return to normality (read as: decadence).

To Duckie: What you just said is pretty much true, except - and I'm only saying this to make it clear, since I think you know this - that the tradition of Itjihad is not 'outside' of Islamic legislation, but is rather an important part of it. The other part, Taqlid, is what you said, following tradition and the legal authorities on matters. An easy analogy is that Taqlid is basically the same as Common Law, following and revising precedent. However, in the same way as judges often trash precedent to make way for modernity - like with civil rights, gay marriage, and women's suffrage - while usually using thin justifications to argue that their overturning of precedent is based on true interpretation of their country's founding document or constitution, Itjihad is overturning subservience to precedent to make your own interpretation, ostensibly by rationally reviewing the Hadith without the cultural bias and ingrained prejudices of those who came before.

For a Catholic, think about the way the Pope can overturn Catholic Dogma when he thinks it appropriate: he, as the successor to Saint Peter, with a direct hotline to the Man Upstairs, has a better personal understanding of his religion than those popes and bishops who came before. It's kind of like that in Islam, except that, technically, anyone can be like the Pope. However, if Yusuf Sixpack just up and decides that there is no God in Islam, no one will listen to him or believe that he's really faithful unless he actually knows what the fuck he's talking about and can back it up. Since Islamic scholarshi[ isn't considered a 'special' field, it's just like other aspects of Academia. Technically, you don't need a degree to get published in a Scientific or Historical or Legal journal, but you do need 'cred' among your peers. You can represent yourself in court even if you're not a lawyer, but you'll be laughed out of court unless you actually know how to do law. That's how Islamic scholarship and Law works. It's basically the same as the Rabbinical tradition in Judaism. It's an informal process.

Hopefully some of that made sense.

[hongi]

are you saying Iran is moderate?

Iran is moderate. Or at least, the people are. The government has its hardliners.

[hongi]

The traditionalists won, but the rationalists never quite gave up... which is where we come to the current situation.

Sorry for the semi-necroing, but I just read through this thread a bit more carefully and I want to say something.

The Salafis, the puritanical ones (of which Wahhabis are among their number) are not the traditionalists. They are emphatically the 'Protestants' of Islam, because they are the ones who proclaim ijtihad is open to all. The traditionalists basically think that the period of seeking out the answers for yourself are over and done with. The Salafis are waging a historic, if relatively unseen, battle against the orthodoxy by saying that hey, Yusaf Schmoe can be as great an Islamic scholar as the revered medieval scholars.

It's a mark of just how little Western pundits understand Islam that they incorrectly conflate the two. And it's a little ironic that those who call for the door to ijtihad to be reopened don't realise that the new fundamentalists are doing just that.