Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  Sadly, what she says is true. In Egypt, people rely on religious Muslim judges to decide contractual disputes and inheritance issues. When the military government wanted to condemn more than five hundred political prisoners to death—many of them members of the Muslim Brotherhood—it still needed a sharia court to sign off on the sentence.

  At the other end of the spectrum are groups such as Boko Haram and IS, which believe they are reviving sharia as it was enforced by Muhammad and the first generation of his followers. When they stone, amputate, crucify, sell into slavery, or force religious conversions, they claim to be following the pure sharia code, and they can and do cite lines from it to justify their actions.

  Global Sharia

  “I did not kill! I did not kill!” a woman shrieks as Saudi police wrap her head with a black scarf.

  “Praise God,” a Saudi executioner dressed in white tells her.

  He lifts his long silver sword and strikes her neck—a gasp, then she falls silent.

  Twice more the hangman hacks at her neck, before stepping away to carefully wipe the blade.

  Ambulance workers immediately start placing the woman’s remains on a stretcher as charges against her are hurriedly read out over a loudspeaker in the Muslim holy city of Mecca.

  She was accused of raping her seven-year-old stepdaughter with a broomstick and beating her to death. “A royal decree was issued to carry out the sharia law, in accordance with what is right,” the statement says.7

  It is a remarkable fact that, after Friday prayers in Saudi Arabia, many men flock to the central squares to watch the implementation of Islamic justice: the cutting off of robbers’ hands, the stoning of adulterers, and the beheading of murderers, apostates, and other convicted criminals.

  Can anyone today imagine a congregation of Catholics leaving mass or Baptists leaving church or Jews leaving synagogue to go and spectate at a lethal injection or an electrocution? Though the death penalty is still inflicted in some U.S. states, we in the West have come very far since the days when public executions were the norm and religious offenses were punishable by death. Far from diminishing, this legal divide between Islam and the West is growing wider and deeper, and is increasingly global in scope.

  When eighteen Palestinians in Gaza were shot dead in the summer of 2014 for allegedly collaborating with Israel, the immediate justification proffered was that these men had been found guilty by “local courts, supported by religious clerics.” (Palestinian law makes collaborating with Israel a crime punishable by death, although the Palestinian president must give his approval before the sentence is carried out.) In other words, they had been tried and convicted under some version of the sharia system. And while human rights activists protested against the killings, there was no challenge to the underlying religious justification, or the role of Muslim clerics in approving these sentences.

  In Pakistan, blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad is punishable by death.8 More than thirty countries around the world have similar antiblasphemy laws, including some Christian ones. But it is in Muslim countries that such laws are enforced. In 2014, a Pakistani court sentenced a twenty-six-year-old Christian man to death on the ground that he had spoken ill of the Prophet. He argued that he was merely the target of fabricated accusations made by disgruntled local businessmen seeking to build an industrial center in his neighborhood. When his sentence was handed down, thirty-three other Pakistanis were already on death row for the crime of blasphemy.

  What is more, with or without a formal court verdict, vigilantes are happy to carry out their own sentences. Again in Pakistan, a lawyer defending a university professor against blasphemy charges was shot and killed; in the southern city of Bahawalpur, after police had taken an alleged blasphemer into custody, a mob broke into the station, dragged the man into the street, and burned him alive as the law enforcement officers watched.

  Such atrocities also occur in the supposedly more moderate nations of Southeast Asia. In the Indonesian province of Aceh, when a twenty-five-year-old widow was found with a forty-year-old married man, a group of eight local males beat the man, gang-raped the woman, and doused them both with sewage, before turning them over to the local sharia authorities. Then the sharia police handed down their own sentence: public caning for both the man and the woman for the crime of alleged adultery. In some ways, they got off relatively lightly; previously, the punishment for their crime had been death by stoning.9

  It is of course tempting for the Western reader to assume that these are antiquated practices that, like witch-burning in Massachusetts, will eventually die out. But the trend in the Muslim world is in the other direction. In supposedly advanced Brunei, the ruling sultan is currently phasing in an “updated” body of sharia criminal law, making adultery punishable by stoning, theft punishable by amputation, and homosexual intercourse punishable by death. In Malaysia, which recognizes Islam as its official religion, supporters of Islamic law want to introduce sharia punishments, such as amputation for stealing, into the nation’s penal code.

  The modern trend for Islamic states to adopt more hard-line legal codes began with the formation of the Saudi kingdom, but it accelerated after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. In its aftermath, Iran became the first fully fledged modern Islamic theocracy. Iran’s adoption of a strict Islamic legal code was popular at the time because it represented a clear and fundamental contrast to everything Iranians had abhorred about the regime of the deposed shah: its decadence, its corruption, its immorality.

  Today, sharia has spread to a point where it has found near-universal acceptance across the Muslim world. Perhaps the most compelling evidence comes from the Pew Research Forum’s 2013 report, “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics, and Society,” a study of thirty-nine countries and territories on three continents—Africa, Asia, and Europe—with more than 38,000 face-to-face interviews in eighty-plus languages and dialects, covering every country with more than 10 million Muslims. In response to the question “Do you favor or oppose making sharia law, or Islamic law, the official law of the land in our country?” the nations with the five largest Muslim populations—Indonesia (204 million), Pakistan (178 million), Bangladesh (149 million), Egypt (80 million), and Nigeria (76 million)—showed overwhelming support for sharia. To be precise, 72 percent of Indonesian Muslims, 84 percent of Pakistani Muslims, 82 percent of Bangladeshi Muslims, 74 percent of Egyptian Muslims, and 71 percent of Nigerian Muslims supported making sharia the state law of their respective societies. In two Islamic nations that are considered to be transitioning to democracy, the number of sharia supporters was even higher. Pew found that 91 percent of Iraqi Muslims and 99 percent of Afghan Muslims supported making sharia their country’s official law.

  Moreover, sharia is no longer restricted to Muslim-majority countries. It is increasingly being referenced in family law and inheritance cases involving Muslims in the West. Several sharia courts are now operational in Britain.10 According to sharia, rather than inheriting equally under British common law, Muslim women can inherit only half what men inherit; divorced Muslim women cannot inherit at all, nor can adopted children, and non-Muslim marriages are not recognized.11 Pressure to apply sharia in other Western nations is also on the rise. France, for example, has faced pressure over its laws forbidding polygamy when men from Muslim nations have wanted their second or third wives to immigrate to join them. So far the French authorities have refused to countenance polygamous marriages—just as France has also taken a stand against allowing Muslim girls to veil themselves at school. Still, some exceptions have already been made for children from polygamous marriages.

  Support for sharia is also rising among Muslims living in the West. A 2008 survey of more than nine thousand European Muslims by the Science Center Berlin reported strong belief in a return to traditional Islam. In the words of the study’s author, Ruud Koopmans, “Almost 60 per cent agree that Muslims should return to the roots of Islam, 75 per ce
nt think there is only one interpretation of the Quran possible to which every Muslim should stick and 65 per cent say that religious rules are more important to them than the laws of the country in which they live.”12 More than half (54 percent) of those surveyed also believe that the West is out to destroy Muslim culture.13

  The Sharia Paradox

  One of the Saudi Arabian kingdom’s leading executioners, Muhammad Saad al-Beshi, told the publication Arab News that he has executed as many as ten people in a single day. The sword is his preferred instrument. He keeps his blade “razor sharp” and has his children help him keep it clean. Al-Beshi finds it interesting that people are amazed at how fast the sword can separate the head from the body, and he wonders why people come to watch executions if they are going to faint and “don’t have the stomach for it.” Al-Beshi also carries out the rulings of sharia by severing hands, feet, and tongues.

  Such comments must be deeply shocking to most Western readers, even those living in countries that retain some form of capital punishment. Yet for years, like most Muslims, I myself did not think to question the basic principles and practices of sharia. Even in running away from my arranged marriage, I believed that sharia punishments would follow me because that was the rule in my own community. When I arrived in the Netherlands, I feared that my father or his clansmen or the man I had been assigned to marry would simply appear and force me to submit against my will. When the Dutch officials first told me that there were laws to protect me and that the Netherlands would not recognize my arranged marriage because it had no legal standing, I marveled at this system, so different from the Islamic code. As I immersed myself more in the beliefs and teachings of Western liberal thought, I only marveled more.

  In small seminars at Leiden, we reflected on World War II. Did ordinary Germans know about the Holocaust? Did the Dutch? We were put in the position of asking ourselves: What would I have done in the circumstances? Would I have been a “willing executioner”? Would I have helped the Jews, at the risk of my own life? Would I simply have done nothing? As I was grappling with these agonizing questions, my younger sister—who had joined me in the Netherlands—was going through what I had experienced in Nairobi. It was her turn now to feel that she must strive to be a good and pious Muslim. She was reading Sayyid Qutb’s Milestones and Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam: key texts of the Muslim Brotherhood. She was embracing sharia, even as I was being taught to understand the importance of man-made laws and the appalling consequences of lawless totalitarianism.

  Today, thanks in large part to my years at Leiden, I understand—I know—that each person, regardless of sex, orientation, color, or creed, deserves basic human rights and protections in return for adhering to the laws of the land where they live. But I also know that this truth contradicts many of the fundamental dictates of sharia. Whereas the rule of law in the West evolved to protect the most vulnerable members of society, under sharia it is precisely the most vulnerable who are also the most constrained: women, homosexuals, the insufficiently faithful or lapsed Muslims, as well as worshippers of other gods.

  Consider the following crimes and their appropriate punishments as dictated by the Qur’an:

  •Apostasy: the penalty for leaving the Islamic “tribe” is death. “If they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them” (4:89).

  •Blasphemy: the Qur’an does not identify an exact punishment on earth, but notes in 9:74, “Allah will punish them with a grievous penalty in this life and in the Hereafter. They shall have none on earth to protect or help them.” (See also 6:93 and Sahih al-Bukhari, volume 5, book 59, no. 369.)

  •Homosexuality: according to the hadith, “If you find anyone doing as Lot’s people did, kill the one who does it, and the one to whom it is done.” (Sunan Abu Dawud, book 38, no. 4447.)

  No group is more harmed by sharia than Muslim women, however—a reflection in part of the patriarchal tribal culture out of which Islamic law emerged. Repeatedly, women are considered under the code to be worth at most “half a man.” Sharia subordinates women to men in a multitude of ways: the requirement of guardianship by men, the right of men to beat their wives, the right of men to have unfettered sexual access to their wives, the right of men to practice polygamy, and the restriction of women’s legal rights in divorce cases, in estate law, in cases of rape, in court testimony, and in consent to marriage. Sharia even states that women are considered naked if any part of their body is showing except for their face and hands, while a man is considered naked only between his navel and his knees.14

  Not untypical of the transgressions sharia identifies is that of the “rebellious wife,” who is defined in the seminal Sunni commentary Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law as a woman who merely answers her husband “coldly, when she used to do so politely.” The husband, the book states, should start to reprimand her with the verbal warning “Fear Allah, concerning the rights you owe to me.” If that fails, he can stop speaking to her and then may strike her, although not to “break bones, wound her, or cause blood to flow.”15

  One of the most onerous burdens sharia imposes on women is the principle of guardianship. It is based on both a series of Qur’anic verses and the commentaries in the accompanying hadith. In essence, guardianship is presented as a way to protect women, but in reality it forces women to be entirely dependent on male guardians for the most basic activities outside the home, from shopping for their families to visiting the doctor. The Qur’an states, in 4.34: “Men are the maintainers [guardians] of women. . . . As to those women on whose part ye fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them (first), (Next), refuse to share their beds, (And last) beat them (lightly); but if they return to obedience, seek not against them Means (of annoyance): For Allah is Most High, great (above you all).”

  Chapter 2, verse 223 also categorizes women as “like a tilth for you,” which is interpreted in sharia as ensuring that a husband shall have unfettered sexual access to his wife or wives, provided they are not menstruating or physically ill. Polygamy, too, is asymmetrical under sharia, as it is in all traditional patriarchal societies. Men, according to the Qur’an, may take up to four wives, but women may take no more than one husband.

  A girl can be married off without her consent by her father or guardian. After she reaches puberty, seeking her permission is recommended but not required, and her silence is considered permission. According to Reliance of the Traveller, even if a woman has selected a “suitable match” for herself, she will be overruled if her guardian has chosen a different suitor who is also a suitable match.16 In practice, many Muslim girls are married off long before they form a view of their own on the matter. In countries that adhere to a strict form of sharia, the marital age is often lowered, following in the tradition of Muhammad, who married his wife Aisha when she was six or seven years old and consummated that marriage when she was nine (she moved into Muhammad’s house with her dolls, according to one of the hadith). Yemeni fathers, for example, routinely marry off their daughters by the age of nine, on the ground that this prevents adultery. Finally, although Muslim men may marry Christian or Jewish women, Muslim women may only marry Muslim men. And, as we have seen, the penalties for breaking this law can be harsh.

  The inequality of the sexes, in short, is central to sharia. The Qur’an says that a son shall inherit as much as two daughters. In a sharia-based court, to prove the crime of rape, either the rapist must confess or four male witnesses must come forward to say that they each saw the rape take place. As a general rule, 2:282 of the Qur’an says that a woman’s testimony is worth only half of a man’s testimony in court. And, while men may easily divorce their wives under Islamic law—simply by saying the words “I divorce you!” three times—it is far more difficult for a woman to secure a divorce from her husband. Women also lose custody when a child turns seven, whereas men do not.

  This is not a history boo
k about past practices. These are contemporary laws and contemporary punishments, taking place in the twenty-first century. And I believe it is these practices—not young mothers like Meriam Ibrahim—that need to be condemned and shackled.

  The Honor/Shame Dynamic in Sharia

  Given Islam’s origins among the clans and tribes of Arabia, we should not be surprised that there is also a strong emphasis on honor in sharia. In particular, the interaction of the principle of male guardianship with tribal norms of modesty frequently leads to “honor” violence against women (see chapter 6).17

  It is true that honor violence is not an exclusively Muslim phenomenon. It is also true that honor killings predate Islam. Yet honor killings are common in the Muslim world and Islamic clerics have shown a tacit acceptance of them.18 An honor killing is, in effect, a crime without a punishment according to Reliance of the Traveller, which explicitly exempts parents who kill their children from any accountability.19 Such attitudes have proved remarkably durable. In 2003 the Jordanian Parliament voted against a bill that would have established harsher legal penalties for honor killings on the ground that it would violate “religious traditions.” When a committee in the Senate then proposed to apply the same leniency shown to men who commit honor killings to women who kill husbands caught in adultery, the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan strongly objected.

  The arguments presented are worth noting for the connection they make between a woman’s religious virtue and the bloodline. Sheikh ‘Abd al-‘Aziz al-Khayyat, a former Jordanian minister of religious affairs (awqaf), even issued a fatwa (Islamic religious ruling) stipulating that sharia does not give a wife the right to murder her husband if she catches him with another woman. Such a case, Khayyat explained, does not amount to an offense against the family’s honor but only against the couple’s marital life, and the most the wife is allowed to do is to file for divorce. Another Jordanian lawmaker, ‘Abd al-Baqi Qammu, explained: “Whether we like it or not, women are not equal to men in Islam. Adulterous women are much worse than adulterous men, because women determine the lineage.”20