The Legitimacy of Taqlīd

Aug 06

The last lecture I gave during my recent trip to Morocco was delivered at the Muhammad VIth Institute for the Training of Imams and Murshidat in Rabat. This is a post-graduate institution (i.e., students are admitted after graduating from another degree program) intended to produce graduates with the skills required to meet the daily religious needs of Muslim communities, such as prayer leaders in public mosques (imams) and spiritual care. Standards, as far as I can tell, are relatively high: no one is admitted who has not, for example, already memorized the Quran.

One of the innovations of this institute was that it opened itself to female students (murshidāt). While Islamic law does not permit women to lead mixed-gender congregational prayers, and Maliki fiqh does not even allow women to lead congregational prayers consisting solely of women (although other Sunni schools of law do), clearly Muslim women need religious instruction just as Muslim men do. The creation of a program for women to serve as murshidat was intended to make sure that women, too, had access to high-quality teachers of religion.

This institute reflects the domestic and international aspects of Morocco’s religious policies. Domestically, Moroccan policy seeks to create a Moroccan national religious identity based on three elements — Ash’ari theology; Maliki jurisprudence; and moderate, “Junaydi” Sufism. Internationally, Morocco seeks to project itself as a bastion of moderate and authentic Sunni Islam. The institute, therefore, is international, accepting students from other North African countries, Subsaharan Africa, and France.

I have no idea whether these policies “work” as a matter of statecraft, but as this video shows, the Moroccan state seems to take them quite seriously as this video of the king marking the completion of the third stage of the institute along with his attendance at the distribution of awards to the top students seems to indicate. The video, based on what I saw when I gave my lecture, gives a fair representation of the diverse nature of the student body. When I gave my lecture, there were large numbers of female students as well as large numbers of students from Subsaharan Africa. Any yes, the lecture hall is quite large. I don’t think I ever gave a lecture in a larger lecture hall than that of the Muhammad VIth Institute.

It was also quite a humbling experience: I think of myself as a legal academic, no more, and otherwise, just an ordinary Muslim doing my best to live a reasonably Islamic life. When I entered the lecture hall, the students welcomed me by standing up and reciting the opening lines of Busiri’s Mantle Poem in praise of the Prophet Muhammad. They did the same when I left. Despite my general cynicism, the warm welcome the students gave me was deeply moving.

In choosing my lecture topic, I wanted to both be respectful of my guests and their policies toward religion while at the same time say something substantive. In preparing for my lecture, I came across this document on the website of the Moroccan Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs, “The Guide for the Prayer Leader, the Friday Preacher and the Religious Adviser (Dalīl al-Imām wa’l-Khaṭīb wa’l-Wāʿiẓ).” This document attempts to assist those religious functionaries who interact with the public on how to go about delivering the most important Muslim public ritual – the sermon at the Friday congregational prayer.

The Friday sermon has always been political in Islam, it being the prerogative of the ruler to deliver the sermon. Traditionally, the Friday congregational prayer could not be held without the permission of the ruler. For this reason, the Shi’a have generally refused to recognize the validity of Friday prayers in the absence of the Imam, but that discussion must be deferred for another day. In any case, the aforementioned Guide for the Prayer Leader, in addition to being a practical reference guide, amounts to a clear articulation of the political theology of the Moroccan state, and is worth of an academic study from that perspective alone.

But there was one topic it touched upon that overlapped with my narrow interests as a legal academic: the obligation of religious functionaries to follow the well-established (mashhūr) position of the Maliki school when they publicly perform rituals. The continued salience of taqlīd is a point of major contention in Muslim societies in the modern period. In my lecture, I defended the legitimacy of the duty of taqlid, particularly in the domain of ritual, from a theological perspective and a political one: theologically, taqlid is legitimate because Muslims are not obligated to follow “true” opinions, only reasonable opinions, and the fact that a doctrine is “well-established” means by definition that it is a reasonable understanding of what God requires; and politically, taqlid in matters of worship is defensible because the point of ritual is discipling the self through practice, something that is fulfilled by acting in accordance with the well-established rules of the Maliki school, while opening the doors of reinterpretation (ijtihad) in matters of ritual will only have the effect of creating dissension and confusion without furthering the principle aim of ritual — disciplined practice — the least.

I also argue in this lecture that just as the common good vindicates taqlid in matters of ritual, it also places limits on taqlid in non-ritual matters: we cannot use taqlid as an excuse to continue following rules that are neither theologically absolute or consistent with our common good, and that this was the kind of taqlid that earned the criticism of modern reformers like Muhammad Abduh, Rashid Rida and the 20th century Moroccan jurist, Muhammad b. al-Hasan al-Hajwi . It is in this latter category of actions that ijtihad is required, not out of fear that practicing taqlid results in not following God’s will, as certain kinds of Salafists would have it, but out of fear of not pursuing the common good.

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German Judge and Legal Orientalism (originally posted March 29, 2007)

Jul 14

I originally posted this on March 29, 2007 on eteraz.org, and it was subsequently re-posted on progressiveislam.org.  Both sites are no longer operational, so I thought I would repost on shanfaraa.com for those who might find it of interest.

The Friday New York Times reported that a German judge denied a Moroccan woman’s request for an expedited divorce from her Moroccan husband – despite the apparently undisputed evidence that the husband had repeatedly abused her – on the grounds that such conduct is “common” in Morocco and that the “Koran . . . sanctions such physical abuse.”

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“Is Historicism a Viable Strategy for Islamic Law Reform?”

Jun 24

Islamic Law & Society has just published a recent article of mine with the title “Is Historicism a Viable Strategy for Islamic Law Reform? The Case of “Never Shall a People Prosper Who Have Appointed a Woman to Rule Them.” This article is both methodological and substantive, insofar as it proposes both a methodology for reformist arguments within Islamic law, and a substantive critique of other progressive arguments on the specific issue of how to interpret the infamous hadith in which the Prophet Muhammad is reported as having said, “Never shall a people prosper who have appointed a woman to rule them.”

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