by Syed Asad and Sultan Abdulhameed
In the 1950s and 1960s Iran was a rapidly modernizing state. Faith was a private matter, hijab was optional, and women and men could attend college or travel together. With its income from oil, Iran was making rapid economic progress and projected to develop into an economy comparable to that of France by the year 2000. Its neighbor Afghanistan was also modernizing under a secular monarchy. Women could dress as they liked, attend school, own a business and travel freely. But Iran and Afghanistan are very different today. The hijab is mandatory, clerics dictate societal norms, ‘morality’ police patrol the streets, and civil rights are nonexistent. Even with a huge income from oil, poverty is widespread in Iran.
What happened in these countries? They were taken over by fundamentalist regimes who believe it is their duty to enforce their understanding of Sharia law on the population.
The horror of life under such a regime was highlighted recently by the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman in Iran after she was detained by the morality police on September 15, 2022 because she was not wearing a scarf.
Three days after her arrest, Iran’s security forces issued a statement claiming that Mahsa. Amini had suddenly collapsed from a heart attack at the detention center, while receiving educational training on hijab rules. From this statement we can imagine that ‘educational training’ by the morality police consists of inflicting brutal violence.
While Sharia is commonly known as’ Muslim Law’, it is important to understand how it came about. By the second century after Prophet Muhammad, Islam had spread to large regions of Asia and Africa with people of different ethnic backgrounds who spoke different languages. There was a need for guidance on what Islam teaches and how to live like a Muslim. Responding to this need several scholars compiled rules for a Muslim life derived from the Quran and the Hadith. Each scholar included rules according to his judgment and this resulted in the creation of five sects in Islam, each following a different code of Sharia. The scholars who compiled the books of Sharia were products of their time in a peasant society with a tribal structure in which women had no say in how society was organized. There was no system of education.
Sharia rules therefore say what was considered appropriate for that time, that women should be fully covered, cannot travel without a male guardian, and lose custody of children in case of divorce. Sharia says that homosexual men should be executed, a person who committed adultery should be beaten and the hand of a person who steals a dollar worth of goods should be cut-off.
The scholars did not include the many liberating teachings in the Quran and Hadith. For, example the Quranic injection that ‘There shall be no compulsion in matters of religion’ (2:256) is not part of Sharia. The hadith in which the Prophet Muhammad said that ‘Search for knowledge is mandatory for Muslim men and women’ is not included in Sharia, as well as the hadith in which the Prophet says that ‘God does not look at what you are wearing, or how much wealth you have, God looks at what is in your heart’.
Freedom of conscience is mandated by Quran’s teaching that ‘There shall be no compulsion in matters of religion’ , but this is ignored by fundamentalist governments. They suppress freedom of speech and use the rules of Sharia to control the population by creating fear of severe punishment for anyone who does not follow their rule.
The rules of hijab have deprived women of opportunity for even religious education throughout Muslim history. This is because according to the rules a woman can attend only those classes taught by a woman scholar. But religious education is offered in madrassas and mosques by male teachers where women cannot attend. So, with rare exceptions, there have been no female teachers to teach other women. This created a history of continuous disempowerment for Muslim women.
The good news is that harm done by blind enforcement of Sharia rules is recognized in the majority of Muslim countries. Freedom of conscience is honored, more in some places and less in others, and there are opportunities for learning religious as well as secular topics for both men and women. Let us hope that freedom will expand to all parts of the Muslim world so all people can thrive, grow spiritually and be happy.
