I'm very happy to be here. Very pleased to be here. And I think this is a very important set of issues.
The papers, which have been presented thus far at this conference have been more from, as I said, a social science background.
So this is going to be a little bit different. My training is in Islamic studies, and I'm focusing on a contemporary jurist named Use Sonore.
He's a very eminent jurist of Iranian Iranian jurists, and he is a Shiite, a 12 or Shiite.
And his rulings are quite unusual and they directly impinge on the theme of this conference, which is legal reform affecting women.
He, if I'm not mistaken, and I mean this information on his is from his website.
He has a website like many of the high ranking, all of the of the Shia school.
LUHNOW And so apparently he was he's probably about 75 years old.
And if you're more interested in his biography, you can go and read it there.
It's in many languages. It's up in English and will do in Persian and Arabic.
But what's most relevant is, well, his age is relevant to to to be influential in Shiite law.
You know, you can't really be under 40.
You can't be. So you have to be blessed with longevity as well if you want to achieve anything with a good memory and a good memory.
So but what's also important is that he studied with many of the eminent ulema of his time, such as H Liberal Jyoti,
but most importantly, perhaps Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the so-called Islamic Republic of Iran.
And he's even had a documentary film done about him by the Doha based Al Jazeera called Online Ayatollah.
And there was an article there was actually a series done on Iran in the London based Arabic newspaper, Asharq Al-Awsat.
And they did a whole thing on him in which they dubbed him Mufti and this or the jurist consult of the women.
So he's distinguished himself by a number of of of peculiar rulings, peculiar against the backdrop of the broader sort of tradition of Islamic law.
And among his noteworthy legal opinions that directly impinge on women are that
a woman may become a multi athlete or what is called a model of imitation.
In in Shiite law, there is maybe 200 such individual.
Well, there's maybe 200 such individuals in the whole world. It can be a large number.
I mean, I don't have the statistics. I mean, if I want to talk about math in the order of magnitude, it's going to be hundreds.
It's not very hundreds of thousands of people who have reached to a level of independent judgement or HDI.
And then so let's say we have a few hundred of these people and it's going to be a very small number who actually want to take
the trouble of issuing rulings in substantial enough and in the codified forms of the people can read them and follow him.
So it's similar.
It's something like in Sunni Islam where you are either a Hanafi process or you automatically or humbly, but those guys are dead, long, long dead.
And for the most part, the vast majority of Shiite scholars have the opinion you must follow a living guide,
a model of imitation, hence the term majority. So he has ruled that a woman can become such a figure.
He also says a woman may hold government office. Thank you. A woman may serve as a judge.
A woman and a man are equal in cosmos, and a woman and a man are also equal, as are a muslim and non-Muslim in Kansas as well.
But also India or the blood which a woman inherits all of her husband's wealth.
If there are no other heirs, a woman is not forbidden to leave her house, even if she does not take her husband's permission.
A woman need not take her husband's permission if she wishes to make a vow or another that concerns her person or her personal wealth,
should a woman forego her dowry seeking divorce than the husband was granted to her?
A woman has the right of guardianship.
Well, I this came up earlier as well as custody over her children should her husband die rather than her father in law.
There is a bunch of these rulings. We certainly can't look at all of them.
We will look at some of them and probably only one or two.
Now, that's a small number, but it will be we look at them in sufficient detail, hopefully, so that one may get an idea.
Very good idea of his methodology and mindset.
Know I was. Before I really begin, I simply state my conclusion about my conclusions about it's a lesson I at the outset and is very simply stated.
I think that in the jurisprudence of Ayatollah's lesson, we have a kind of reassertion or reaffirmation, if you like,
of the notion of of personhood or, if you like, the more modern term or notion of human being, rather than the categories of mere woman and mere men.
Now, I'll try to make this more clear in the examples which I give,
but first we must have aa5 or six minute introduction to also understand where she is, so that there really needs to be an AUP book like that.
So if you know anyone there, I would be happy to write it, you know,
have a very brief introduction, a very short introduction of this over £8 or something.
Right. Islamic jurisprudence is a very peculiar sort of jurisprudence.
It's somewhat more similar, I suppose, to to Orthodox Jewish Law Halacha.
And there was much discussion and question and answer about codification at this conference there.
Really, even in Shiite Islam, despite all appearances to the contrary, there is no final authority in Islam.
There's no pope. There's no patriot, orthodox patriarch or whatever.
There's nothing like that.
There was some attempt by the British to manipulate the Muslims in Islamic history by trying to put forward various candidates as caliph.
And there has been also some attempt to sort of portray the rector of the Azhar University as somehow speaking for Sunni Islam.
But these are all rather nonsensical categories with very various political agendas behind them.
There is no sort of final ecclesiastical authority.
And so what you do have is you have learned individuals, the scholars who presumably have attained to a level of erudition whereby excuse me,
they are able to derive the law, so to speak, directly from the sources.
This level of erudition is called jihad. What are the sources of Islamic law, therefore, and depends on which school we're talking about.
So we're talking about Sunnis and Shiites. In Sunni Islam, it's very well known.
It's and Khattab was well known as case, which basically means, you know, the Koran, the text of the Koran.
Then they use the term Suna. Suna is the normative practice of the Prophet Muhammad.
Some of my ideas in them. What is the son?
What was his normative practice? We don't know. We can't go and ask him.
So what we do have is something else called the Hadiths, which are accounts of his statements or his actions or his tacit approvals.
And these accounts were originally oral, and they were compiled in this old historical debate about how and when this all took place.
And then you have each matter or the juridical consensus, the consensus of the jurists, and then you have a piece which is juridical analogy.
You know, this is for Sunni Islam. All of the four well-known Sunni schools of law, the Hanafi, Maliki Qawwali, will adhere to this.
The one Sunni school of law is not well known much anymore is the law school which rejects peace,
which rejects any sort of notion of juridical analogy. In this they are have they share this opinion with the 12 Shiites.
So the 12 are Shiites also reject peers and they have a different quadri partite division, which looks superficially the same, but it's not.
Mm hmm. I should also add that this, quote, apartheid division, when I when I speak of the 12, are Shiites, I mean, the Sunni school.
My question earlier of the year, the earlier speaker was addressing that.
There's a division also among the 12 Shiites between the Israelis and the US bodies.
And yet what is pretty much finished.
Very, very small number of adherents except for in Bahrain, the notable exception, they still sort of survive there.
So for the 12 year old Sunnis, you have again the Koran.
Then you have the son. But here the son is not just the normative practice of the Prophet Muhammad, but it also includes the so-called in syllables,
what are termed the insoluble elements, all moving or are not so mean, and they're actually 14 persons.
So there's the Prophet Muhammad, his daughter, Fatima. Zahra and the 12 imams.
And who are they? Well, that's Ali Hassan Hussein and so forth.
I could recite all the names for you, but we don't need to do that.
So what's important to realise is that the imams are descendants of the Prophet Muhammad
through the Union of Ali and Fatima Saddam as the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad.
Ali is his cousin and his son in law.
And so then the 12 imams are the Ali is the first imam, and then the line of the imams goes through his eldest son, Hassan.
Then it goes to his younger son Hussein. And then the line of imams perpetuates from Hussein.
So the Sunni that for the 12 Shiites includes the statements, actions and tacit approvals of all of these individuals.
And so the body of son is much larger for the Shiites.
And so the the hadiths are really, really huge.
The corpus of Hadith is vast. Showing this.
To give you an idea, one of the largest compendiums of Shiite Hadith literature is called the heart of Anwar.
And in the most widespread, widely used edition today, it is 110 volumes.
Now each volume is about that thick. You know, it's maybe maybe, you know, it would be like a 1.7, 1.8, 1.9 centimetres thick.
But then you have 110 of them, and I have it. It takes a lot of space.
That's a lot of hadiths.
For this reason, the Shiite jurist is actually somewhat more limited in terms of their room for manoeuvre than the Sunni jurists,
because they just have a lot more sources of law. And in many cases, in many, many, many instances, things are spelled out in great detail.
Nowhere in Sunni Islam will you find a complete description of how the five prayers are supposed to be performed.
You kind of have to dig around. You won't find it in a single Hadith. You have to piece it together.
In 1238 Hadith, you have the full description.
So so the Shiite jurists have somewhat less room for manoeuvre and the Sunni jurist had less text, which is why they had to resort to this.
So the third principle then for the 12 Shiites is also juridical consensus.
But here it's not the same. It looks the same. In other words, something like the Western notion of legal precedent.
No, it's not like that at all.
You have to realise that for the 12 Shiites, the Prophet Muhammad, like all the prophets and the imams, are all completely, totally infallible.
They don't make any mistakes.
So it is the job of the jurist to try to discover what the law is, preferably by finding explicit statements in the Koran or the Hadith.
And then if not, then he has to be careful. He doesn't have a little room for manoeuvre.
They don't allow chaos. So what do you do? How do you basically justify the consensus of a bunch of jurists?
You have to understand that the 12th imam is considered to be still alive by the 12 Shiites, so it would make him about 1200 years old.
But he is an occultation. And so the principle of each matter or consensus is considered a means for discovering the opinion of the 12th man.
Because if you're referring to a previous generation of jurists, then you must conclude that somehow the opinion of the 12th man is there as well.
And so each man is seen as a means of discovering the view of the 12th, and then you have the fourth principle,
which is IQ or the the judgements of pure and practical reason to use modern philosophical terminology.
And this is very important for sign him because he does this a lot. So that's a Shiite as well there.
In addition, which was developed much later in the 19th century, if I'm not mistaken,
my share from Humble and Sadi, another set of principles called Ahmadiyya, which we cannot go into.
But just for the sake of completeness, we we mentioned them.
If anyone is interested in all of these things in more detail, you should read the papers and of Hussein majority.
That's pretty much all that's out there. And he has a book called Xi Law, a bio bibliographical study.
Is it compressed? 1986, at any rate.
So what does this mean for use of Sony? Well, let's look at some examples.
How am I doing on time? So you have another service.
Oh, my God. All right. Yeah.
If we look at the his ruling on blood, which where he says basically the the blood way to the man and woman is equal.
So this is in the case of, for example, an accidental death.
You know, you're out hunting, you shoot some arrows and you end up killing someone unintentionally.
For example, what do you do? Well, there's really no serious debate on whether there is a blood, whether or not there is.
But suddenly he says that the blood work is equal.
Now, why does he say this? Which, by the way, is 100 camels or its equivalent?
100 camels or 200 cows or a thousand gold dinars?
It's 10,000 silver dirhams.
So Sani rules that there is no disparity at all in the amount of the blood between a man or woman and indeed between a muslim or a non-Muslim.
He argues that there's only a single verse in the Koran that even mentions death, which is the fourth Sura.
The Koran written is the one name for women and the verses 9 to 2, if you want to go on, it's kind of long.
But what it does, it merely establishes the principle that DIA is due in cases where one is killed, where someone is killed by mistake.
It does not specify the amount of the dead, whether in camels or what have you in any way.
What to say of establishing differing amounts for men and women, Muslim and non-Muslim.
Moreover, the Koran explicitly establishes the sanctity of all human life.
There's a famous verse which alludes to the original, if you like, Primordial Murder of Cain by Abel.
And it states that on account of this heinous deed, it was decreed to the children of Israel.
Then it was for you that any who take a life.
And the word that's used in Arabic is nuts. So any who takes a life, it is as though he killed all humankind and national jihad.
While if anyone saved a life, it is as though he saved all humankind.
Moreover, the Koran also states. Also, interestingly enough, included in this are the forces of the Koran.
First, verse eight.
Yohannes Tucker Bookman, Lydia Coleman of Xinhua, had written in has ojigho of a seminal marriage identity on when he said,
Oh humankind, be mindful of your Lord who created you from a single soul.
Mean Xinhua. Again, the word is naps in Arabic and from it created its mate.
The term is ZOG in Arabic. And from then to end, this is pixel has spread abroad.
A multitude of men and women. It's there that you get the gender differentiation, the vaginal and catheter monies.
Despite these clear Koranic passages of the equal sanctity of all human life, male and female believer in infidel,
she jurisprudence quantifies the desire of a woman to be half that of a man.
How did this happen? Well, the support for this view is established not on the basis of the Koran.
Remember, there's only one verse in the Koran that explicitly mentions the blood to it,
and it's really just establishing the principle of blood, but not the amounts.
So where does it come from? Remember, she argues Prudence. Well, now you've got to go to the Hadith.
So there's a bunch of hadiths on this. If you're wondering, there are exactly 14.
And those 14 hadiths are found in the most important legal compendium of Hadiths by
compiled by a cultural committee such that the period is called Without Side of Shia.
As you need the references, I can get them for you. But suffice it to say that there are 14 hadiths and out of those son, he argues.
And I forgot to mention my source son. And he has published a series called Sunni Citizenship Advisory.
And it's my guess is he probably wrote it originally in Persian and it's downloaded everything from the website.
But on the website, he's only got those books up in Arabic. Alternatively, he could have written them in Arabic.
I really don't know for sure. Here, what they do matter if he did.
Because sometimes you can't tell. Because there is a kind of Shiite seminary in Arabic which isn't like modern.
I actually think it's better than modern Arabic. But then you have to know the terms and so forth in the end.
So you can't always tell, at any rate, insensitive political mind so that he has a monograph,
about 100 pages called Mosul what being a radical or what a muslim.
One Catholic said the equality of men and women and Muslims and non-Muslims in blood.
So this is a whole series. And it's interesting because it's the term that's used is the series on CIP.
The word is spoken in Arabic, which is different from the term Sharia separately indicates understanding.
And so there is an element of interpretation and sanity in this in this monograph and in others.
And there's there's about ten of them in this series, at least that I found on the Web.
All ten of them are not there. There's some discrepancy in the numbering, but at any rate, you can look in the website.
And so it's interesting that he uses this in these monographs.
He talks about how there is law, there is Sharia, and then there's the interpretation of jurists.
So with reference to this question, he says that these hadiths, out of these 14 ladies,
there's actually only two which can be construed as is putting forward a kind of disparity in the amounts,
and he rejects those on linguistic and other grounds.
So in one of them, the term allegedly is used allegedly.
And actually, the narrator says that he asked one of the imams about the idea of a radical,
and then the imam answered and suddenly he says, well, the terminology will also in Arabic, you can use any gender neutral sense.
And so he clearly favours it going that way.
But he also says that, well, we don't you know, this is the phrasing of the person who asked the question.
Had he phrased it differently, maybe the imam would have given a different answer.
And other hadiths he rejects on what not.
What one always does in these debates is if you're not familiar with this, hadiths are evaluated according.
In terms of authenticity, usually by the narrators. And so [INAUDIBLE] find something wrong with one of the narrators, say, well,
this narrator or narrator is weak or this narrator is not reliable, or this person is unknown.
These are the sorts of things that are done. And so he basically gets rid of those.
But for sanity, the ultimate principles are these principles which are found in the Koran, in his sort of understanding of a suicidal sufferer,
if you like, his methodology, he favours or it gives pride of place or priority, shall we say,
to the Koranic values of justice and equality, which are clearly stated in verses which which some of which we cite,
in which he also cites, as well as in many hadiths of the imams, which are of undisputed, impeccable, if you like, the authenticity.
So we don't it would have been nice if we had time to go through all of those hadiths, but we don't.
Hmm. Yeah. There is another example which we won't be able to go into,
but this has we mentioned that if you have the situation in inheritance where the sole heir is the wife, then he.
Rules that she should get the entirety of the state of the deceased husband as opposed to one quarter.
And again, he goes through the same sort of method,
same same sort of arguments that to go otherwise is against the notion of justice and against the notion of equality and so forth,
which is established in the mind. He's not appealing to the U.N. Charter on Human Rights.
He's very much within the Shiite tradition and trying to work within the tradition of soul itself.
He also, since he is a Shiite and this comes out in a book of sort of essays of his, it's not very legal.
So the book is called Love Bible. What's it called?
Well, some essays which he wrote.
And he talks about the importance for Shiite Muslims of Fatimah, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad,
and how she is sort of the ideal sort of model for Islamic women and womanhood and so forth.
This may be one reason he has sort of written this sort of an attitude or a more kind of respectful.
I don't know if that's the right turn of phrase with respect to the questions of that relate to women.
But there is another dimension. He he's very clearly like, as we find in the Shiite school.
But he argues more, I think much more vigorously for the notion that there has to be a rationale behind all divinely instituted laws.
What is it what's called in in in Shiite the Sunnis faith or in these discussions of of holding a husband.
Welcome, Liane. That was to say the notion of a kind of literal translation of rational,
good or evil and to put it in a more idiomatic English, not translating, but interpreting.
In other words, the ethical evaluation of Acts must have a basis in reason, and divine legislation is not whimsical as in physics.
So also in the law you need to borrow a phrase from Einstein.
God does not play dice with the universe.
So if God had said in the Koran that we should not consume intoxicating alcoholic drinks, then there is a reason for this.
There's a rationale behind it, whether we know it or not.
The Sunni Oshodi School took the opinion that, well, no, there isn't we there is no rationale behind these things.
Things are good or bad simply because God said so.
And if he said, well, don't drink lemon juice, then we wouldn't be drinking lemon juice today simply because he said it.
So, son, he also appeals, therefore, to reason in his arguments.
All right. Why how and why the how and why of Sunny's rulings?
I mean, how did we how did we get to this situation?
I mean, if things are so simple and clear in the Koran, as he would argue, how did we get this one?
This is my opinion. Sunny isn't saying anything about this. I think that something funny, something odd happened in Islamic history.
It's hard to say exactly when, but it has been called the the egalitarian turn or the legality and ascendancy
by someone in Christiane JAMA in a book he wrote called The Act of Being,
which is a book on Islamic philosophy on melisandre. But it's this point in Islamic history where I or knowledge and the Lama,
therefore the men of knowledge or the women of knowledge, as well as the people of knowledge.
The scholars, if you like,
become identified completely with legal knowledge and legal scholarship as opposed to other ways of knowing other scholar discipline,
such as philosophy since Caesar. And I think that had a very profound and lasting and in some ways detrimental effect
on Islamic intellectual history and the effects of which we live with to this day.
Now, in terms of implications, I mean, you know, isn't going to be influential in terms of legal reform in the MENA region.
I doubt it. One, because he's a Shiite jurist, the Shiites are very much marginalised in Muslim world anyway.
And the other thing is that a lot of the other Shiite jurists are not really taking him seriously.
And if you talk to some Shiite dilemma, they sort of smile, Sunny, you know, as though he's some kind of a laughing stock or something,
but they can't really say what say that because he studied with them and people.
He was appointed to the Council of Guardians. Was it Council of Experts after the revolution even served as a prosecutor?
You know, he's not just some guy walking around that you can dismiss, but there is a kind of authority of antiquity.
You know, the older an opinion is, the harder it is usually to to question it and challenge it.
And if Islamic intellectual history or legal history tells us anything, these kind of views will only be successful in the long term.
If if he is able to educate enough students who are then in turn able to influence more and survive.
And this is how things happen. But whether it will happen or is very hard to say, I mean, you cannot really predict these kind of sociological forces.
It's easier to predict an earthquake and tsunami. So we'll have to wait, but we'll probably all be long gone.