Abrabanel: Musings on the Jewish condition

A fascinating thing happened yesterday, a veritable Protestant moment in Islam. Amina Wadud, a long-time convert to Islam and professor of Islamic studies in a Virginia university, became the first woman to lead coed Muslim prayers in Britain, which she did at the start of a conference on Islam and feminism at Oxford.

This was apparently big enough to warrant stories in multiple important news outlets mainly because, well, Muslim women aren’t supposed to do that.

As Islam Online tells it:

Many Muslim women gathered in front of the conference hall to protest Wadud’s prayers, despite calls from Muslim leaders not to protest to avoid giving it more publicity.

“We’re here to uphold the traditions and the values of Islam and uphold the ways of the prophet – peace be upon him,” said protestor Aishah Samah.

“It has nothing to do with position of women in society,” Mokhtar Badri, vice-president of the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), told the BBC. “It is not to degrade them or because we don’t think they are up to it.”

“We have no objections to women being heads of state, or organization leaders,” [Samah] said. “Women are highly respected in Islam but in Islamic law, women cannot lead prayer.”

According to a statement issued by the Assembly of Muslim Jurists in America after Wadud’s first precedent women-led prayer in New York, there is unanimous consensus for the entire Ummah that women cannot lead the Friday Prayer nor can they deliver the sermon.

But Wadud held firm, telling AFP:

“This is not a movement, it is just a reality. It is part of the living tradition of Islam, Islam has not died. It is important British women take up the mantle and fulfil the possibility of prayer leadership.”

Taj Hargey, chairman of the Muslim Education Center of Oxford that sponsored the event, supports Wadud:

“There was a specific example during the life of the prophet himself where he let a woman lead a mixed-congregation prayer,” Hargey said. “The lady was Umm Waraqah. She was also one of the first women who memorized the entire Quran. Certainly she was a woman who was learned, erudite in religion and a devoted follower. The Prophet Muhammad allowed her to lead the prayers in her neighborhood.”

Remember back a few days when Sunni Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi asserted that “the capitalist system based on usury and paper and not on goods traded on the market” has collapsed while “Islamic economic philosophy is holding up?”

It looks as though Iran’s Shi’ite leadership reached the same conclusion:

“The school of Marxism has collapsed and the sound of the West’s cracking liberal democracy is now being heard,” supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Monday, recalling the fate of the Soviet Union.

Hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is backed by Khamenei, said on Tuesday that “it is the end of capitalism.”

“These people see the outcome of their bad deeds. This problem has spread to Europe now which makes us happy. The unhappier they are the happier we become,” Ayatollah Ali Janati, who heads the Guardians Council, said in last Friday’s prayer sermon.

Ahmadinejad has recently echoed that, saying “the reason of their defeat is that they have forgotten God and piety.”

The financial crisis should be a divine sign that “the oppressors and the corrupt will be replaced by the pious and believers,” he said, adding that “an Islamic banking system will help us survive the current economic crisis.”

When you’re utterly locked into a particular analysis, everything always seems to fit. Exhibit A: Like Marxists before him, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi jumps on Western hiccups – the financial crisis in world markets – as clear proof of the supremacy and coming triumph of Islam.

AFP reports this fascinating opinion by a man reputed to be one of Islam’s great opinion-makers (who incidentally approves of suicide terrorism):

Muslims should take advantage of the global financial crisis to build an economic system compatible with Islamic principles, influential Sunni cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi said on Sunday.

“The collapse of the capitalist system based on usury and paper and not on goods traded on the market is proof that it is in crisis and shows that Islamic economic philosophy is holding up,” said the Egyptian-born, Qatar-based cleric.

“The Western system has collapsed and we have a complete economic philosophy as well as spiritual strength,” he said at Sunday’s opening of a conference on Jerusalem.

“All riches are ours… the Islamic nation has all or nearly all the oil and we have an economic philosophy that no one else has,” Qaradawi said.

He urged Muslims to “profit from the crisis to bring about the triumph of the (Islamic) nation, which holds the spiritual and material resources for victory.”

Maybe it’s not a fair comparison, but Qaradawi’s craziness compares rather unfavorably to the TIME story that came out this weekend asking whether Jewish ethics and law could have prevented the financial crisis.

Representative Tom Tancredo last week presented HR 6975 to the House floor, a bill “To require aliens to attest that they will not advocate installing a Sharia law system in the United States as a condition for admission, and for other purposes.”

We understand the fear of sharia law, particularly in the context of the culture war in Europe over Muslim immigration, but we don’t understand the purpose of the bill.

If it’s about preventing any sharia-based lifestyles from taking place in America, it will fail. Those who wish to live through sharia can do so privately, through arbitration courts similar to the batey din that decide religious personal status issues for Jews. And why shouldn’t they?

If it’s about preventing a coup that replaces the Constitution with the Quran, we have to wonder if Tancredo, an obsessive campaigner on immigration issues, really believes this is a threat.

Hat tip: reason magazine.