Women who taught their husbands

(Book Review)

There are not many contemporary books that can be read without reservations, and which give one good value for the time invested in reading them.

However, this is one book with equal enthusiasm to Muslim and non-Muslim readers – and most of all to Islamophobes who perpetuate the myth of how ‘Islam subjugates Muslim women’ and keeps them ‘oppressed and ignorant.’ This brief history of six Muslim women scholars from the ‘Dark Ages’ – the period of history notorious for the ignorance, superstition and intellectual debilitation that permeated most of the ‘civilized world’ – is a definitive negation of the aggressive propaganda.

The author, who goes by the pen-name ‘Bint-us-Sabeel’ says in the introduction: ‘’I can almost feel the shock when your eyes fell upon the title: ‘Muslim Women Who Taught Their Husbands’!? This shock most probably stems from the sad state of affairs many Muslims find themselves in today.

Muslim women today may not teach their husbands because:

§ They don’t have that sort of knowledge to teach their husbands, full stop.

§ The husband does not want to learn from his wife (“how embarrassing my wife teaching me!”)

§ One or both parties are just too busy to take time out to sit together and learn the Deen of Allah.

§ One or both parties have no or little interest in studying Islam.

“Yet the Muslims of yesterday were very different from the Muslims of today. […] the scholars of the past were such that they would travel for months in pursuit of just one Hadith of the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him). For such men, having a scholar as a wife was one of the greatest blessings in this world and a source of respect and honor.”

The very first scholar mentioned in the book, Fatimah Bint Al-Mundhir Bin Al-Zubayr Bin Al-‘Awwam, granddaughter of Asma Bint Abi Bakr, illustrates this point.

A prominent Ta’biyah (from the generation succeeding the Prophet’s Companions) and jurist, she was married to her cousin, Hisham Bin ‘Urwah Bin Al-Zubayr. Interestingly, Fatimah learnt more from Asma Bint Abi Bakr than her cousin, and so, he would memorize narrations from his wife, before passing them on to his students who included scholars like Imam Abu Hanifah, Imam Malik, Shu’bah and Sufyan Ath-Thawri. Thus, there is a whole line of scholars who learnt Ahadith which are included in Sahih Al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim on her authority, led by her own husband.

The author writes at the end of Fatimah’s story: “For some of the leading scholars of Islam to record these Ahadith where women have narrated the Hadith and a man has narrated from his wife, holds great lessons for those who claim that the scholars of Islam were misogynists and androcentric.”

Among other delightful vignettes, the book mentions how the Mahr for one of the women scholars was a book of commentary!

The story goes that the scholar Muhammad Bin Ahmad Bin Abu Ahmad ‘Ala-Al-Din Al-Samarqandi, author of ‘Tuhfat Al-Fuqaha’ , had a daughter named Fatimah, who was so knowledgeable that she would issue fatwas (religious edicts and verdicts) along with her father. One of her father’s students, ‘Alaa Al-Din Abu Bakr bin Mas’ud Al-Kasaani wrote a commentary on ‘Tuhfat Al-Fuqaha’ called ‘Bada’i` Al-Sana’i`’, which made such an impression on the Sheikh that he accepted the book as dowry for his daughter – when he had earlier refused a proposal for her from the kings of Byzantium!

One noteworthy feature of the lives of these women scholars is the lack of domestic strife and “ego problems” between them and their spouses – although some of them were more knowledgeable than their husbands and even corrected them on occasion.

Maryam Bint Jahsh, a scholar of classical Arabic helped her husband, the Yemeni scholar Jamal Al-Deen ‘Ali Bin Abee’l-Fawaris Al-Hamdani resolve a debate with members of the Murji’ sect; while Al-Mutahhar Bin Muhammad who was married to the famous Mujtahidah Fatimah Bint Yahya used to consult her on juristic matters while she sat behind a curtain, such that when he came up with the answer, his students would say: ‘This is not from you. This is from behind the curtain!’

The book concludes with an account of Amat Al-Ghafoor Bint Ishaaq Al-Dihlawi, a Muhaddithah from Delhi, India, who helped her husband so that ‘’whenever he faced any difficulty in Hadith or Fiqh, he benefited from her.’’

The husband of Sa’eed Bint Al-Musayyib’s daughter, who brought ‘the knowledge of Sa’eed’ to her husband and taught him right from the first day of her marriage, famously praised his wife: “She was among the most beautiful people, and most expert of those who know the Book of Allah by heart, and most knowledgeable of the Sunnah of the Prophet (peace be upon him) and most aware of the right of the husband.”

What is it that stops us from raising women like these, who will be assets to their families and communities and continue to benefit the cause of Islam for centuries?

The book can be downloaded in pdf format at www.idealmuslimah.com

Permission is granted to circulate among private individuals and groups, to post on Internet sites and to publish in full text and subject title in not-for-profit publications.

Obama In Cairo: A New Face For Imperialism

By Patrick Martin

The speech delivered by US President Barack Obama in Cairo yesterday was riddled with contradictions. He declared his opposition to the “killing of innocent men, women, and children,” but defended the ongoing US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the US proxy war in Pakistan, while remaining silent on the most recent Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. These wars have killed at least one million Iraqis and tens of thousands in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Palestinian territories.

Obama declared his support for democracy, human rights and women’s rights, after two days of meetings with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, two of the most notorious tyrants in the Middle East. He said nothing in his speech about the complete absence of democratic rights in Saudi Arabia, or about the ongoing repression under Mubarak’s military dictatorship. In the days before the US president’s arrival at Al-Azhar University, the campus was raided by Egyptian secret police who detained more than 200 foreign students. Before leaving on his Mideast trip, Obama praised Mubarak as a “steadfast ally.”

While posturing as the advocate of universal peace and understanding, Obama diplomatically omitted any reference to his order to escalate the war in Afghanistan with the dispatch of an additional 17,000 US troops. And he tacitly embraced the policy of his predecessor in Iraq, declaring, “I believe the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein.” He even seemed to hedge on the withdrawal deadline of December 2011 negotiated by the Bush administration, which he described as a pledge “to remove all our troops from Iraq by 2012.”

Obama rejected the charge that America is “a self-interested empire”—a perfectly apt characterization—and denied that the United States was seeking bases, territory or access to natural resources in the Muslim world. He claimed that the war in Afghanistan was a “war of necessity” provoked by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This is the same argument made by the Bush-Cheney administration at the time, which deliberately conceals the real material interests at stake. The war in Afghanistan is part of the drive by US imperialism to dominate the world’s two most important sources of oil and gas, the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Basin.

There was of course a distinct shift in the rhetorical tone from the bullying “you’re either with or against us” of George W. Bush to the reassuring “we’re all in this together” of Obama. But as several commentators noted (the New Republic compared the speech line-for-line to that given by Bush to the United Nations on September 16, 2006), if you turned off the picture and the sound and simply read the prepared text, the words are very similar to speeches delivered by Bush, Condoleezza Rice and other officials of the previous administration.

The vague and flowery rhetoric, the verbal tributes to Islamic culture and the equal rights of nations, constitute an adjustment of the language being used to cloak the policy of US imperialism, not a change in substance. Obama made not a single concrete proposal to redress the grievances of the oppressed peoples of the Middle East. That is because the fundamental source of this oppression is the profit system and the domination of the world by imperialism, of which American imperialism is the most ruthless.

Obama made one passing reference to colonialism, and to the US role in the overthrow of the democratically elected Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953. But in his litany of “sources of tension” in the region, he offered the same checklist as his predecessor, with the first place given to “violent extremism”, Obama’s rhetorical substitute for Bush’s “terrorism.”

The reaction to the Obama speech in the American media was across-the-board enthusiasm. Liberal David Corn of Mother Jones magazine said Obama’s great advantages were “his personal history, his non-Bushness, his recognition of US errors, his willingness to at least talk as if he wants to be an honest broker in the Mideast.”

Michael Crowley wrote in the pro-war liberal magazine New Republic, “to see him unfold his biography, to cut such an unfamiliar profile to the world, is to appreciate how much America will benefit from presenting this new face to the world.”

Perhaps most revealing was the comment by Max Boot, a neoconservative arch-defender of the war in Iraq, who wrote: “I thought he did a more effective job of making America’s case to the Muslim world. No question: He is a more effective salesman than his predecessor was.”

In his speech in Cairo, Obama was playing the role for which he was drafted and promoted by a decisive section of the US financial elite and the military and foreign policy apparatus. This role is to provide a new face for US imperialism as part of a shift in the tactics, but not the strategy, of Washington’s drive for world domination.

Nearly two years ago, former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski gave his public backing to the presidential candidacy of a still-obscure senator from Illinois, holding out the prospect that as an African-American with family ties to the Muslim world, Obama would improve the worldwide image of the United States.

Brzezinski was the leading hawk in the administration of Democrat Jimmy Carter and helped instigate the political upheavals in Afghanistan in the hopes of inciting a Soviet invasion that would trap the Moscow bureaucracy in a Vietnam-style quagmire. He has remained steadily focused on what he calls the “great chessboard” of Eurasia, and particularly on oil-rich Central Asia, where a struggle for influence now rages between the United States, Russia, China and Iran.

According to Brzezinski in August 2007, Obama “recognizes that the challenge is a new face, a new sense of direction, a new definition of America’s role in the world… Obama is clearly more effective and has the upper hand. He has a sense of what is historically relevant and what is needed from the United States in relationship to the world.”

Brzezinski, a ruthless defender of the interests of US imperialism, has issuing warnings to the American ruling elite of the danger of what he calls the “global political awakening.”

In one particularly pointed comment, he told the German magazine Der Spiegel, only months before he endorsed Obama, that the vast majority of humanity “will no longer tolerate the enormous disparities in the human condition. That could well be the collective danger we will have to face in the next decades.”

To call it by its right name, what the more perceptive elements in the US ruling class fear is world revolution. The effort to prevent such a social upheaval is what impelled them to install Obama in the White House and what set him on his pilgrimage to Cairo.

http://www.countercurrents.org/martin050609.htm

 Secularism and social justice are not mere election slogans, but they remained the soul and ideology of the Congress

                                                                                         -Sonia Gandhi

The Congress party presents it’s secular credentials every now and then; however the Nehru-Gandhi party has failed to prove itself as a flag bearer of actual secularism, even in the Indian context of the word.

Argument # 1

The Bhartiya Janata Party Demolished the Babri Masjid.

As you have recently reminded us, the Union Govt. in Delhi has all the rights to intervene , if the state government fails to protect the civillians.

Which party was at the Centre at the time of demolition of the Babri structure? P.V.Narasimha Rao, who was, I believe from the Congress Party.

But, they say, Babri never happened in Delhi. Ah! Here is what all you could have done:

1. You could have, acted, on the information provided by the Intelligence agencies. 

http://www.expressindia.com/news/fullstory.php?newsid=90109

2. You could have invoked the president’s rule; as suggested.

3. What was the Fifth Schedule for? You didn’t even threaten the state government. The assurances of L.K.Advani were farcial, you know it, we know it, even Rao knew it.

Argument # 2

We guaranteed Secularism and Socialism by amending the constitution.

May we remind you that the 42nd Amendment was passed at a time when opposition leaders were being baked in tihar; the basic structure of the constitution can be changed (violated) only by a dictator – Ah! now I remember, it was a dictator.

Argument # 3

If you don’t vote us; the Communal party will come in power.

Pray tell me, how is it going to make any difference at all?

You were in power from the period 1947-1990s. All the major riots that occured, happened to be during this time alone. Care to explain?

The fact that regional parties are stronger than the two principal parties, in their states, is proof enough of your secularism.

Argument # 4

We’ve apologised to the Sikh community, we even made one of them as the head of our government!

Narendra Modi, in 2024, might as well apologise for the Godhra carnage, he may apologise to every Muslim. Twenty years hence, no one would care about the orphaned, burnt and raped Gujaratis.

Argument # 5

We appointed the Sacchar Commission.

You might have appointed any commission for any community, the questions is, how many Muslims have benefited? The number of Muslims in the armed forces, intelligence agencies and civil services is MUCH below average – in the 40 years that you have ruled, Muslims have neither benefited from either your policies nor your commissions.

Argument # 6

Religion based reservations.

Reservations for castes or poor or whoever are misplaced. We all know this! Why appease when you know the vote bank is no more yours?

Argument # 7

The Shiv Sena went on a rampage in Mumbai, we didn’t.

The Srikrishna Commission has submitted it’s findings, we are still waiting for ACTION on the culprits.

We’re waiting for Jagdish Tytler to be sacked, how long is it going to be?

Argument # 8

The Bajrang Dal is a part of the Sangh Parivar, we abhor the Sangh Parivar.

Do you remember Orissa 2008? How can you forget!

You had that one golden opportunity to ban the Bajrang Dal, just like you banned the Students Islamic Movement India. What stopped you?

You had ample choice to ban  HJM, BD, VHP, SRS, SS, MNS – all of them, through a simple piece of legislation! Ah! but why would you? How are you any different from the party with a difference?

__________

It is time that the average citizen, regardless of his religion see through the two “national parties” which have played havoc in our lives for a long time.

The regional parties, viz., TDP, AIADMK, AGP, BJD, JD(U) and the BSP have, in their respective states acted as better lesser evils than the BJP or the Congress. 

They’ve spoken your language, they’ve made sure of better development and they’ve been much more tolerant towards religion than the Congress or the BJP.

The Congress Party is run by one family which ironically swears by democracy!

It is, therefore my advice that we choose Independent candidates or candidates of smaller parties which have educated, sensible people as candidates. In absence of either, it is best we choose the regional parties.

—————–

References:

—————

1. The Gujarat Riots

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_violence

2. Bombay 1992-93 riots

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbai_riots

3. Srikrishna Commission’s findings.

http://www.sabrang.com/srikrish/sri%20main.htm

4. The Babri Demolition

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babri_Mosque

4. Pogrom of 1984

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Anti-Sikh_Riots

5. Kandhamal 2008

http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/sep/01mob.htm

6. The Constitution’s Fifth Schedule

There are reports that the Congress may also push for invocation of the Constitution’s Fifth Schedule to control the violence in Orissa. The Fifth Schedule gives extensive rights to the State Governor in matters relating to scheduled areas and scheduled tribes.

http://news.indiamart.com/news-analysis/riot-hit-kandhamal-r-19774.html

 

 

 

By G. F. Haddad

If a fly falls into one of your containers [of food or drink], immerse it completely before removing it, for under one of its wings there is venom and under another there is (its) antidote.

And it protects itself with the wing that carries the disease, so immerse it completely.

Sa`id ibn Khalid said: I went in to see Abu Salamah. He brought us some butter and date pastry. A fly fell into the dish. Abu Salamah began to submerge it with his finger. I said, “Uncle! What are you doing?” He said, “Truly, Abu Sa`id Al-Khudri told me that the Messenger of Allah said,‘In one of the fly’s two wings there is poison and in another, its antidote. If it falls into food, submerge it in it; for it sends the poison first and keeps the cure last.’”

Thumamah said: We were with Anas and a fly fell into a vessel. Anas motioned with his hand and immersed it three times then said “Bismillah” (in the name of Allah) and he said that truly, thus did the Messenger of Allah order them to do.

I found nothing to pinpoint the wing that carries the antidote but one of the scholars said he observed that the fly protects itself with its left wing so it can be deduced that the right one is the one with the antidote.

The flies were given some of the cultured microbes for certain diseases. After some time the germs died and no trace was left of them while a germ-devouring substance formed in the flies bacteriophages. If a saline solution were to be obtained from these flies it would contain bacteriophages able to suppress four kinds of disease-inducing germs and to benefit immunity against four other kinds.

Phage Therapy Making a Comeback

U.S. Designs on Pakistan

By AYESHA IJAZ KHAN

A pattern is beginning to emerge.  Every time the Pakistani military and local tribal forces in Pakistan’s north form a successful alliance in the fight against terrorism, US forces launch offensives striking civilians in the area, thereby undermining the Pakistan military’s credibility vis a vis its own population and sabotaging the effectiveness of the joint strategy to combat terrorism in the region.

As a result, anti-Americanism in Pakistan has reached record highs and even those Pakistanis who are left-leaning and actively lobbying for an end to the brutality of terrorism are concluding that America’s primary interest lies in destabilizing Pakistan and not in putting an end to terrorism.  This should be worrying for a nation that has few friends left in the Muslim world and needs Pakistan’s cooperation desperately if it is to maintain its supply routes in Afghanistan.

Following the recent attacks in North Waziristan, Pakistan’s Ary TV aired a short documentary characterizing the United States as an aggressor nation that has not hesitated to maim and kill civilians in various parts of the world, whether it was in Southeast Asia, Latin America, or more recently, the Middle East and South Asia.  Let’s just say that it has become almost impossible for the United States to win the battle for hearts and minds as a result of its recent actions.

The United States has struck civilians on the pretext that tribes from Pakistan’s side of the border have made incursions into Afghanistan and targeted NATO/ISAF forces.  The reality is that both American forces and strategy have failed miserably in Afghanistan and the Karzai government struggles, even after six years, to establish credibility with the Afghans or extend its writ beyond Kabul.  The feeling in Pakistan is that the US government needs a scapegoat to dump its incompetence on and Pakistan is just that.  The fact that this is election year in the US manifests the sheer desperation of the American forces in launching ground offensives based, at best, on bad intelligence, and at worst, on bad intentions, within Pakistan’s territory, threatening the nuclear-armed state’s sovereignty and killing several women and children. 

The surprise attack which prompted a stern statement from General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff, condemning US actions as beyond the scope of the clearly defined terms of engagement and warning that further attacks of this sort will not be tolerated was the first of its kind and came on the heels of a successful mobilization of awakening forces in Bajaur, a previous hotbed, where the government had partnered with the Salarzai tribe against Taliban operatives and managed to achieve peace so that displaced persons from the area were able to return to their homes.  The US attacks changed all that.  The tribes have greater reason to sympathize with the Taliban as siding with the government does not appear to ensure tranquillity.

While a couple of months ago, several stories in the Pakistani press talked about formulating a “made in Pakistan terrorism policy” and fed up with suicide attacks and violence, Pakistanis were refusing to empathize with the cause of the Taliban, today there is near consensus on the idea that American presence is dangerously destabilizing for the region and must be expelled at all cost.  It is once again being viewed as “America’s war”; not “our war”.

Adding injury to insult, it is not just the case that America is focused on eliminating Al-Qaeeda supporters from the region, it is also a complicated mess that it has entangled itself in trying to ensure that it does that.  In doing so, America has abandoned all democratic norms and values that it claims to want to export.  In fact, it has gone further than that.  It has actively worked to create obstacles in the way of civilian secular Pakistani movements who had exhibited great courage and valour in supporting the Chief Justice and other members of the superior judiciary ousted by General Musharraf last Novemeber.  While the lawyers’ movement in Pakistan has, at great peril, fought for the introduction of checks and balances, constitutional supremacy and rule of law so that Pakistan can call itself a well-functioning democracy, America’s policy has been one of trying to make friends with a select few, whether dictators like Musharraf or corrupt politicians like Asif Zardari, so that it can have blind continuity of a policy that is clearly not working on the Pak-Afghan border.  Pakistanis are therefore not wrong in concluding that America does not have the people’s interests at heart.

Last month, I was in New York and when I saw McCain and Obama questioned by Pastor Rick Warren, I was heartened at least by Obama’s response to:  Does evil exist and what should we do about it?  Obama was reasonable enough to comment that in confronting evil America must be mindful that it does not employ evil ways because then it will lose the moral high ground.  This is already a fait accompli in the case of American policy in Pakistan and Afghanistan.  It will take a long time to repair it.

Yet it is lamentable that even left-wing groups in America are talking about taking the war to Afghanistan.  Guess what?  The war is already in Afghanistan and its not working!  It was only when I switched the television on at 12:30 am on a weeknight (I was probably the only one watching) that I heard Bill Maher say, “All wars are bad.  Why do we think Afghanistan would be a good war?”  Such discussions cannot only be held at odd hours of the night or on the fringes of society.  Mainstream media has a responsibility to cover such stories front and centre.

America has some desperate soul-searching to do.  There is a pretty good reason why anti-Americanism has grown in leaps and bounds in the Bush years.  It will take a lot to undo it.  The American media is not doing its people any favours by not showing the effects of American raids on civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  Having lived in America for a few years myself, I do believe that if Americans were better informed, they would not let their government make the mistakes it makes and trample on the lives of people abroad in the manner that it does.  America must ask itself:  is it possible after all to mess up so much, destroy so many lives, and not expect pay back?     

Ayesha Ijaz Khan is a London-based lawyer turned political commentator.  She can be contacted via her websitewww.ayeshaijazkhan.com