by Jerome du Bois
According to Irshad Manji, the Canadian Muslim ijtihadist, we need to separate the Arabs from the Muslims. For example, think about these things:
Why does the Koran have to be in Arabic? Because Arabs have insisted on it. Why pray five times a day toward Mecca? Because it's in Saudi Arabia. Why the hijab and other female coverings? Because it's Arabic tradition.
And there are other examples, such as the odd Arab attitude towards dogs.
From Ms. Manji's excellent book, The Trouble With Islam:
I'll use myself as an example. I grew up afraid of dogs because Islam taught me that dogs are dirty creatures. . . In the hadiths -- the reports of Prophet Muhammad's sayings and doings -- nearly all mentions of black dogs appear alongside degrading references to women and Jews. . .
It comes off as crazy, doesn't it? Yet the fallout is real. Listen to the experience of a UCLA professor, Khaled Abou El Fadl. He knows a Muslim convert who was instructed by a mullah to ditch his pet dog. This convert found that no matter where he left the dog, it would straggle back to his doorstep. The man asked his mullah what to do with the dog who refused to be abandoned.
Starve it, the mullah replied.
When El Fadl heard this merciless story, he was catapulted into rebellion. The Kuwaiti-born, Egyptian-trained scholar of Islamic law pored through original texts and early interpretations to find out if the mullah had any leg to stand on. And that's when he discovered how dogs, women, and Jews have been scurrilously linked as lesser beings, not by Prophet Muhammad, who apparently thought highly enough of dogs to pray in their presence, but by later intellects. Like the construct of Sharia law, the vilification of dogs (and Jews and women) has been a choice. God didn't choose it; a bunch of godfathers did. Plenty of us buy into parts of their system, but we don't have to swallow any of it. El Fadl and his wife, Grace, have adopted three stray canines -- one of them black.
I am wondering if the dogs in whose presence Muhammad prayed were salukis, the oldest purebred dogs in existence and the greatest desert hunters, revered for that ability by Sumerians, Egyptians, Bedouins and other Arabs for thousands of years and down to this day. All other dogs are considered by Arabs scavengers -- "Kelb" -- but the saluki is "El Hor," The Noble.
The saluki predates Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; its continued existence testifies to uncounted generations of human-nonhuman cooperation and patience, for the sake of mutual survival. So when Islam overtook Arabia, the invaluable saluki -- who helped to stave off hunger and starvation -- was made an exception to the Kelb rule.
Women and Jews have not fared as well.
Posted by Jerome at March 19, 2004 07:34 PM | TrackBack